Fritinancy

Book review: “Writing with Style”

It’s Independence Day here in the US, and how better to celebrate our divorce from the colonizers than with a book written by an American expatriate for reporters at a British publication?

 

February linkfest

I’ve started listening to the “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast, expertly hosted by Canadian tech critic Paris Marx, who’s joined each week by an expert who critically examines “the tech industry, the powerful people who helm it, and the products and services it unleashes on the world.” Separating tech from politics, says Marx, “has consequences for us all, especially the most vulnerable.” I’m looking forward to reading books by two recent guests, Malcolm Harris (Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World), and Edward Niedermeyer (Ludicrous: The Unvarnished History of Tesla Motors). Niedermeyer introduced me to the useful word autonowashing, “the practice of making unverified or misleading claims which misrepresent the appropriate level of human supervision required by a partially or semi-autonomous product, service or technology.” (More -washing compounds here.)

 

“Tech Won’t Save Us” logo tee

 

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September linkfest

I’ve read more books about Trump, Trumpism, and What It All Means than is probably healthy for me, but until I read Thank You for Your Servitude, by Mark Leibovich (Penguin Random House, 2022), I’d never laughed my way through a Trump book. Leibovich, a veteran Washington correspondent (New York Times, The Atlantic), focuses not on “your favorite president” but on the lickspittles and soul-sellers who sought relevance through their obeisance to him, most notably Senators Rubio (R-FL), Cruz (R-TX), and Graham (R-SC), all of whom had been loudly contemptuous about TFG  before he became the nominee and they made the bread-butter connection. Leibovich is the rare insider with an outsider’s sense of irony, and he’s a master of the snappy sentence. Here’s one example, about former Republican National Committee Reince Priebus, who became 45’s much-put-upon first chief of staff: “No matter how much Trump had roiled the Republican water, it remained Priebus’s job to carry it.”

Identifying your brand's personality

Years ago, when “having your colors done” was trendy, I thought there might be a story in it, so in the interest of research I sought out a color consultant and handed over my money. There were a lot of charlatans and opportunists in this field, but I lucked out: The color analyst I found was John Kitchener, who had an art-history background and an unerring eye. (He’s still in business, but has relocated from the Bay Area to the Atlanta area.)

For what I remember as a not-inconsequential (but worth it) fee, John gave me palette of fabric swatches that suited my eye and skin colors. He also gave me something equally valuable: a lesson in what he calls “style essences” and what other image consultants sometimes call “style personalities” or “style profiles.”

Color Me Beautiful (1981), an early and influential guidebook. Not John Kitchener’s system.

 

Knowing my style essence—which shapes and textures harmonize with my overall look, which styles to avoid—greatly simplified my wardrobe choices and gave me an objective assessment that my mirror never quite delivered. (After the consultation, it dawned on me that even when I was 4 years old I looked and felt terrible in “youthful” clothes.)

Style essences continue to interest me, and when I read a post on the subject by style blogger Susan of Une Femme d’un Certain Age, I realized that there was a lot of overlap between the fashion-y side of style profiling and the brand-y side that I do. When you’re building a brand—starting with the name and tagline—you first need to identify your brand’s personality: its style essence. As with personal style, brand style is often a blend of two or more traits: dramatic, classic, romantic, nerdy (that’s my term; style consultants don’t use it!), playful, and so on.

Want to know more about how brand personality can influence your choice of a brand name? Read my new story on Medium, and let me know in a comment about your own style-personality and brand-naming experiences.

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This is the latest in my series of Naming 101 posts.

 

April linkfest

Journalist, novelist, and author Kurt Andersen (Spy magazine, Fantasyland, Evil Geniuses) wrote about “how an article about genomic sequencing led to an afternoon playing around with AI branding tools.” The names and logos these tools spat out—Dynester, Aerodynamiq, ModernZeal—led Andersen to muse about how real life is increasingly indistinguishable from science fiction.

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Speaking of science fiction, here’s a list of fictional super-metals, from Adamantium to Zortium.

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If you’re a fan of the New York Times Spelling Bee, you’ll want to try Tylogram, a new word-formation game created by William Shunn, the genius behind Spelling Bee Solver. As with the Bee, you’ll create words for points; slide the tiles around the grid to maximize their value. But it’s even trickier than that! (And fun.)

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: A review of “Dreyer’s English”

My March column for the Visual Thesaurus is something a little different: a review of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, by Benjamin Dreyer. Dreyer is managing editor and copy chief at Random House, and a witty dispenser of advice and stories. (If you’re not following him on Twitter, you should be.) The book was a joy to read and great fun to review. Good news for all my stingy thrifty readers: There’s no paywall on this column, so dive right in (and share).

The author and the authored

 

Here’s an excerpt:

Dreyer's English is several things at once: a description and dissection of the art of copyediting, a set of tips and guidelines, and a memoir of a working life spent with some of the best writers of our era (to name a few: Elizabeth Strout, Michael Chabon, E.L. Doctorow, and, posthumously, Shirley Jackson). It’s the tips and guidelines that I’m guessing most readers will zoom in on, because who among us, no matter how experienced or widely published, doesn’t feel just a little bit uncertain about comma placement and possessive apostrophes and the correct spelling of “leprechaun”?

Benjamin Dreyer is happy to oblige. He’s firm about the series or Oxford comma (not “serial,” comma, he writes, because “for me ‘serial’ evokes ‘killer’”) — the second comma in “lettuce, turnips, and peas”: “Whatever you want to call it: Use it. I don't want to belabor the point; neither am I willing to negotiate it.” All well and good for him, because, as he tells us, the use of the series comma is the only hard-and-fast style rule applied to all Random House books. If you’re a newspaper copy editor in the United States, though, you’ll follow a different standard: Associated Press style, which frowns on series commas. (In an interview, Dreyer admitted that until a few years ago he hadn’t heard of AP style. Copyediting is a multifarious profession.)

Read the rest of “Dreyer’s English”: An Utterly Readable Style Guide.

June linkfest

“The use of rainbows as logo design elements has fallen back almost to its pre-1970s level, while the use of rainbow colors in logos has taken off.” (Emblemetric)

Image via Emblemetric

 

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Remember tronc, possibly the worst corporate name ever? You can forget it now. (The Verge)

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After 27 years, Greece has finally agreed to the formal name of its northern neighbor, the Republic of North Macedonia. (BBC)

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This ad for Texas Congressional candidate Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar sets a new standard for political advertising: It’s well written, brilliantly edited, and engaging.

January linkfest

Is an Eataly ad for truffles offensive to Italians and Italian-Americans? (Chicago Tribune)

July Linkfest

The leaves of Citrus hystrix are used in many South and Southeast Asian cuisines; they’re sometimes called by their Thai name, makrut, but in many English-speaking countries they’ve long been called kaffir lime. That’s changing thanks to a protest “against the racial and religious slur of ‘kaffir’,” writes Tiffany Do in SF Weekly (“Citrus-Based Racism Leads Market to Change Product Names”). “Kaffir,” which comes from an Arabic word meaning “unbeliever,” was appropriated by English colonizers in South Africa, where it was used as a slur and a term of abuse against blacks. “What’s most surprising in this whole controversy is that the issue hasn't been addressed – and remedied – before now,” writes SF Weekly’s Do. Most markets are switching to the neutral “lime leaves.”

Photo via Flicker/robinejay

 

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Who decides what makes a word “real”? Anne Curzan, a language historian and member of the American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel, explains why she finds language change “not worrisome but fun and fascinating.” (TEDxUofM talk; video and transcript.)

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What do speakers of Japanese, Spanish, and Finnish call “John Doe,” Mr. Anonymous Average Guy? Baby Name Wizard looks at the names of “nobodies” around the world. (For inanimate placeholder names, see my 2008 post on kadigan.)

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Struggling with the best way to tell your corporate story? ThinkShift distills the narrative into five essential elements.

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“The CIA is a prescriptivist scold, a believer in the serial comma, and a champion of ‘crisp and pungent’ language ‘devoid of jargon’”: Michael Silverberg, writing in Quartz about the recently declassified—and “ruthless”—CIA style manual. (Via @jessesheidlower.) By the way, since June 6 the CIA has had a public Twitter account.

 

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.

— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014

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Another reason for style-guide fans to rejoice: the BBC News style guide is “now fully and freely available online,” writes Stan Carey in his Sentence First blog. I was particularly amused by the “Americanisms” section, which includes this starchy sentence:

We say: meet (not ‘meet with’),consult (not ‘consult with’), talk to (not ‘talk with’), protest against a decision (not ‘protest a decision’), appeal against a verdict (not ‘appeal a verdict’).

And, n.b., the BBC does not punctuate the abbreviations i.e. or e.g.

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In the early to mid-1960s, Mad magazine carried on a “glorious” and “fearless” anti-smoking campaign through parody ads that “closely resembled the real ones that ran on television and in magazines,” writes David Margolick in the New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog. The ads attacked tobacco companies, ad agencies, and smokers with equal-opportunity opprobrium. Mad has always been ad-free, and—unusual for the 1960s—its offices were “largely smoke free” as well: the magazine’s publisher, William Gaines, “was fanatically opposed to the habit,” writes Margolick.

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It’s not every day that a name developer has the chance to name a radically new technology. Anthony Shore had such a chance when the makers of a “cinematic virtual reality” device hired him. Read about how Jaunt got its name.

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“Machines don't need names, but we feel the need to name them,” writes Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic (“Why People Give Human Names to Machines”). The urge has long been with us, or at least some of us: a siege engine was named “Domina Gunilda” (“Lady Gunild”) in an Anglo-Norman document of 1330-1.

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Some of Facebook’s conference rooms are named after bad ideas (Sub-Prime Mortgages, Land War in Asia). The genetic-research company 23andMe names its computer servers after characters and plot points in “Arrested Development” (Gob, Annyong, Nevernude). These and many more lists of “clever names that companies have called their conference rooms, servers, etc.,” via Quora.

(My favorite submission comes from Erica Friedman, who once worked for an ad agency whose conference rooms were named Ideation, Creation, Dream, Coopetition [sic], and Resonate. “It was horrible and miserable and it still makes me shudder,” she writes. Erica and I are not related, but we are definitely soulmates.)

February Linkfest

Rebranding Cupid, just in time for Valentine’s Day. 

 

By Massive Media. See also my February 2010 post about another Valentine’s Day rebrand, this one by Under Consideration for Studio 360.

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An order of roastbeef with a side of stalefish? Yes, we’re talking snowboarding lingo. The Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Bachman interviews snowboarders; Ben Zimmer, at Slate, analyzes “I’ll just huck it,” which caused an “overanxious” BBC presenter to “freak out.”

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Leave it to the inventive and enterprising Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, to turn language peeves (“literally,” “could care less,” “very unique,” et al.) into a card game in which the object is “to annoy your opponent to death.” She’s raising money for Peeve Wars through Fund Anything; contribute now to claim your own card set or another nifty reward.

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Speaking of peeves, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg has had it up to here with verbal anachronisms in otherwise classy TV shows—like, say, Showtime’s Masters of Sex: “We live in a golden age of production design—but only for what we see, not for what we hear. Script-wise, anything goes, including the lexical equivalents of a jukebox in a frontier saloon or a zip-up toga on a Roman senator.” See also a response and amplification from the master of anachronism-spotting, Ben Schmidt. (As you may recall, this stuff annoys me, too.)

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Some people peeve about new, “unnecessary” words. But language blogger Stan Carey defends them: “Avoiding new and ‘needless’ words in formal contexts is all well and good, but what’s wrong with a grand superfluity elsewhere? Will the language look untidy if words float around not filling vital gaps? Will they gum up the works?”

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“We think first / Of vague words that are synonyms for progress / And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.” This Is a Generic Brand Video, from McSweeney’s, of course.

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Orenitram, a drug for pulmonary arterial hypertension, is an ananym: The name was created by reverse-spelling the first eight letters of the name of the drug company’s CEO, Martine Rothblatt. But that’s just the beginning of a truly remarkable name story, reported by Catchword.

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The new BuzzFeed style guide answers the really tough spelling and usage questions: Is bitchface one word or two? (One.) Is there an E in chocolaty? (No.) What’s the proper abbreviation of douchebag? (d-bag.) What’s the difference between wack and whack? (Look it up; it’s in there.) And, FYI, the word is spelled whoa. Don’t make us repeat ourselves.

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“Writing and editing are linked but distinct enterprises, and distinct temperaments are involved. Very few people can move smoothly from the one enterprise to the other.” – John McIntyre, one of the few. 

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The second lives of dead US brands: Woolworths thrives in Australia, Nextel in Latin America, Friendster in Southeast Asia, Mister Donut (“Misudo”) and Pan Am in Japan. (Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp and Shogannai.)

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Arika Okrent sorts out 11 brands with plural problems (topping the list: LEGO).

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A linguist (Gretchen McCulloch) explains doge grammar: “[B]roadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling.”

 

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Who names the color of the year? Professional namers, that’s who. The Boston Globe interviewed Bay Area name developer Anthony Shore for his insights into color naming; the article is headlined—care to guess?—“What’s in a Name?” (I tackled the subject of color names myself for a 2011 Visual Thesaurus column.)

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From the indispensable TV Tropes, the periodic table of storytelling.

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Speaking of charts and taxonomies, here’s a “marketing technology landscape supergraphic”—the logos of 947 companies in 43 categories—created by Scott Brinker.  Wow. Very names.

 

Read Brinker's follow-up post about the chart.