Fritinancy

Battle of the not-milks

If you’re avoiding dairy for reasons of health or principle, you have more choices than ever, and some of them even taste good. There are dairy substitutes made from soy (Silk, introduced in 1977, is one of the oldest soy-milk brands, and still one of the most elegantly named), oats (Oatly, based in Sweden and famous in the U.S. for its whatever advertising), nuts (Texas-based MALK, whose weird all-caps name may have been inspired by that episode of The Simpsons), or peas (Ripple, based in the Bay Area, and aren’t you glad they didn’t name it Pea Milk?).

“Malk: Now with Vitamin R.” Via Simpsons Wiki

 

Then there are the dairy alternatives that tell you only what they aren’t: Not Milk, NotMilk, and “Shh … This Is Not MLK,” with a white droplet replacing the I in milk, to ensure that you don’t confuse it with not–Martin Luther King Jr.

That’s right: Three brands with three virtually identical names—none of them telling you what the product is, only what it’s not.

November linkfest

Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2017 is complicit. The selection is based on the number of online lookups, which spiked in March, when SNL featured a perfume ad parody; and in April, when Ivanka Trump said she didn’t know “what it means to be complicit.”

 

 

Collins Dictionary, based in London and Glasgow, got a head start on the WOTY competition in early November, selecting fake news over runners-up such as unicorn, echo chamber, and gig economy. (Related: My November 2016 post on fake.)

In the Wild: Adjective Noun Is Adjective

Here’s one of the Verizon “Better Matters” ads currently papering the Montgomery BART station in San Francisco:

 

“A better network is better.”

 

“Well, of course better is better,” you may be thinking with a twinge of annoyance. (“Some copywriter got overpaid for that?”) Ah, but there’s more to the slogan than meets the eye.

March Forth!

I’m marching to the beat of the Strong Language drummer, with a new post about naughty-sounding brand names with innocent meanings. It may be the only post you’ll read today that has the tags appliances, beverages, pee, and smegma.

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Also: March 4 is National Grammar Day, an occasion for remembering what grammar is and is not. (It’s not spelling and punctuation, for starters.) Here are some good places to start:

• “Do not aspire to be a grammar Nazi, and don’t indulge people who use the term. Nazis are not funny unless you are Jerry Seinfeld or Mel Brooks. You are not Jerry Seinfeld or Mel Brooks.” – John McIntyre, “Prepare Yourself for National Grammar Day” 

• “On all other days, we read whatever we want. On National Grammar Day, we may read only from The Elements of Style.” – Dennis Baron, “Why Is National Grammar Day Different from All Other Days?”

• “In the spirit of Mr. Spock, I would encourage writers to boldly go where grammarians would keep them out.” – Roy Peter Clark at Poynter, “What Are Your Biggest Grammar Pet Peeves?”

• “The Grinch then replied: “I can help you, of course! / I have here a Rule-Book that you can enforce.” – Tom Freeman, “How the Grinch Stole Grammar”

• “We must face up to the unfaceuptoable.” – Arika Okrent at Mental Floss, “11 Best Uses of Bad Grammar on ‘The Simpsons’”

Under the capable leadership of Mark Allen, ace copy editor, I was one of the judges in this year’s National Grammar Day Tweeted Haiku Contest. (The job was my reward/penance for having won the contest last year.) I am pleased to report that we have selected our winners. Congratulations to first-place poet Adriana Cloud and all the other contestants! Enjoy their haiku, and don’t let any dangling modifiers hit you on your way out.

 

June Linkfest

Remember when ads were dense with copy and every new product was magical? A delightful Tumblr called A Word from Our Sponsor does.

 

“The miracle of Philco’s mystery control is hard to believe!” (1938)

 

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Is the Great American Tagline dead? Copyranter thinks so.

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On the other hand, corporate jargon is alive and thriving, as the Use Sparingly Tumblr makes abundantly clear.

 

Via Girls of a Certain Age.

 

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Speaking of jargon: “Are you a native full-stack visiongineer who lives to marketech platishforms? Then come work with us as an in-house NEOLOGIZER and reimaginatorialize the verbalsphere!” And other amazing new jobs you’ve never heard of because they were just invented. Hat tip: @trochee.

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How many synonyms for “flip-flops” do you know?

Image via The Flip-Flop Appreciation Society.

 

When I was a kid we called them “thongs” or “zoris.”

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What exactly can you expect when you commission a $5 logo from Fiverr? To find out, Sacha Greif invented a company (“SkyStats”) and tested the waters. Among his conclusions: “Fiverr apparently sees nothing wrong with designers appropriating other people’s work. And not only do they tolerate it, they even directly profit from it since they feature these fake work samples prominently.”

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Ten words that “The Simpsons” invented. Via @Wordnik. Speaking of Simpsons inventions, years ago I wrote three long posts about fictional brands in “The Simpsons.” Here’s the original post, the 2008 update, and the 2009 update.

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And speaking of fictional brands, Russell Falk of FVM Strategic Communications analyzed the logo of a madeupical company in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit:

Cherevin may be the evil aggressors of economic warfare, but I’d love to have them as a client. They could teach me about propping up housing markets, and I might be able to offer them a nugget or two about reducing security breaches through better interaction design. Plus, I bet it’s fun to get a project brief with the objective of ‘instilling fear and obedience.’

I’ve written a few posts about fictional brands myself.

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“The NFL wouldn’t rename the Redskins, so we did.” – A Hundred Monkeys blog. See also my April 9 post about the Redskins and other troubled names.

UPDATE: This morning (June 18), the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, an independent tribunal of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, recommended that the federal registrations for “Redskins” trademarks be cancelled. Read the TTAB fact sheet.

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Thirteen words so “untranslatable” that even a professional linguist like Michael Covarrubias (aka Wishydig) can’t figure them out.

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“A name is meaningless until you give it meaning,” “Try to avoid name envy,” and other naming advice worth heeding from Will Burns, CEO of Ideasicle.

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“Half of living American Brittanys are between the ages of 19 and 25” and other insights into personal- name trends. (Hat tip: Karen.)

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“Does it look like a pig? Are you sure?” How to name animals in German. Via @stas and @chrys.

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Mice well, minds well, maze whale, midas whale, mieswell, and more than 40 other incorrect spellings of “might/may as well,” retweeted almost daily by The Minus Well.

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One more fun Twitter account: Power Vocab Tweet, an exercise in “speculative lexicography”—i.e., made-up words with random definitions.

 

jinglingly, adj. on or relating to the modern era; since the Middle Ages

— Power Vocab Tweet (@PowerVocabTweet) June 12, 2014

Power Vocab Tweet was invented by the creator of Everyword, which recently completed its mission to tweet every word in the English language. From the blog:

On the surface, Power Vocab Tweet is a parody of “word-of-the-day” blogs and Twitter accounts. My real inspiration, though, comes from the novel Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin. In that book, a group of underground linguists invent a language (Láadan) that “encodes” in its lexicon concepts that aren’t otherwise assigned to words in human languages. …

The definitions are generated via Markov chain from the definition database in WordNet. The words themselves are generated from a simple “portmanteau” algorithm; each word is a combination of two “real” English words of the appropriate part of speech. (The forms of the words and text used to generate the associated definition aren’t related.)

May Linkfest

I’ve been interested for years in advertisers’ penchant for turning adjectives into nouns and nouns into verbs. In his regular column for The Week, James Harbeck, a linguistics-trained editor, looks at why these switches—collectively known as anthimeria—work. It’s all about bisociation: “You have two things operating on two different planes or according to two different scripts, and at the point where the two meet, you jump from one to the other. … Bisociation tickles your brain, and that’s just what marketers want to do.”

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Here’s something lovely: Vernacular Typography, “dedicated to the documentation and preservation of vanishing examples of lettering in the everyday environment.” A project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, it catalogs ghost signs, Coney Island signs, no-parking signs, subway signs, grammatical-error signs, and much more.

Graham Home for Old Ladies, catalogued in the Architectural section.

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Think it might be fun to name a racehorse? Be sure you read the Jockey Club’s naming rules first. Here, for example, are three types of ineligible names:

• Names clearly having commercial, artistic or creative significance;
• Names that are suggestive or have a vulgar or obscene meaning; names considered in poor taste; or names that may be offensive to religious, political or ethnic groups;
• Names of winners in the past 25 years of grade one stakes races.

There are 14 additional no-nos on that list.

( Via Dustbury.)

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Why do so many Chinese restaurants in the U.S. and around the world use “Tasty” in their names? Victor Mair investigates at Language Log. Commenters weigh in with other Chinese-restaurant name trends, including “Panda,” “Garden,” and “Wok ’n’ Roll.”

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Oxford Dictionaries has an app that identifies your “birthday word”: a words that entered English the year you were born. If you’re an OED subscriber, you can narrow the field to the month as well as the year. Read Dennis Baron (Dr. Grammar) on his own birthday word, “gobbledygook.”

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Why do we call parrots “Polly”? The answer, says Mental Floss, has almost nothing to do the feminine nickname.

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Reason #46,312 to love the Internet: Every Apple reference on “Futurama” and “The Simpsons.”

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Reason #46,313: The best worst names in superhero comics, compiled with frightening thoroughness by Drew G. Mackie of Back of the Cereal Box. A few of my favorites: Egg Fu, Microwavebelle, Flemgem, and Rice O’Rooney (the San Francisco Threat). If you don’t know why the last one is so bad it’s good, watch this. 

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Electric-car manufacturer Tesla recently abandoned its Model E trademark, and Duets Blogger Martha Engel wonders whether Ford Motor Company—which still owns the Model T mark, as well as its own Model E trademark—had something to do with it. Meanwhile, the Oatmeal’s Matthew Ingram waxes rhapsodic about his Tesla Model S: he loves everything about it except the name. He prefers “Magical Space Car.”

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On April 22 the New York Times launched The Upshot, an online section that focuses on politics and policy. The name was chosen over 45 also-rans, including Crux, Kernel, Sherpa, and Uncharted. Why did The Upshot prevail? “It’s simple and straightforward,” the editors write, “and there’s no inside joke or historical reference you’ll need to understand what it’s about: a clear analysis of the news, in a conversational tone.”

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Now that Pied Piper, the fictional startup in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” series, has an official logo, how well does it stack up?

 

Betabeat (“The Lowdown on High Tech”) does a comparative analysis and pronounces it “safe” but “off to a good start.” The green color, notes Betabeat, signals equilibrium, harmony and balance. And according to Hindu tradition, the green chakra represents self-love — which, to be fair, is the only kind of love anyone in Pied Piper is getting so far.” Via Brand New. (Also see my post about the Pied Piper name.)

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In November 2012, voters in Washington State legalized marijuana use and authorized the licensing of retail outlets to sell cannabis. (Voter turnout, Wikipedia notes with no apparent irony, was 81 percent, “the highest in the nation.”) Now that Seattle’s first pot stores have been chosen by lottery, let’s take a look at their names. Lots of greens (Greenjuana, Evergreen, Street of Greens, Green Vision, Greenco, Behind the Green Door), quite a bit of 420 (Seattle 420, 420 PM Corp, Highway 420, 420-911), and a few whose owners appear to be fans of “The Wire” (Bellinghamsterdam, Vansterdam, Hamsterdam, New Vansterdam). Kinda meh, if you ask me, but hey—it’s still a budding industry. (Hat tip: Benjamin Lukoff.)

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In related news, Fast Company’s Co.Design blog talks to four cannabis-industry experts about “how to brand a high-demand, once-illegal product.” Cherchez les femmes, says Cheryl Shuman, who points to “stiletto stoners”—successful working women who smoke pot—as a key demographic. (Hat tip: Irene Nelson.)

More Campaign Lingo 2012

Part 2 of my lexicon of presidential-campaign buzzwords—guillotine to super PAC—was published today on the Visual Thesaurus. You’ll have to subscribe to read it (and Part 1), and of course I hope you will. Meanwhile, here’s an outtake from the column, cut to keep the list to an even dozen:

Meh. The monosyllabic expression of disappointment has been used for the Republican contest in general and especially for candidate Romney, who has failed to generate much enthusiasm among voters. Punning on the candidate’s name, reporters and humorists started referring to “Meh Romney.” (There’s even a Tumblr blog where you can download a Meh Romney poster.) Meh was popularized by a 1995 episode of “The Simpsons” (“Lisa’s Wedding”), but Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer has traced it further back to a Yiddish source.

Read the rest of Campaign Lingo 2012: Part 2.

May Linkfest

The new-to-me verb “to knoll” comes from Knoll, the furniture brand named for founders Florence and Hans Knoll. Mike Pope writes in his Evolving English II blog that knolling refers to “aligning or squaring things (as on a desk), or more broadly, in what might be thought of as arranging things in an uber-anal-retentive way.” Mike’s post includes an “Always Be Knolling” video clip. I am a non-knoller—an anti-knoller, even—but I do like knowing the word and its origin.

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Pinterest is a dream medium for visual thinkers, but lately I’ve been seeing it used in some distinctly verbal ways. See, for example, Dipika Kohli’s board about naming that includes links to posts about taglines, the naming process, and common naming mistakes. I was especially pleased to discover “How to Name Things,” a thoughtful post on the ribbonfarm blog about naming and numbering. And I love the story about how ribbonfarm got its name.

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Worry more about creating a strong brand than about concocting a “pure” URL, advises Jay Jurisich of naming agency Zinzin. (Hear, hear!)

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Monday was “Name Day” in the U.S.: the day the Social Security Administration released its 2011 baby-name data. Read Nancy’s Baby Names and Baby Name Wizard for comprehensive coverage. (Each link goes to the first of several posts about the name data.) Some high/low points: Sophia is the number-one girl’s name for the first time; Tyler, Jayden, Isabella, and Miley are finally falling out of favor; and the girl’s name Harper rose in rank from 118th in 2010 to 54th in 2011. Also from Baby Name Wizard, the best sibling name set ever.

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The misuse of “whom” only seems like a recent problem. Language Log reminds us that the humorist James Thurber, tongue planted firmly in cheek, addressed the problem in 1929: “Take the common expression, ‘Whom are you, anyways?’ That is of course, strictly speaking, correct – and yet how formal, how stilted!”

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The University of Minnesota’s James M. Pilcher, who has been studying the origin of the taco for 20 years, tells the Smithsonian magazine that the name for the food item may have originated in the 18th century, in the silver mines of Mexico, where “taco” referred to little charges used to excavate the ore. “Taco” first appeared in print in the U.S. in 1905. Lots more fascinating history in that article, including the story of Taco Bell, named for its founder, Glen Bell. For more taco history, read the recent New York Times article about Gustavo Arellano, author of a new book, Taco USA.

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The Millions on books with one-word titles: “At their best, one-word titles distill content to its purest essence, which is what all titles strive to do, and then they stick in the mind. Sometimes, of course, they fall flat, and much of the time they’re just lukewarm and vague or, worse, falsely grand.”  (Hat tip: Diana Landau.)

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On the other hand: One hundred books whose titles start with “The Man Who…”

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Need to name a beverage? Just add zero.

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“A company needs a new name and it decides to engage its employees to come up with a new name,” writes guest blogger Mark Prus at DuetsBlog. “What could go wrong?” Plenty.

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Quick: How many fictitious brands from “The Simpsons” can you name?

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Bill Gardner of Logo Lounge identifies the most significant logo trends of 2012, and the names he gives the trends are as interesting as the designs. A sampling: Potato Chip, Anaglyphs, Sphere Carving, Peel.

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Why does the sentence adverb “hopefully” carry a stigma in some quarters while “obviously,” “seriously,” and “honestly” don’t? Linguist Geoff Pullum casts a gimlet eye on “five decades of foolishness,” hopefully put to rest now that the AP Stylebook permits “the modern usage of hopefully”—i.e., “it is hoped that.”

February Linkfest

The “Downton Abbey” anachronisms story certainly has legs. I wrote about one out-of-place usage, “to contact [someone],” in January; this week Ben Zimmer compiled a video of several ahead-of-their-time usages and wrote about them for the Visual Thesaurus. Graduate student Ben Schmidt goes further and deeper in a post on his Sapping Attention blog that summarizes the results of feeding “every single two-word phrase through the Google Ngram database to see how characteristic of the English [l]anguage, c. 1917, Downton Abbey really is.” (Via Language Hat.) “Black market,” “shortages,” “mitral valve prolapse,” and even “wartime” and “peacetime”? All rare or unheard-of in England in the nineteen-teens. (“To have legs” = to show potential for a long run. First documented in 1930, “orig. and chiefly U.S.,” according to the OED. Keep that in mind when you write your Civil War novel.)

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Meanwhile, the Wordnik blog looks on the bright side, identifying some fusty (or simply odd-to-American-ears) words and phrases that “Downton Abbey” got right, like penny dreadful, dropsy, and sprat to catch a mackerel.

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What’s a “cryppie”? A “day lady”? A “Korling”? A guide to the just-declassified lingo of the National Security Agency.

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From another subculture, a dictionary of Western slang, lingo, and phrases, wherein I learned that a “banjo” is a miner’s term for a short-handled shovel and “goat meat” is venison killed out of season. As far as I could ascertain, the lexicon is free of Deadwood-esque naughty words.

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A whole bunch of US newsroom lingo, slang, and catchphrases, from the universal (nut graf, gutter, downstyle) to the hyperlocal. My favorite in the latter category: “Arnie Pye,” used by the New Jersey Jewish News to refer to a jokey lede or headline that isn’t all that funny. Arnie Pye (in the sky) is the helicopter traffic reporter on “The Simpsons.”

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Besides our sun, how many stars can you name? (Via TYWKIWDBI.) One that didn’t make the list: Gomez’s Hamburger.

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Here’s a quiz for you: Westminster Dog Show champion dog name or line from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”? Exactly as tough as you’d think. (Via @BeautyMarks.)

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I’ve written previously about how Twitter got its name. Now read how the company bought Twitter.com from a bird enthusiast for the bargain price of $7,500.

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How to pronounce things hilariously. (Via Kottke.)

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Henry Hitchings, author of The Language Wars, talks to The Browser about “stupid myths” about the English language, e.g., “that Americans are ruining English or that American English is worse.” That, says Hitchings, “is just an absurd thing to say.”

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Speaking of stupid myths, did your fourth-grade teacher tell you there was a “rule” about never ending a sentence with a preposition? Then I implore you to listen to Slate’s new Lexicon Valley podcast, “Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From?” And worry no more about what you end your sentences with.

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And speaking of sentences and endings, here’s an appropriate cartoon by Wiley, via Mighty Red Pen:

 

Names in the News: Qwikster

Early Monday morning Netflix announced a new service, Qwikster, that will do what the original Netflix did: deliver movies to mailboxes. The entity known as Netflix will limit itself to streaming movies and other content (notably games) to customers’ computers and TV sets.

The bifurcation follows Netflix’s loudly protested repricing of DVD and streaming services, announced in July. In an email and blog post published Sunday night, Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings issued an apology to customers (or “members,” in Netflix-speak):

I see that given the huge changes we have been recently making, I should have personally given a full justification to our members of why we are separating DVD and streaming, and charging for both. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.

His explanation of the new name? Terse, to put it generously:

We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

The outcry was immediate and abundant. Mashable speculated whether Qwikster was “the worst product launch since New Coke.” Last time I checked, there were more than 17,000 comments on Hastings’s post. One of the more temperate ones came from Benjamin Hutchins:

The name itself, to me, shows a lack of thought. You say it was to represent the quickness of the service, but to me that was a bad attempt at trying to find an available.com domain when there are so few good ones left. I bet there were lengthy discussions over a good name, probably taking weeks, and yet to me, it truly sounds like a half-witted idea cocked up from someone in front of an investor and needed to keep things rolling.

Here’s my own disclaimer: I have never been a Netflix customer/member. I rarely watch movies at home. So I’m an impartial observer here—except where the name and branding strategy are concerned.

My take on the name: so bad it’s laughable. The branding strategy: mystifying.

Crazy, right? Like a fox.

Hang on for my explanation. First, though, a little background.