Fritinancy

August linkfest

Years ago, I named the world’s first “bidirectional” condom, so this story really spoke to me:

Diverse & Resilient, an LGBTQ organization in Milwaukee, decided to do something about the bland branding of free condoms. So it partnered with a local marekting agency, Cramer Krasselt, to create Naughty Bags, condoms designed by teens for teens. According to Adweek, the condoms are made “to be sex-positive, humorous, and cool” and feature “witty names like Pork Parka, Pelvic Poncho, Scuba Gear, Surge Protector and—our favorite—Papa Stopper.” Brilliant – in every sense.

To nape, perchance to dream

Welcome to another installment of “Brands That Don’t Understand English Vowel Sounds”! Our subject today comes courtesy of David Lloyd Clubs, established in 1982 and headquartered in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK, so unfamiliarity with the language is most likely not an excuse. The company calls itself “Europe’s premier racquets and fitness provider,” but the new class it announced last week is especially tailored for people who prefer to get fit without actually moving around. This is what it’s called:

 

Name in the news: Oath

“Broadly speaking,” Winston Churchill may or may not have said*, “short words are best, and old words when short are the best of all.” With Oath, the name of the new division that will house AOL and Yahoo’s media and business-to-business properties after those two companies merge, parent company Verizon gets a twofer: short and old.

 

The name was revealed in a cryptic tweet from AOL CEO Time Armstrong on Tuesday afternoon: “Billion+ Customers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017.” Twitter predictably piled on, not without justification. But I solemnly pledge to give the new name a fair hearing.

Name in the news: Werowocomoco

Last November the film director and winemaker Francis Ford Coppola opened a new restaurant in Geyserville (Sonoma County). It has an unusual menu for a California Wine Country restaurant, or indeed any California restaurant: fry bread tacos, venison chili, rotisserie prairie chicken, pine ice cream. It’s located inside a winery with a historic name: Virginia Dare. And then there’s the six-syllable name of the restaurant itself: Werowocomoco.

What’s the story?

Not Native American: “American Native.”

Name in the News: Bentayga

At the Frankfurt Motor Show this week, Bentley Motors, a wholly owned subsidiary of Volkswagen since 1998, unveiled its first SUV, the Bentayga. Bentley has already sold out the full first-year production – 3,500 vehicles – of the $229,100 (base price), 600-horsepower behemoth. Buyer #1 was Queen Elizabeth II, who reportedly will use the vehicle for her hunting expeditions in Scotland. Tally ho!

2017 Bentayga via Car and Driver.

July Linkfest

Your counterintuitively spelled business name of the month is QuiQui.me. It’s so bad, writes Domain Name Wire, that “the company includes the pronunciation in its logo.” Reminds me of Nyoombl.

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How an artist brought an obscure 17th-century word, “parbunkells,” back to life.

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May Linkfest

Trademark

“When Simon Tam dropped out of college in California and moved to Portland, Ore., to become a rock star, the last tangle he imagined falling into was a multiyear battle with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over his band’s name.” The trademark tussle over “The Slants,” which the USPTO has deemed “disparaging” and thus ineligible for protection. (For a more technical perspective, see this Brent Lorentz post at Duets Blog.)

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“Your mission statement shouldn’t necessarily be the same thing as your trademark.” Trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy on why companies should think twice before registering names like Food Should Taste Good and WannaBettaButt?

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“Falling in love with an internal development name prior to completing a full trademark search and legal review is one of the most common problems companies encounter.” Trademark lawyer Tara Benson on avoiding trademark pitfalls. 

 

Science

What is the Moon’s real name? (Hat tip: Michele Hush.)

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Look for more alphanumeric names like H1N1: The World Health Organization gets tough on disease-naming. 

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Profanity

“You go to their Twitter profile: ‘I’m passionate about brands!’ You’re what? Dude, get a fucking girlfriend.” Veteran adman Bob Hoffman on why we’re living in the golden age of bullshit in advertising and marketing. (Video)

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How and why Lexicon, one of the world’s most influential branding and naming agencies, developed its first iPhone app: a profanity checker.

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“Though badass is historically associated with male pugnacity, perhaps the most striking change is that the word is now often used by and about women.” Jesse Sheidlower—a lexicographer and author of The F Word—tracks the history and soaring popularity of an all-purpose descriptor. (I wrote about badass in brand names in 2012.)

 

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Words and Language

“Webster was a visionary—even a radical—so far ahead of his time, in fact, that grammar and style guides are only now catching up with him.” Linguist Rosemarie Ostler on why Noah Webster, “the founding father of American English,” would have loved Urban Dictionary. (Hat tip: MJF.)

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The strange charm of cutthroat compounds like pickpocket, scarecrow, and, well, cutthroat: Stan Carey on these rare English words “that have a long, colourful history and constitute a very interesting category.” (I wonder how the newish fondleslab fits in?)

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Dictionary.com—offices right here in Oakland!—is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Its latest additions to the word-hoard include anecdata, microaggression, haptics, and a couple of Fritinancy favorites: dox and astroturfing.

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Taglines

“Finding a quick description that was also consumer friendly was exceedingly difficult. But when the founders did come up with the right tagline, the effort was well worth it: ‘The moment we started using the right language, it was like night and day.’ How the right tagline helped turn luxury-products company Cuyana around.

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Baby names

The 2014 Social Security Administration stats on baby names are out, and the Baby Name Wizard blog has discovered some interesting trends in the data. The biggest trend? What naming expert Laura Wattenberg calls “the great smoothing of American baby names”: goodbye “chunky” names (Jayden, Jessica), hello “silky,” vowel-rich names (Amanda, Mia, Noah, Liam).

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Speaking of popular names, here’s a fun tool to discover what your “today baby name” would be, based on the ranking of your own name in the year you were born. The tools works backward too: If I’d been born in the 1890s, chances are I’d have been named Minnie. More than a time-waster, the tool can be a big help in character-naming. (May take a while for the tool to load.)

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Advertising

“She originally went by Flo White, then Lord of the Strings. She eventually settled on the Period Fairy. It was more straightforward.” A new ad from category-busing Hello Flo, which sells a Period Starter Kit to adolescent girls.

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Errata

Which words are most commonly misspelled? Readers of the Lingua Franca blog speak up.

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A new plaque at AT&T Park honoring San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner commits two punctuation errors (apostrophe, hyphen) in the first line. Another reminder, as if we needed one, that it pays to hire a proofreader before casting that encomium in bronze.

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Name of the Year

Which will it be: Lancelot Supersad, Jr., or Amanda Miranda Panda? There’s still time to cast your vote.

Grube Therapy

If you’re considering a coined name for your company or product, it’s helpful to keep in mind a general rule of English pronunciation: When a vowel precedes a single consonant that’s followed by an e, the first vowel is long. Double the consonant and the vowel becomes shortened.

Later: long a. Latter: short a. Miler: long i. Miller: short i.

Yes, yes, there are exceptions. But coined words are like hoofbeats: we expect a horse, not a zebra. We look for simplicity, not conundrums.

Which is why Gruberie is problematic.

How Otoke Got Its Name

I’m generally not a fan of company names that require phonetic pronunciation guides, but I’ll make an exception for Otoké Horticulture, a Colorado-based consultant to marijuana growers throughout the United States. The name story is just too good.

It’s “oh-toh-KAY.” P.S. Surely they can improve on the Papyrus typeface.

 

Given the company’s line of work, I at first surmised that the name was a thinly veiled allusion to “Oh! Toke!” It certainly seemed apt. (Did you know that the verb to toke refers exclusively to inhaling marijuana, and may come from Spanish tocar, to touch? I didn’t.)

But then I wondered about the acute accent over the e, which clearly alters the pronunciation. A brief bout of research revealed that otoke, pronounced oh-toh-kay, is Korean for “what to do?” or “what do I/we do?”

Image from Dramafever: “101 Korean pop culture words you absolutely must know.” (Also on the list: bagel girl, “a girl with a glamorous body and a baby face.”)

 

Well, that works pretty well, too.

But guesswork won’t suffice for How They Got That Name, so I emailed the company. The response, from co-owner Kurt Badertscher, was prompt—and cryptic.

There is a  personal story behind it, which is usually a bad basis for a name. 

I persisted. Kurt relented.

[Company co-owner] Kerrie [Badertscher] had a native American friend who called her Otoke telling her it meant star of hope in Cherokee. When she started the company, she decided to call it Otoke and went looking for the Cherokee meaning only to find out her friend had been hitting on her with the start [sic] of hope line and the only place we can find a real meaning was that in Korean, it means What’s up/happening or such.

 

It isn’t often that a failed pickup line becomes a successful business name. Well played, Otoké.

By the way, if you live in a state where marijuana cultivation is legal—like, say, Colorado—you may want to buy the Badertschers’ magnum opus, Cannabis for Capitalists. The table of contents (which is all I’ve read) runs to more than nine pages, and looks to my untutored eye to be pretty darned comprehensive. I admit I’m curious about the epilogue: “R.I.P. Mary Jane Superweed.”

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Previously on #WeedWeek: Budtender, Just Say Know (Leafly).

How ASOS Got Its Name

The online-only fashion and beauty retailer ASOS launched in London in 2000, began turning a profit in 2004, and first expanded outside the UK—originally to France, Germany, and the US—in 2010. Today the company has 4,000 employees and sales of £753.8 million (nearly $1.3 billion). The company sells more than 850 brands, including its own, and is the most-visited fashion website in the world, per day, among 18-to-34-year-olds.

 

 

What does ASOS mean? It’s an acronym: the company was originally called As Seen On Screen Ltd.

The logo is lower case, but the company name appears in all caps everywhere else on the site. The media are less consistent: the Guardian (UK) spells it Asos; the New York Times has used both ASOS and Asos.

As for the pronunciation, opinions vary—some people use the A-S-O-S initialism, others rhyme it with “pesos”—but the consensus tilts toward “A-sauce” (rhymes with play-floss, emphasis on the first syllable).

 

Racked Presents Fashion Phonetics: ASOS.

 

ASOS isn’t the only company whose name has no fixed pronunciation. The official stance of Moleskine, the global notebook company, is that “there is no predetermined pronunciation” of its company name.

There’s another example that’s even closer to ASOS. In 2009 I wrote about Taiwan-based computer maker Asus, aka ASUS—the company uses all caps, the media don’t bother. Of the many pronunciations in circulation back then, Asus preferred “ah-SOOSE.” Then, a year later, it switched to “EH-soos.”

Pronunciation diktats are irrelevant in the eyes of US trademark law. As Jessica Stone Levy noted in a comment on that Asus post, “the USPTO at least lives by the precept that ‘there is no correct pronunciation of a trademark because it is impossible to predict how the public will pronounce a particular mark’.”

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Yesterday on How They Got That Name: Pitango. 

Read previous How They Got That Name entries.