Fritinancy

Guest Post on Duets Blog: Nova Has Never Meant "No Go"

In a guest post for Duets Blog, I look at one of the most popular and persistent of all naming myths: the one about the Chevrolet Nova. The car hasn’t been produced since 1988, but the story about how the Nova name “failed” in Spanish-speaking countries—because it means “no go,” according to the legend—lives on.

Guess what? “Nova” isn’t “no va,” and the Nova sold well in Latin America.

Read the post to learn more about the “Nova” myth and why it has proved so surprisingly durable.

Some of my other guest posts for Duets Blog: white elephants, the Aveda trademark, Los Doyers, Festivus.

 

July Linkfest

If you’ve been following the big science news of the month/year/century/millennium, you know that the “Higgs” in “Higgs boson” is British physicist Peter Higgs. But you may not be aware that “boson” was named for an Indian scientist, Satyendranath Bose. (Note: The Higgs boson is not to be confused with the Higgs bos’n or the Herrgs berson.)

*

Ten weird rules that control how planets are named.

*

Five words with surprising etymologies. I knew the “California” story, but was indeed surprised by “partridge.”

Names in the News

In their annual meeting last week, Kraft Foods shareholders approved Mondelez as the corporate name for the company’s business. The new name, which is pronounced moan-dah-LEEZ and signifies “world of deliciousness” (or something like that), was chosen through an employee contest.

Armin Vit reviewed the logo for his Brand New blog:

It’s no secret that I don’t like hate the Kraft Foods logo — see spots 6 and 5 in 2009’s Worst list — so I was very skeptical about anything good coming out of the same company. Even more so with a weird name like Mondelez and its, like, totes ridics pronunciation. I have to say: I’m extremely surprised by how nice the new logo is. It’s bouncy, it’s flowy, it’s perfectly kerned, and it even manages to tie in to the Kraft Foods logo with those two teardrop shapes.

Teardrops … or ketchup splotches? Or the bleeding edge?

Read my original post about the Mondelez announcement.

*

Microsoft has figured out what the world needs now: a new social network. Its entry into the market, So.cl, launched on May 20, while business and tech reporters were still distracted by Facebook’s IPO. The name is pronounced “social,” says Microsoft, but I can’t help reading it as “SoCal.” (The .cl domain is Chile’s country code.)

 

Microsoft makes us smile!

Anyone can join So.cl, but according to a ZDNet story the target market is students and academics. The So.cl FAQ says the network “helps you create rich stories (posts) by making it easy to assemble and share collages of web content.” The site is powered by Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. (Via Duets Blog.)

*

AdFreak, the AdWeek blog, reports that a Texas-based chain, Pizza Patrón, is giving away a free large pepperoni pizza to anyone who orders in Spanish on June 5. Predictably, that got the English-was-good-enough-for-Jesus crowd all riled up. Well, let them eat Domino’s. Anyway, I was more interested in the respelling, ransom-note style, of “pizza” as “picza” in the promotion.

Yes, I know there are only four days left.

 

“Picza” is in fact how “pizza” is pronounced by many native speakers of Spanish, because it’s a more natural consonant blend in that language. And “pizza” isn’t the only example of that pre-sibilant pronunciation shift: In 2009 I wrote about a Pepsi-Cola campaign in Argentina in which “Pepsi” was changed to “Pecsi” in advertising and signage.

As for Pizza Patrón, for more than 25 years the chain has catered to the Hispanic community. The company’s slogan is “Más Pizza. Menos Dinero”—more pizza, less money—and its web content is 100 percent bilingual.

*

Via the KidCrave blog, here’s a follow-up to my postlet in the May Linkfest about the latest baby-name data in the U.S.: 102 of the most unusual baby names of 2011. And by “unusual” I do mean “insane.” Five babies named “Aunesty”? Another five named “Honestii”? And six named “Onesty”? Six named “Dearria”? Five named “Peniel”? I rest my case. (Via @eponymia.)

BelVita vs. Velveeta

In the last couple of weeks two acquaintances, both American, independently sent me tweets about belVita breakfast biscuits. The product has been sold by Kraft Foods subsidiaries in Europe for more than a decade and in the UK since 2010; it launched in the US last month with a pre-game ad on Super Bowl Sunday and a huge sample giveaway in supermarkets and to bloggers. (Not this blogger, however.)

Both of my Twitter friends asked the same question: “Doesn’t belVita…

   

…sound a lot like Velveeta?”

 

 

It sure does. And it’s especially odd when you consider that both products—one a cookie-like biscuit, the other a processed cheese food—are made by Kraft. (In the US, BelVita is sold by Nabisco, a Kraft subsidiary since 2000.) Velveeta, the cheese product that’s been around since 1927—some of it probably still in the original packaging and still a pristine, vivid orange—isn’t sold in the UK or Europe. But with belVita now crossing the Atlantic, won’t there be some confusion between the two brands?

Dave Pool in Albuquerque, New Mexico, thinks so:

 

True, the names have different etymologies: “Velveeta” is meant to suggest “velvet-smooth texture,” while “belVita” is a compression of bella vita, Italian for “beautiful life.” But in a radio ad, I’d challenge you to hear the difference in their pronunciation. It’s of particular concern in Spanish-speaking markets: in spoken Spanish, there’s virtually no distinction between “b” and “v.”

I can only surmise that when it introduced belVita in France, more than 10 years ago, Kraft (or Lu, its French subsidiary) didn’t plan for an eventual US launch and didn’t concern itself about the belVita/Velveeta confusion. But I’d love to hear from someone closer to the source.

So why, all these years later, didn’t Kraft just rebrand the product for North America? Again, I have no inside info. After all, it’s not as though it couldn’t afford to: total Kraft Food revenue in 2010 was $49.2 billion; and the belVita brand alone brought in $100 million. And I doubt it’s because of brand equity: I don’t suspect belVita has built up a huge following among Americans who returned from the UK and Europe clamoring for those exquisite breakfast biscuits they’d bought at Sainsbury’s or the hypermarket.

BelVita faces another marketing challenge: For several decades Americans have willingly consumed breakfast bars like Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain, but the breakfast biscuit is unknown on these shores. Indeed, to most Americans, a “biscuit” is soft and fluffy and served with gravy. (Alternatively, biscuits are for teething babies or for dogs.) BelVita biscuits are hard and crunchy and lightly sweetened.* To overcome Americans’ confusion, belVita’s US site goes into a lot more detail than the UK site about nutritional benefits and the “newness” of the product. According to a MarketWatch story about the US launch, belVita products will be sold in the reassuringly familiar cookie/cracker aisle, not with the dog biscuits.

As for Velveeta, if you’ve ever wondered how it’s made, an article by Veronique Greenwood in Discover magazine reveals all. Did you know there was Velveeta fan fic? Now you do.

__

* For more on British vs. American “biscuit,” I refer you to the authoritative Lynneguist of Separated by a Common Language.

¡Ay, Ay, Ay!

It’s bad enough that an optometric office is using a wretched bilingual pun as its name.

Eye Carumba, 4 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco

 

What’s worse is that, having opted to go with a wretched bilingual pun, the optometrists didn’t get their vision checked before ordering the sign. The second word of that Spanish interjection is spelled caramba, not carumba.

Even that proud underachiever Bart Simpson—whose first words, after all, were “¡Ay, caramba!”—knows better.

(By the way, caramba is a minced oath, the sort of thing you get when you substitute goshdarnit for goddammit. In this case, the word being minced is carajo, a vulgarism for “penis”; idiomatically, “¡Ay, carajo” means “Oh, fuck!”)

I might accept “Eye Caramba” (not “Carumba”) as the name of a hip, whimsical retailer of eyeglass frames à la Warby Parker. Or, even better, a hip, whimsical retailer of children’s eyeglass frames. But the name is out of focus for an optometrist’s office: a silly, misspelled pun just doesn’t say “skilled and experienced medical professionals dedicated to the improvement of my vision.”

Potty Humor

You have to hand it to Poo-Pourri.

“Forever changing the bathroom experience.” Note angel tooting on throne.

For starters, the product has a catchy rhyming slogan: “Spritz the bowl before you go and no one else will ever know!” You just don’t see enough versification in marketing copy nowadays.

I also give Poo-Pourri credit for coming right out and saying “stinky poop smell” instead of some wan euphemism.

And the brand extensions evince what one of my readers once called “dedication to the theme.” To name just a few: Trap-a-Crap (“a natural Before-You-Go spray that takes the odor away”), Déjà Poo (another “before-you-go” spray; what a name!), Heavy Doody (yet another “preemptive bathroom scent”), Pooch-Pourri (spray it on your pet’s coat), and Royal Flush (“the fresh essence of eucalyptus works in synergy with spearmint”). Do I need to add that most of these products are available in gift packaging? For that very special, thick-skinned someone, it goes without saying.

Poo-Pourri is, of course, a pun on “potpourri,” which since the mid-18th century has signified a miscellaneous collection. It often refers specifically to a fragrant medley of dried herbs and flowers. It didn’t start out that way, as the word’s etymology reveals: pot pourri literally means “rotten pot” in French (from Spanish olla podrida, ditto)—the English cognate of pourri is “putrid.”

Which makes Poo-Pourri even more … redolent than you’d first suspect.

More experiments in excremental branding here, here, here, and here.

Hat tip: Nancy Nall.

__

P.S. Speaking of potty humor, I recently learned that American Standard, the toilet manufacturer, is headquartered in Piscataway, New Jersey. Yes, Piscataway. Piss. Scat. Away. Well played! Now, if only they had a branch office in Flushing, New York.

Post-Shmost

Two commercial examples of Yiddish-accented reduplication, spotted within the same week.

I saw “Burglar Schmurglar” on a Bay Alarm truck in Oakland:

 

Flickr has the billboard version, with a clearer view of the corporate tagline “What Have You Got to Lose?” The signs are part of a long-running Bay Alarm ad campaign that I commended in a 2009 post. I’m pleased to see that the company has spruced up its web design and content since then.

Libros Schmibros is a lending library and used bookstore that opened in July 2010 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles; it's the labor of love of former San Francisco Chronicle book critic David Kipen. I took the photo at the Libros Schmibros temporary residence at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, where it will remain through November 5.

 

The store’s name reflects its current population (majority Latino) and its heritage (majority Jewish). My father grew up in Boyle Heights during the latter period; it was said that when they started to make money, the immigrant Jews of Los Angeles moved “from BH to BH”—Boyle Heights to Beverly Hills. Westwood lies just west of Beverly Hills.

The reduplicative pattern employed in Burglar Schmurglar and Libros Schmibros usually expresses disdain, disesteem, or a dismissive shrug: “poetry-shmoetry”; “facts-shmacts”; “virus-shmirus.” The formula is “pure Yinglish”—a blend of Yiddish and English—writes Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yinglish. In his entry on “fancy-shmancy,” Rosten says that “the sardonic shm- must have been among the earliest of what linguists call reduplications that was created or embroidered by Lower East Side Jews.” He devotes a separate entry to the particles sh-, shm-, sch-, and schm-, which he says are “solidly entrenched in Yinglish as prefatory expressions of mockery, scorn or derogation.” And he adds an “IMPORTANT NOTE”:

I strongly disapprove of using sch or schm instead of sh for English transliterations of Yiddish words. Sch is German; sh is Yiddish—which, in fact, uses a single letter (shin) for the sh sound. There is no letter for sch in Yiddish. I use the sh and exile the sch wherever possible.

The most famous example of the “x-ing shmx-ing” formula is, of course, the joke about the Jewish man whose psychoanalyst tells him he has an Oedipus complex. The punchline: “Oedipus-Shmoedipus, as long as he loves his mother!”

How Cold Is It?

“Colder than a summer in San Francisco.”

“Más frío que un verano en SF”: MUNI bus ad for McDonald’s McCafé Mango Pineapple Real Smoothie.

No, Mark Twain never said “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” but that doesn’t mean the statement isn’t true. (The summer of 2011 was especially frigid. Some residents cheered; not I.)

McDonald’s has appropriated the comparison for a local ad campaign directed at the Spanish-speaking market. I spotted one of the ads last weekend on the side of a 47 Van Ness bus, but didn’t have time to take a photo. Flickr to the rescue. Thanks, Shockingly Tasty!

“Me encanta” is the Spanish translation of McDonald’s current slogan (since 2003), “I’m lovin’ it.”

P.S. I also spotted a Chinese version of this ad, but had similarly bad luck taking a photo. Has anyone seen the ad in other cities?

“Los Doyers”—Cheers or Jeers?

I’m the guest blogger today at Duets Blog, whose beat is trademark law and marketing. In honor of béisbol season, which opens next week, my subject is “Los Doyers,” an affectionate name for the L.A. Dodgers used by many native speakers of Spanish. When the Dodgers pursued trademark protection for the name last year, some fans cried “exploitation,” pointing to the $30 price tag on “Los Doyers” T-shirts sold at Dodger Stadium. Other observers cheered what they saw as an acknowledgment of the team’s many Spanish-speaking fans.

Read all about it—and about the telenovela-worthy story behind the scenes—at Duets Blog.

A Hair Over the Line?

Hairapy isn't a brand or a product but rather the name of a multimedia campaign from Sunsilk, a division of the venerable beauty brand Helene Curtis. I blogged about the Hairapy name back in January, saying it reminded me uncomfortably of "harpy." Somehow, Sunsilk recovered from that devastating blow and soldiered on with its team of Hairapy Guys who pose as therapists ("The door is always open and we're always here to help").

Some of the Hairapy output is quite funny, intentionally or not. The "case history" commercials are both sexy and goofy, especially this one (although as AdRants has noted, the premise isn't original).

There's also a blog (not to be confused with this blog, also called Hairapy, which seems to be about buying hairstyles on Second Life), where you can apply your intellect to timely topics like "Who's smarter? Blondes or brunettes?" And there are forums where you can sympathize with readers like Morgan, who writes, "i just want my hair curly but one thing that bothers me is my hair at the root is all poofy and lil hairs stuck up and it just a mess.. and hard to make it look nice u kno?"

Oh, Morgan, we kno.

A couple of things puzzle me about Hairapy. One is the semi-bilingual marketing. Of the eight product formulas, two have Spanish names: "Anti-Caída" and "Anti-Esponja." Anti-caída means "anti-fall" or "anti-break," and as a Sunsilk "expert" explains in a forum, the Anti-Caída system "balances excellent conditioning protection to reduce hair breakage during hair grooming." Anti-esponja literally means "anti-sponge," but here has something to do with reducing hair volume (a problem some of us wish we shared).

Are Spanish-speaking women the primary market for these two product types (which, by the way, are sold only in "threesomes," a bit of naughtiness that foreshadows my main topic here)? If they are, why don't the forums have Spanish-language versions? Is there something about women who speak Spanish that makes them especially vulnerable to "falling" and "sponge"? Or are the names in Spanish because Spanish is the new French--in other words, the international language of beauty and elegance?

I really do want to know.

But here's my main reason for revisiting Hairapy. Some generous Sample Fairy recently visited the Dolphin Club, where I swim, and left behind a big bag of Sunsilk goodies. I scooped up a fistful of folded cards in different colors that represented various formulas. Each piece contained a "threesome" of samples--shampoo, conditioner, and "creme"--along with a couple of gift cards worth a dollar each.

Branding obsessive that I am, I couldn't just tear open the packages and lather away. In fact, I had a hard time getting past the copy on the front of each card, which invites the customer to choose her hair "issue":

My frizz is so wild not even a dominatrix could tame it (image: silhouetted high-heel boots and handheld whip)

My hair is poofier than a prize-winning poodle

My hair is kinkier than an S&M convention

My hair is drier than a martini

And the one that really got my attention:

My hair is limper than my boyfriend after a few drinks

Hilarious? Edgy? Vulgar? Cruel? You be the judge. And while you're being judgmental, you might also ask yourself how you'd feel if your thirteen-year-daughter, niece, or sister--who is likely in Sunsilk's target demographic--came home with these sample cards.

I looked online for examples of this promotion but couldn't find them. I did, however, find a version on Sunsilk's Canadian site, where a quiz asks users to describe their hair in one sentence:

Flat as a training bra and limp as a noodle

Bigger and poofier than a bridesmaid dress

So frizzy a dominatrix couldn't control it

Straightened with kinky tendencies

Dry as toast--with more splits than a pole-dancer

Pretty easy-going and well-adjusted, considering

Duller than the clearance rack at the Khaki Shack

Let's recap: Dominatrices. Pole-dancers. S&M. Dry martinis. Limp boyfriends.

To sell shampoo.

Am I the only one who has a problem with this? Is it a problem a Hairapist can solve?