Fritinancy

Word of the week: Choice

Last week, in response to the leaked draft of a US Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the legal right to abortion, the Pro-Choice Caucus of the US House of Representatives distributed new messaging guidelines to House Democrats.

NEW: The Pro Choice Caucus has just sent out messaging materials to House Dems on Roe draft.

One of the recommendations: Don't use "choice." pic.twitter.com/nqVA8W1nWT

— Sarah Ferris (@sarahnferris) May 12, 2022

Among the guidelines: Instead of choice (“harmful”), use decision (“helpful”).

Yes, this recommendation came from the Pro-Choice Caucus, not the Pro-Decision Caucus. But putting aside that mixed message, what’s the reason for the change?

One ad line to rule them all

Is there a bar or a club where tech copywriters huddle to collude on slogans and ad lines? The CopyCat Lounge, maybe? Because I keep seeing double with outdoor ads, and it can’t be a coincidence.

What we talk about when we talk about abortion

Because that’s what we’re talking about this week. Don’t worry, though: I’m going to stay in my lane. Mostly.

In case you’ve been tuning out the news, and who could blame you: On Monday, a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, confirmed what many of us have been gloomily anticipating for years: that the precedents established in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), long considered settled law, are about to be jettisoned. “The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion,” wrote Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward for Politico. 

Here’s what “allowing each state to decide” can mean: Twenty-three states already have laws that could be used to restrict legal access to abortion. Under a state law passed by the Texas legislature in September 2021, abortions are prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they’re pregnant. “The law empowers private citizens to sue anyone who ‘aids or abets’ a prohibited abortion,” the Texas Tribune reported in March 2022. “Those who sue could be awarded at least $10,000 if they win.”

Snitches get riches, in other words.

I believe abortion is health care. I support abortion access for anyone who needs it. But I’m not a lawyer or a legislator, so I’m using this platform to share some resources about my own specialty: language, messaging, and branding, all of which have played, and continue to play, outsize roles in the ongoing fight for safe and legal abortions.

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February linkfest

After 22,000 submissions and 60,000 votes, the Minnesota Department of Transportation announced new names for six additional snowplows, including The Big Leplowski and Betty Whiteout. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy)

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Some commentary on “Commanders,” the recently announced name of the Washington Football Team:

• “While it’s not surprising that a team in the NFL, a league that festoons itself in camouflage every November for its ‘Salute to Service’ campaign, would adopt a military-theme name, most of the American public likely identifies more with the boots on the ground than the brass giving them their marching orders.”  (James I. Bowie for Fast Company)
• “Fans will surely get used to Coms, but for most folks now that word solely means ‘communications’ (comms is commonly used in that way, particularly in the military).” (Catchword blog)

I wrote about the controversy over the team’s original name back in 2014.

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You’re already playing Wordle, right? How about Globle and Worldle, the geography guessing games? Or the Broadway word game created by Broadway World?

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The ten worst company-naming mistakes, from “imitating successful brands and following trends” to “focusing on the specifics of today rather than on your core purpose.” (Catchword blog)

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I was once a typesetter, and I still maintain an interest in typefaces, but I’d never heard of a typeface called Jim Crow. Sarah K. Kramer writes about its history and how it came to be renamed Ruby, in honor of school-desegregation pioneer Ruby Bridges. (Believer Magazine)

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“The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer’s Block:”: a paper published by the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1974. (Kottke)

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“The Biden team — and the Democratic Party — could learn a lot from what Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump accomplished with their embrace of strong branding. Plainly put, it’s time for the White House to wake up. Or we are screwed.” (Julio Vincent Gambuto for Medium)

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Here’s your semi-regular reminder that you can follow me on Twitter and on Instagram, and read more of my writing on the Visual Thesaurus, the Strong Language blog, Medium, and—just once so far, but there’s more to come!—in EatDrinkFilms.

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“People sometimes poke fun at me for my unhealthy obsession with naming things: workism, hygiene theater, everything shortage. Naming things is a gimmick, and I am not strictly pro-gimmick. But I am an extreme partisan for memorable writing. I want people to read my words, and recall them, and use them, and talk about them.”: Derek Thompson’s tips for nonfiction writers. (I wrote about workism in 2019.)

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The 57 in the Heinz’s  “57 Varieties” slogan is a completely madeupical number, but it’s been a great brand-booster for more than a century. (CNN Business, via Michael F.)

A 1902 Heinz advertisement that lists far fewer than 57 varieites.

 

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Nothing to do with names or brands, but I know I’m not the only one who was strongly affected by Jennifer Senior’s story for The Atlantic about friendship. A short excerpt:

You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.) You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.

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Rebranding for the 13th century: Designer Ilya Stallone imagines how famous logos would have looked in the Middle Ages.  (UX Design)

Via Ilya Stallone

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How to say “mansplain” in languages other than English? Read the whole thread!

 

poll time!

which language has the best version of the verb that means: “(of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending/patronising”?

(and please do reply with other variants—these are just the four I’m familiar with)

— Dan Hicks (@profdanhicks) February 7, 2022

On the Strong Language blog: “Let’s go, Brandon”

This week’s word is a three-word slogan with a sweary subtext. It’s also  a shibboleth, a slogan, a meme, a mondegreen and the title of three recently released songs (well, “songs”).

Read all about it in my new post for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing.

Memo to self

Think!

Think! protein bars (spotted at Trader Joe’s). The company slogan is the anthimeria-esque “Stand for Strong.”

 

Think!

Think! shoes, “designed in Austria, handcrafted in Europe,” found in my closet, via eBay.

 

ReThink

ReThink “tummy-friendly ice cream,” via Grocery Outlet. Not so tastebud-friendly, IMO.

 

Think Think Think

“Think” IBM slogan. From the IBM website:

THINK was a one-word slogan developed by IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr. It appeared in IBM offices, plants and company publications in the 1920s and in the early 1930s began to take precedence over other slogans in IBM. It eventually appeared in wood, stone and bronze, and was published in company newspapers, magazines, calendars, photographs, medallions -- even New Yorker cartoons -- and it remained for years the name of IBM's employee publication. You can still find echoes of Watson’s motto in the brand name of IBM's popular notebook computers: the ThinkPad. This photograph shows a number of THINK signs rendered in a variety of languages for display by IBM employees around the world.

More thinky posts right here.

Name in the news: Shein

Here’s a statistic that surprised even me, a follower of fashion and retail trends: The most downloaded shopping app in the U.S. in May 2021 was not Amazon. It was Shein, an online-only retailer of cheap fast fashion for women and men (plus beauty products, plus home products) founded in 2008 in Nanjing, China, by Chris Xu, a search-engine-optimization specialist with no previous experience in fashion or retail.

Today, Shein (often styled as SHEIN) is a “quindecacorn”*—its gross merchandise volume is worth US$15 billion—and it’s forecast to surpass $20 billion in volume by the end of 2021. The word “juggernaut” comes up frequently in coverage of the company, which has achieved its numbers by targeting the mostly female tween, teen, and early-20s members of Generation Z who can’t resist buying tops and dresses for as little as $5 (and posting about their “hauls” on social media) and who eagerly anticipate Shein’s monthly roster of designer collaborations.

Still from a Shein “haul video” posted in December 2020 by Instagrammer Fabienne Pelaud, who struggles with the pronunciation of “Shein.”

 

Word of the week: Lollipop (and lollypop)

Tomorrow, July 20, has been deemed National Lollipop Day, probably by the confectionery-industrial complex. No one seems to know when this faux-liday first appeared on calendars, which is fitting, because no one is quite sure where the word lollipop comes from, either, or whether it’s spelled with an I or a Y.

See’s Candies, which celebrates its centenary this year, has it both ways: lollypop in promotions for its “sweet-stakes,” lollipop in the sweet-stakes URL.

I love “sweet-stakes.” 

How "Daisy" changed political advertising

Election Day, November 3: A polarizing Republican candidate who has spent much of his adult life heading a family business faces a Democrat who has spent most of his adult life as an elected official. The Republican has been branded as an extremist, a narcissist, and possibly a fascist—none of which deters his fanatical supporters. The Democrat is overshadowed by a glamorous predecessor and tarred by a specious eleventh-hour scandal. In the background—or foreground, depending on your perspective—are widespread racial and youth uprisings that some people suspect are ignited by “Communists” and “anarchists.”

2020? No, I’m describing 1964, when the November election date was the same as this year’s. It was a year of violence in Harlem and Jersey City; of the murders of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi; of heated free-speech protests in Berkeley. It was the year Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, running for his first full term less than a year after the JFK assassination, faced Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a far-right Republican who had beaten all of the Establishment contenders—Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Scranton—to win his party’s nomination.

I’ve thought a lot about the parallels between then and now while I read historian Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. The book was published in 2001, long before our current troubles, but it’s a timely and vivid reminder of how history rhymes.*

 

One 1964 event stands apart for its strangeness and impact: the Johnson campaign’s rule-breaking late-campaign TV spot. It’s known today by a one-word title, “Daisy,” and it permanently changed the way political campaigns were waged.

Still shot from “Daisy” ad, 1964

On the Visual Thesaurus: Political campaign slogans then and now

My September column for the Visual Thesaurus, “A Slogan in Every Pot!”, looks at the history of political slogans—from “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” (1840) to “Build Back Better” (2020).

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt.

Campaign slogans are “miniature narratives,” says Philip Seargeant, a British linguist and author of The Art of Political Storytelling: Why Stories Win Votes in Post-truth Politics (2020). Successful slogans, he told me in an email, “place the desire for change at their heart, and foreground the need for action to accomplish that change.” Change through action is at the heart of slogans like "Make America Great Again” — Donald Trump's 2016 campaign motto, often compressed into a hashtagged acronym, #MAGA — and “Take Back Control,” a Brexit slogan. “Both use imperatives — ‘make’ ‘take’ — which urge a form of participation from the electorate, and suggest that together some sort of change can be effected in society,” Seargeant says.

“Make America Great Again” was an abbreviated version of the slogan originally used by Ronald Reagan. In 1984, Reagan ran for reelection with the hazy, sunny slogan “It's Morning in America.”

Context matters too, says Seargeant: “A successful slogan will be a mix of the words on the page themselves, plus outside factors which mean these words resonate with a particular mood in society, with the character of the candidate, and with the larger branding of the campaign or movement.”

Read the rest of “A Slogan in Every Pot!”