Fritinancy

S’more or Less

I usually wait for three examples before I declare a trend, but this time I’m going to bend my own rule, because two examples—both spotted last week in TechCrunch—are more than enough. 

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Item #1: “S’moretgage Launches to Bring Real Time Mortgage Data to Real Estate Investors.”

 

 

From the TechCrunch story:

From whence the name? It’s a play to make the word “mortgage” less weighty and ponderous. According to [founder Patrick] Browne, the company thought that “S’moretgage could be a nice way to make that word sound a bit less intimidating.” Once you learn how to spell it, it’s not too hard to remember.

A couple of comments:

“Everybody Has Suggested Changing the Name”

“What if you never had to worry about food again?” asks the home page of Soylent. The company makes a product with the same name: a nutrient-rich food substitute designed to replace traditional meals.

“The packaging is space age, with minimalist black-and-white lettering, reminiscent of Paul Mitchell shampoo.” – “The End of Food”

 

The New Yorker’s Lizzie Widdicombe traveled to Studio City, California, to interview Soylent’s inventor, Rob Rhinehart, and one of his partners, Dave Renteln, for “The End of Food,” published in the May 12 issue of The New Yorker. Inevitably, the subject of the name came up:

I asked if they really planned to call their product Soylent—which, in my unofficial field research, had evoked, at best, unpleasant associations with “soy” and “soil,” and, at worst, alarmed recitations of the movie catchphrase “Soylent Green is people!”

“Everybody has suggested changing the name,” Rhinehart said. “Investors, media people, my mom.”

“My mom, too,” Renteln said.

Rhinehart said that he liked the self-deprecating nature of the name, and the way it poked fun at foodie sensibilities: “The general ethos of natural, fresh, organic, bright—this is the opposite.”

Anyway, he said, a lot of young people never got the memo about Soylent Green’s being people. “If you Google ‘Soylent,’ we’re in front of the movie.” He added, “Remember, Starbucks was the guy from ‘Moby-Dick.’ ”

Starbuck, actually.

I like the Soylent name—and the whole never-worry-about-food, anti-foodie premise—and wish Rhinehart much success. But he isn’t the first entrepreneur to seize on the “Soylent” name. Soylent Green Crackers (“People Food”) was developed by San Francisco’s Parallax Corporation as a conversation piece and a way to bring an imaginary, movie-spawned idea to life. Soylent Green Crackers have been around for a few years; I wrote about them in September 2011. They’re out of stock on Amazon.

For the hacker crowd, there’s a Make Your Own Soylent website with hundreds of recipes, many of them fancifully named: Metroid Nootropics, Bachelorette Chow, Dingosaurus_KetoFood, Soylent in Paris, Rainbow Unicorn Feed.

Watch: Charlton Heston utters “Soylent Green is people!” in a climactic scene from Soylent Green (1973).

 

HBO’s “Silicon Valley” Gets into Naming Trouble

The trouble isn’t the unimaginative name of HBO’s new comedy series, which the pay-cable network has just renewed for a second season, just three episodes into Season 1. Rather, I’m talking about the major plot point of Episode 3, “Articles of Incorporation,” which aired Sunday night.

The business and tech bloggers who covered the episode found nothing amiss in the story. But to anyone who knows how business names work, it betrays the naïveté of the show’s creators.

The protagonist of “Silicon Valley” is a programmer, Richard, who’s inadvertently developed a file-compression algorithm. For reasons that haven’t yet been explained (and may never be), he named the algorithm—and the start-up he creates around it—“Pied Piper.”

Everyone but Richard hates the name. But that’s not his biggest headache.

Thanks, But…

A San Francisco startup called Gramr has blasted past its $15,000 Kickstarter goal in less than two weeks and appears likely to reach its “stretch goal” of $50,000. Before I give you any links or clues, try to guess from the name alone what Gramr makes. Language-learning flash cards? National Grammar Day T-shirts? An app that corrects your faulty subject-verb agreement?

No, no, and no. Gramr looks and sounds exactly like “grammar,” but the company has a completely different mission.

Let’s Talk About Names

Need fast feedback about a naming dilemma? On a tight budget? You can now hire my expert naming services by the minute—yes, one-sixtieth of an hour—through Clarity.fm*, a year-old San Francisco company that connects entrepreneurs with experts, over the phone, for advice on business challenges.

In a 15-, 30-, or 45-minute phone conversation (or longer, if you have the stamina), I can review your naming objectives and criteria, give you a quick professional critique of your top name choices, and point out areas you may have overlooked. You can ask me questions about product names, company names, taglines, domains, or brand architecture. There’s no obligation to hire me for further naming work, but if you’d like to do so we can talk about that, too.

Yesterday, for example, I spoke with a couple of entrepreneurs in Vancouver, BC, who wanted my opinion of their four top name candidates. In a fast-paced 17-minute call, I gave them my impressions of the names and advice for a follow-up round of creative work.

Sound good? Read about how it works, check out my Clarity profile, then sign up and give me a call!

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* About that .fm domain extension: It’s the country code for the Federated States of Micronesia—and an apt choice for a company called Clarity.

October Linkfest

It’s Portmanteauber! But first, let’s welcome the return of the Name of the Year Tournament, “a celebration of unconventional names and the people who wear them.” After a 30-year run, NOTY’s originators stepped down in 2012; the tournament is now run “by two recent graduates of a university near Chicago” with “boring names” who are carrying on the tradition under a new URL. This year’s brackets include Hurricane Weathers, Fancy English, and Leila Bossy-Nobs. Go forth and vote!

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“One of my biggest language pet peeves is the phrase ‘That’s not a word’,” writes James Callan, a content strategist and linguistics aficionado in Seattle. So he launched the Nixicon “to find and retweet people on Twitter who claimed that something isn’t a word.” In less than a week he’d discovered and circulated more than 200 “not a word” tweets.

A few days after starting this, one thing is clear: people really hate irregardless, ain't, and mines.

— That's Not A Word (@nixicon) October 14, 2013

As for the Nixicon name, James says it’s “a portmanteau of ‘nix’ (meaning ‘no’) and ‘lexicon’.”

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Speaking of non-words and portmanteaus, in May 2012 a group of lexicographers, poets, and authors coined “phubbing”—a portmanteau of “phone” and “snubbing”—to describe “the phenomenon of ignoring people in front of you in favor of paying attention to your phone,” according to an article in Advertising Age. Since then, the ad agency McCann Melbourne has been seeding the word—on Facebook and the StopPhubbing website, among other platforms—as a way to create interest in, and sell more copies of, a new edition of Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary. The Wordability blog (which slightly misrepresents the word’s origin) calls phubbing “the best new word of the year” and says the word’s rise demonstrates “all that is good about modern word formation.”

Watch Macquairie’s video about the birth and spread of “phubbing.”

 

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Why do some invented words—gobbledygook, blurb, and smog, for example—catch on? Ralph Keyes writes in The American Scholar that “need and usefulness” and the ability to “capture a widespread sensibility” are key indicators. So is playfulness: “A remarkable number of terms we use today originated in the speech bubbles and captions of cartoonists,” Keyes observes.

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In a couple of months we’ll be placing our bets on the 2013 word of the year. Allan Metcalf, author of many books on language (including the definitive history of “OK”) and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, makes the case for “Obamacare” as this year’s leading candidate. (My own money, as of this moment, is on “shutdown.”)

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My friend Suzanne Mantell, a writer, editor, and rare-book dealer, has written a lovely defense of old-school reading matter: “Real Books and Why We Love Them.”

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Another friend, Mike Madrid, has published a new book: Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics. (Mike also wrote The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines.) An illustrated excerpt from the new book—“10 Most Badass Comic Book Heroines”—is up at Huffington Post. I’m loving the name of these nearly forgotten supergals: Jill Trent, Science Sleuth! Madame Strange! Betty Bates, Lady-at-Law! And how did they get away with “Pussy Katnip”?

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There were plenty of snorts and snickers in my Twitter timeline over Fukuppy, the name of Fukushima Industries Corporation’s new egg-shaped mascot. But as Victor Mair, Language Log’s Asian-language expert, explains: “Fukuppy is actually a very nice name for a mascot in Japanese.”

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Thirty days hath Septaper? In Word Routes, Ben Zimmer looks at “the financial word of the moment,” taper, and how it gave rise to the portmanteaus Septaper (a gradual slowdown of bond-buying in September) and Octaper (ditto, for October). “September through December seem to lend themselves to creative blending,” Ben writes, “perhaps because the names form a prosodic pattern: each is a three-syllable sequence with a stressed middle syllable (i.e., an amphibrach) and ends in -er.” My own “portmonthteau” sightings include Socktober, Sharktober, OAKtober (celebrating the Oakland A’s), and Archtober (pronounced, perplexingly, ark-tober). (And see my 2012 post on X-toberfest.)

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Cronut, shmonut: Earlier this month Starbucks UK introduced a doughnut-muffin hybrid it dubbed the Duffin. Just one little problem with that: a small British bakery chain, Bea’s of Bloombury, has been selling its own “duffin” since at least 2011. (That last link includes a list of several other pastry portmanteaus, including the townie, the crookie, the fauxnut, and the muffle.) Alas, proprietor Bea Vo never troubled with trademark protection. As it happens, Bea’s coinage wasn’t original, either: Barry Popik, a historian of food terms, has found print citations for “duffin” going back to 2007.

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And speaking of food portmanteaus:

Did no one @BurgerKing say #satisfries out loud and know it sounds like "Saddest Fries"?

— Rye Silverman (@ryesilverman) September 27, 2013

Those Crazy Startup Names!

In today’s Wall Street Journal, reporter Lindsay Gellman looks at the “increasingly quirky names” of startup companies. Her examples include Mibblio (a “digital sing-along storybook”), Kaggle (which connects companies to big-data scientists), and Shodogg (a mobile screen-sharing service). As with most stories about naming, this one is a mix of solid information and misleading assertions. (Disclaimer: I was interviewed for the story’s sidebar about naming trends such as the perplexingly popular -ly suffix.)

My take on the story:

“Quirky” names are not a recent phenomenon. As Gellman rightly points out, Yahoo! and Google were considered bizarre names 20 years ago. In the late 1990s, so were FogDog and Jamcracker (which survived the dot-com bust) and Flooz (which didn’t). Back in 2006, I wrote about startup names like Ookles, Simpy, Weekemor, and DimDim. But oddly spelled names have been with us for much longer than that. In 1999, Salon’s Ruth Shalit wrote a much-cited article on “the vicious world of corporate name-creation”; her examples included the car names Xterra and Alero and the corporate names Acteva and Aquent. Science-fiction-y names have been common in pharmaceuticals for decades (Xanax, Zyrtec, Zyprexa). And you can go back even further, to Cheez-It crackers (1921) and Tastykake baked goods (1914) to trace Americans’ enthusiasm for krazy spellings.

You don’t need a short dot-com URL. You may not need a dot-com at all. The reason for the latest of crop of wacky spellings, Gellman writes, “is that practically every new business—be it a popsicle maker or a furniture retailer—needs its own website. With about 252 million domain names currently registered across the Internet, the short, recognizable dot-com Web addresses, or URLs, have long been taken. The only practical solution, some entrepreneurs say, is to invent words, like Mibblio, Kaggle, Shodogg and Zaarly, to avoid paying as much as $2 million for a concise, no-nonsense dot-com URL.” Nonsense on many levels. Many dot-com names, even short ones, can be bought from third-party owners for less than $2,500. A short name isn’t always the best name. Your URL doesn’t have to be your name: The web address of Open, a design agency in Manhattan, is notclosed.com. And alternatives to .com abound—.us, .ca, and the many country-code domains that can be employed in creative ways. An example from my own portfolio: PostAndBeam.is (Iceland country code).

Do-it-yourselfers beware. Creating a good business idea doesn’t mean you can create a good business name. The skills simply aren’t the same. Naming consultants, on the other hand, have the knowledge and experience to point out illogical pronunciations and unintuitive spellings that will hinder your brand. If you can’t afford a full naming consultation—less expensive and more cost-effective than you think—then at least opt for a short review.

Forget the focus group and focus on the naming brief. One entrepreneur quoted in Gellman’s story, an Australian data scientist named Anthony Goldbloom, says he was “too frugal” to buy an existing domain—or, presumably, to hire a naming professional. Instead, he created an algorithm that spit out 700 names. He picked two finalists and “dashed off an e-mail to family and friends asking for their preferences.” He took their advice and chose Kaggle … which, it turns out, is mispronounced by many Americans. Goldbloom is probably very good at data science, but a) that’s a terrible and unscientific way to conduct a focus group, b) “dashing off an e-mail” is no way to do a names presentation, and c) focus groups are good for product testing and user experience; they’re bad for names, taglines, and logos. (Everyone has an opinion, but only a few people should have a vote.) Instead of polling his nearest and dearest, Goldbloom should have poured his energies into a solid naming brief that spelled out his naming objectives (what does the name need to communicate?) and criteria (which words, word parts, sounds, and letters are most desirable in the name?). Better still, he should have asked for professional help.

Almost lost in the WSJ story is this quote from Steve Manning, a principal at the Bay Area naming company Igor International:

“The primary driver for startup naming right now is the misguided mission to find the shortest possible, pronounceable [unclaimed] dotcom address,” says Igor's Mr. Manning.

Startups are likely underestimating their potential customers, and adding an unnecessary constraint, in clinging to short URLs, he adds.

(Emphasis added.)

Good advice. Is anyone listening?

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UPDATE: Rebecca Greenfield of The Atlantic Wire quotes me in "The Pitfalls of the Clever.ly Named Startup."

UPDATE #2: "Silicon Valley's Stupid Naming Problem" reproduces my Pinterest board without crediting me by name.

Nicely Named: Oxgut Hose Co.

You have to admit it takes guts to name a consumer-product company Oxgut. But that’s exactly why this name works so well. It’s tough, it stands out, and it tells a story – just like the products that bear its name.

Oxgut Hose Co., a startup here in Oakland that’s currently raising money through Kickstarter, salvages “retired” fire hoses that have become unsafe and turns them into useful products: floor mats, furniture, hammocks, tote bags. “Tons of fire hose ends up in landfill,” says company founder (and former ad-agency producer) LauraLe Wunsch*. “And that’s where we come in. We work with fire departments to intercept the fire hose before it goes to the Dumpster and repurpose every bit possible.”

Well-executed stencil-style wordmark.

Those salvaged hoses are weathered yet still rugged and surprisingly colorful. “I’ve never seen anything so full of character or so worthy of a second life,” LauraLe says.

So why “Oxgut”? Because that’s what the first fire hoses were made from. Here’s how a staggeringly comprehensive How Products Are Made article on fire hoses tells the story:

The earliest recorded use of fire hose was in ancient Greece. According to the Greek author Apollodorus, one end of an ox’s intestine was attached to a bladder filled with water. When the bladder was pressed, the water was forced through the long ox gut and was directed “to high places exposed to fiery darts.”

Oxgut Hose Co. doesn’t belabor this history, but it makes sure the name isn’t an indecipherable enigma, like too many startup names I see.

Oxgut also plays, but doesn’t overplay, the emotional card. Just in case you’ve forgotten why fire hoses matter, the company tagline is “Exclusive designs with a heroic past.”

 

Fire-hose floor mats and non-fire-hose T-shirts from Oxgut.

 

In addition to creating an effective name and tagline, Oxgut’s founders are doing a lot of other things right. They’ve filed for trademark protection of the name, and they’re working the social-media angles. They’ve also produced a gorgeous print brochure with professional photos of all the products. And they’re showing a social conscience – while reinforcing the origin story – by donating a portion of their proceeds to the Children’s Burn Foundation.

To learn more about Oxgut and its products, check out Oxgut’s Kickstarter video and Facebook page.

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* LauraLe is a neighbor of mine, and I’ve happily supported her Kickstarter, but I have no other connection to Oxgut.

Underwear Week: Startups

It’s Day Three of Underwear Week! Time for some news of the new.

TechCrunch, to which I turn for the latest info about gadgets, gizmos, and Google, surprised me a couple of weeks ago with a guest column by research analyst Ross Rubin about, of all things, four new underwear companies. The tech angle? All four startups had sought crowdfunding to build their businesses; two succeeded, two didn’t. My angle? The companies’ names, naturally.

Thinx (pronounced “thinks”) was started by three women in New York City who saw a need for leakproof, stainproof underwear that women can wear confidently during their periods (referred to in the Kickstarter video with inexplicably coy euphemisms like “that time”).

“QUAD-DRY BreatheTECH” provides “a leak and stain resistant support matrix that’s got you covered.”

 

The project met its funding goal, but the name falls short. Yes, it’s non-descriptive (remember, that’s a good thing), but the spelling makes it look like a knockoff—or a spinoff—of the successful Spanx brand, and the “think” concept strikes me as off-target. The customer doesn’t care how much thinking went into your product, and she doesn’t want to have to overthink her purchase. (“Think” is also overused in branding to the point of meaninglessness.) The dull, redundant tagline, “Rethinking Women’s Underwear,” doesn’t convey a benefit or convince me to buy.

The bottom line, so to speak: an interesting product that could better realize its potential with a more effective, less derivative name/tagline combination. Something sassy and unexpected is what’s called for here.

By the way, a tip of the hat to columnist Rubin for working “panty ante” into his copy.

Snowballs (“Cooling underwear for conceiving men”) also addresses a serious problem—male infertility—and it does so with candor (in the pitch) and humor (in the name). “Testicular cooling has been shown to increase sperm count,” the website informs us, “particularly in cases of varicoceles, and we’ve created an comfortable, organic product that will help you succeed naturally before investing thousands of dollars in other risky, more invasive solutions.” I love the product name (and also the Procreativity.net domain name), but backers balked, possibly put off by the product’s high market price ($65 to $80).

Don’t give up, Snowballs! I’d love to see you pitch on “Shark Tank.”

JockGods is a decent name, but slightly misleading if what you’re selling is “high-quality underwear designed for men and women”: both “jock” and “god” suggest that these undies are for guys only. There’s also nothing particularly distinctive about the product. I’m not surprised that the project failed to meet its funding goal.

Helux Gear has a clear, straightforward pitch: there’s a need for “ergonomic” (supportive) men’s briefs with a practical, accessible fly. The name has a nice resonance, suggesting both “luxury for men” and “helix” (suggestive of the unusual design of the pouch). “Helix” also sounds powerful, elemental, and science-y, and the logo makes it stick. Backers apparently agreed: they funded the project with room to spare.

 

Previously on Underwear Week:

Cheekini.

True & Co. and the MILFs.

September Linkfest

New York City gangs take their names very, very seriously, according to “Gang ‘Slang’ers,” in the New York Post. “It took us about a month to come up with our name,” said Piff Montana, a member of the Get Touched Boyz of Jamaica, Queens. … We wanted a name that would make an impact.” The full list of 300 or so gang names reveals a preoccupation with numbers and precinctspercentages: there are gangs called 5 Precinct Percent, 10 Precinct Percent, 40 Precinct Percent, and so on up to 122 Precinct Percent. (Hat tip: NameFlash. And thanks to Dave for correcting me on "precinct.")

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New additions to World Wide Words: eastwooding, mirror fasting, underbragging, and gramping. No, gramping is not a misspelling of glamping.

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Looking for a title for your book? You can’t go wrong with “The Elements of ___,” says Poynter.org’s Roy Peter Clark, who lists more than 25 knockoffs of the Strunk and White original. Here’s the one that inspired his post:

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Before she founded the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean worked on the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a reference that isn’t just for writers but is also by writers—i.e., various writers were invited to contribute notes on words that interested them. One of the writers assigned to McKean was the late David Foster Wallace, who, she writes, approached the copyediting phase as if “someone invited him to an all-day grammar seminar (with celebrity photo signings and vendor's expo hall), combined with a debating society picnic, where the topic was ‘RESOLVED: This Comma Should Be Removed.’ (You're not surprised, are you?)” Read the whole delightful account at “It was wonderful, marvelous, magnificent, superb, glorious, sublime, lovely, delightful ...”

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The Chamomile Tea Party was formed in 2010 as an alternative to “the rancor between the political left and right” in the US. It’s using modified World War II posters to get the point across, and you can view and download the posters on Flickr.

 

By outtacontext.

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In brand naming, many clients panic if a name is more than five letters long. According to Baby Name Wizard, there’s a contrary trend in baby-boy naming, at least in the US: fear of short names. Finn becomes Finnegan, Quinn becomes Quinlan, and—most boggling of all—Levi becomes Leviathan (“the twisted serpent to be killed at the end of time”) or Leviticus (the third book of the Old Testament, notable mostly for its litany of laws about skin diseases, sacrifices, and genital discharges).

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Fellow name developer Chris Johnson (aka The Name Inspector) has created my new favorite Pinterest board: the Wall of Namifying, “logos of companies whose names end with -ify (or, in one case, -efy).” As you probably know, I share his obsession. (And speaking of Pinterest, I’m trying my hand at a similar project: cataloguing the many, many -ly names and logos.)

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Linguist Arnold Zwicky collected some wonderful names of minor-league baseball teams, including the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, the Fort Wayne Tincaps, and the Lansing Lugnuts. Then he followed up with an imaginary list of his own. I’m rooting for the Baton Rouge Compacts.

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From the Autoextremist blog, a slightly jaundiced guide to the latest auto-industry terms. An “accidental tourist” describes “executives devoid of the qualifications necessary to properly perform the duties assigned to them”; “greenage” is a program’s environmental potential. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Speaking of jaundiced, there’s nothing like a Condescending Corporate Brand Page to say “We're a big corporate brand using Facebook. So look out for us asking you to like and share our stuff in a faintly embarrassing and awkward way.” Read more about the CCBP in Fast Company. (Note: the CCBP is British in origin—its URL contains “corporate bollocks”—but the themes are, alas, universal.)

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He is the very model of an amateur grammarian.

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I attended the Brand New Conference last year, when it was held in San Francisco, but couldn’t make it to New York for this year’s conference. Thankfully, organizer Armin Vit has compiled the best quotes and tweets from the event. Here’s a provocative opinion from UK designer Miles Newlin: “Stories have an end, and unless you want to think of your brand as having an end, then forget the storytelling idea, and forget people who talk about brand storytelling.”

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See what happened when New York Magazine sent a reporter to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to ask startup founders about their “chronically misspelled” company names. It’s, uh, Osom. (Thanks, Jessica!)