Earlier this year I wrote about two new and unrelated brands that share a name: Nokia HERE (yes, all shouty like that) and PayPal Here. Now comes word, via Coin Branding of Toronto, that Radio-Canada, the government-owned, Francophone counterpart of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is jumping on the brandwagon with ICI, French for “here.”
The new name comes from the network’s longtime on-air identification: “Ici, Radio-Canada.” The network’s domain name, currently radio-canada.ca, will change in October to ici.ca.
The announcement “swiftly met widespread condemnation and mockery, especially from those angered over dropping the word Canada,” writes Ian Austen in the New York Times. He adds: “Some online critics, particularly on English-language Web sites, suggested that Quebec separatism was a factor in the new name.”
Coin Branding’s Andris Pone points out that ICI “cannot possibly be a good choice” because the network’s government funding stipulates that programming be “predominantly and distinctively Canadian” and that it be “in English and in French, reflecting the different needs and circumstances of each official language community.” Not only does ICI flout these requirements, the name is also “totally unrelated to the abiding message of the network,” Pone writes.
William Chambers, Radio-Canada’s vice president of brand, communications, and corporate affairs, “said it was all a misunderstanding induced by the network’s ‘enthusiasm’ for its new identity,” according to the Times story. He said the network’s abstract logo – Chambers called it “the gem,” but most people, says the Times, call it “the pizza” – will not change.
Have you heard? Nokia has rebranded all of its navigation products with a single name: HERE.
The official story, in flawless brandbabble:
“HERE is a name that I think signifies what I call an ethos in cartography. HERE is about a sense of location,” said Michael Halbherr, the Nokia executive who oversees the company’s location and commerce unit, in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. (Via TechCrunch, March 2)
I can’t explain why the name is in spelled in ALL CAPS everywhere on the website except in the logo.
And here’s more news: PayPal has introduced a new credit-card reader for mobile devices. It, too, is called Here.
“Here” focuses on the target audience and freshly, yet familiarly conveys its benefit: the ability to do business here and now, here and again, here there and everywhere.
However, if you happen to forget, as I did, which company makes the mapping Here and which one makes the payment Here, and you attempt to do a web search simply for “here” … well, you’ll learn some moderately interesting things about here documents and deixis and the Here Lounge in West Hollywood.
As we all know, verbing weirds language. And, like it or not, it’s everywhere. (See showrooming, subtexting, “Let’s Tonic,” et al.) But nouning – turning a modifier into a noun – is also increasingly popular in commerce, and it’s also changing our perceptions about what language “should” be.
Take “funness,” which Apple has been using for several months in its iPod Touch marketing. As Ben Zimmer has noted in columns for the Boston Globe and Word Routes, now that “fun” has successfully shifted from noun to adjective, you have to add “-ness” to turn it back into a noun.
But other brands aren’t even bothering with nounifying suffixes. Instead, they’re simply putting adjectives to work as nouns.
Here are nine recent examples of nouning in brand slogans. In each case, the advertiser could have made a conventionally nounish choice (“Welcome to possibility,” “The future of awesomeness”) but instead grabbed our attention, for better or worse, with a functional shift, also known as anthimeria.
Officials in Incheon, the city in South Korea, announced plans this week to transform a small fishing island off the country’s west coast into a gambling and tourism center. According to a report in the Washington Post, the project will be called EIGHTCITY – Bloomberg News reported a different spelling, “8-City” – and will be built in the shape of the number 8, which has connotations of good fortune in several Asian cultures.
California’s new health-insurance exchange, formed in compliance with the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), won’t be called Avocado after all. Instead, the five-member exchange picked a safe choice, Covered California, the Los Angeles Timesreported this week. (The tentative tagline is equally bland: “Your destination for affordable healthcare.”) The stated rationale for the name is on shaky grammatical ground: “Covered is an action verb, and if we do our job, that’s what we want to happen,” exchange-board member Robert Ross told the Times. Actually, in this construction “covered” is an adjective.
Other rejected names included Eureka (the state motto) and Ursa (a Latin word for bear, in honor of the state animal).
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The cable company Comcast, which already owns faster, has applied for trademark protection for UPWARE. According to the industry publication Fierce Cable, the name would be used to market software as a service (SaaS). I suspect many Comcast customers are already using UPYOURS.
(Hat tip: MJF.)
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Two things I learned from a Daily Candy email this week: that there is a salon in San Francisco called Lonni’s Punani, and that the salon employs “body hair stylists,” a job title that was new to me. Lonni is the first name of the salon’s owner; she’s originally from New Jersey. And “Punani”? “Not Lonni’s last name,” Daily Candy said coyly. Further research revealed that punani is a Hawaiian word meaning “heavenly flower” and a Pacific Islander slang term for “vagina” or “vulva.”
You gotta admit that “Lonni’s Punani” sounds classier – and rhymier – than “Virginia’s Va-jay-jay.”
Mansionis the unapologetically 1 percent-ish name of the Wall Street Journal’s new weekly section devoted to “high-end property.” In a letter to WSJ subscribers, managing editor Robert Thomson said Mansion would be “the home of both aspiration and real-estate realization.” I look forward to the quarterly spin-off, Car Elevator.
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What the fut was Alaska Telecom thinking when it renamed itself Futaris? This, apparently: “Based on the word future, Futaris represents limitless possibilities and progress.” Funny, because when I look at this sad excuse for a logo, I see “futility.”
UPDATE: Reader Dan Freiberg suggests that “this variation helps with pronunciation, and
works better with the symbol.”
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Juniper is a new subscription service for women who don’t own calendars. Oh, sorry: it’s “a monthly care package” consisting of tampons (five brands are offered) and a collection of “gourmet sweets and artisan savory treats.” (Yes, it’s that word!) “Never panic shop again,” says the home-page copy. The price, however, may cause cramping: $28 a month. I couldn’t find a story behind the name—which is lovely in its nondescriptive way—but I’m wondering whether founder Lynn Tao, young as she appears to be, is a Donovan fan. Remember “Jennifer Juniper,” who “longs for what she lacks”?
UPDATE: Mystery solved (although I’m still fond of my own theory):
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I’m even more mystified by Tassafaronga Village, a mixed-income residential development in East Oakland that I learned about this week via a New York Times story. There’s no explanation of the name in the story or on the website of the architect, David Baker, so I tried to dig deeper. I learned that Tassafaronga Point, on Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands), was the site of several naval engagements between US and Japanese forces during World War II. But that wasn’t very helpful: the housing project is meant to heal a troubled neighborhood, so why name it after a bloody, 70-year-old series of battles? And why the Melanesian reference in Oakland, where Pacific Islanders make up less than 1 percent of the population?
It’s certainly a distinctive name, fun to say if a little challenging to spell. Here’s hoping someone who knows the whole story reads this post and leaves a comment that clears up the mystery.
UPDATE: It took less than half an hour to get an answer to my question about Tassafaronga. See comments below from Gene, proprietor of the excellent Our Oakland blog.
Exhibit A: Cablevision is helping to market OMGFASTfixed wireless broadband Internet and telephone service in Florida. OMGFAST was formerly known as Clearband.
Earlier this month, the company changed its name to OMGFAST, incorporating the slang abbreviation for “oh my god” that is often used in text messages. On July 3, Cablevision subsidiary Rainbow MVDDS Company filed a trademark application for the brand “OMGFAST,” which the company said would be used to provide “Internet access via wireless broadband,” according to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. RMVDDS listed the address of Cablevision’s corporate headquarters in Bethpage, N.Y., in the filing.
(Hat tip: MJF.)
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Exhibit B: The controversial diet book Six Weeks to OMG, was published in the US earlier this month. The author is Venice A. Fulton—the nom d’OMG of Paul Khanna—who, according to the blurb, is “a nutrition expert and personal trainer” who designed the regimen for “his A-list clients.” Fulton/Khanna originally self-published Six Weeks in the UK.
Bus-shelter ad, New York City. Tweeted by Grand Central Publishing, the book’s US publisher.
An excerpt from the hilarious reviewby John Crace in the Guardian (UK):
Let’s go. But before we do, I should just mention the A and B words. And now I have mentioned anorexia and bulimia, let’s forget about them. Because the first thing you are going to do is skip breakfast, do an hour of exercise – just thinking will probably be exhausting enough for some of you – and drink five double espressos. Can’t you just feel all that fat being purged? Nice feeling! Now I want you to have an ice-cold bath. Stay in as long as you can manage. Those doing the Quake [the most challenging version of the diet] should aim for two hours. That way your legs will get frostbite and have to be amputated. OMG. No more cellulite dimples for you, babykins!
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Exhibit C: Venice/Paul had better watch out: “Celebrity doctor” Marc Lawrence, in Southern California, is promising OMG Fat Loss in four minutes.
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Exhibit D: A sign in one of the front windows of Euromix, an international food shop in my Oakland neighborhood. I wrote about Euromix in 2008.
I think they mean “toothsome,” but I still want to turn it into an imperative: “Eat our beans and toot home!”
I can’t resist sharing a photo of the sign on the other side of the door:
Speaking of “mister” names—as we were only yesterday—I’ve learned about another one from reader Licia, who’s a translator in Italy. Mister Baby, writes Licia, “has been on the Italian market since 1964 and it is a household name; it now belongs to British multinational Reckitt Benckiser (which, incidentally, also produce Mr Sheen).” Mister Baby sells products for babies (of both sexes, it seems) and for nursing mothers.
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Friends don’t let friends drink and text, but that hasn’t deterred TXT Cellars from creating “a line of wines dedicated to celebrating the ordinary and not so ordinary moments in life when you just need to LOL!!!” (Via @ahundredmonkeys.)
Screwtops, of course. Because it’s RLY HRD to operate a corkscrew while you’re texting, amirite?
Just for kicks, click “No, I am not 21” on the opening screen.
Take the quiz: Condom or Android phone? (Via Lance Knobel.) Congratulations to The Intercom Blog for sticking with tradition and using “What’s in a Name?” for the title of that post. Fifty thousand other headline writers can’t be wrong!
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Speaking of unoriginality, here’s another startup with an -ly name: Swipely. According to TechCrunch, “The company first launched as a way to share your credit card purchases with your friends, but when that idea (as deployed by Swipely and others) failed to take off, Swipely shifted its focus to helping merchants with their loyalty programs.” By my count, that brings us to 50 -ly startups, and let us say: Enoughly.
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In my February post about the bra-fitting service Brayola, I traced the commercial use of the -ola suffix back to Pianola (1895), Crayola (1903), and Victrola (1905). But it turns out there’s an even earlier example. Granola, now a generic term for a crunchy oat-based breakfast cereal, was originally a trademark. According to “Who Made That Granola?” in last week’s New York Times Magazine, John Harvey Kellogg—whose name lives on in the Kellogg’s brand—came up with “granola” in the late 1870s or early 1880s after he was sued by a rival who made “granula” and objected to Kellogg’s use of that spelling. By 1889, according to the article, Kellogg was selling two tons of Granola a week. (Tangentially, Grano.la is the name of a power-management software product. Dot-la is the country code for Laos.)
During a recent evening of TV viewing I saw repeated airings of “Going Pink,” the latest installment in Verizon Wireless’s long-running “Susie’s Lemonade” ad campaign. The ads, created by McCann Erickson, feature a plucky, adorable girl, age 8 or 9, who over the course of the campaign turns a conventional idea—a neighborhood lemonade stand—into a mini-empire. The ads have been praised for “depicting a positive female role model” (AdWeek) and for being “memorable,” “engaging,” and “heartwarming.”
The spots are indeed charming and expertly produced. But something bothers me about them: Susie. Not the character—her name.
Think about it: how many 8-, 9-, or 10-year-old American girls do you know named Susie? If you have a young daughter, was Susan or Susie on your short list of names for her? I’m guessing the answers to those questions are “none” and “no,” because Susan/Susie is very far out of the 21st-century baby-naming mainstream (yet not far enough out to be cycling back into popularity, like some early-20th-century names). The last time Susan was in the top 100 baby names was in the 1980s, according to the Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager tool. (It ranked #4 in the 1950s and #3 in the 1960s.) In 2010, the last year for which statistics are available, Susan barely appears on the graph: its rank was #792.
So why would Verizon and its ad agency give their protagonist such an unpopular, anachronistic name—a name that now suggests not a fourth-grader but her grandmother? Laura Wattenberg of Baby Name Wizard looked at this question in a different context in a November 2010 blog post, “The Mysterious Persistence of Little Johnny,” whose title I’ve cribbed. Wattenberg was inspired by this New Yorker cover:
In her post, Wattenberg observes that we still turn to names like “Tommy,” “Johnny,” and “Sue” whenever we need “generic symbols of American childhood.” They’re examples, she says, “of a distinctive faux-name species: the Mid-Century Normative Child (MCNC).” She continues:
I remember the generic use of “Little Johnny” sounding old-fashioned back in my 1970s childhood. All these years later, Johnny still rules the roost alongside the New Yorker’s Tommy and Sue, as well as Jimmy (a generic child I spotted in a recent Dear Abby column). All of those names had their heydays in the mid 1940s. The most up-to-date name on the standard MCNC list is Timmy, which peaked in the late ’50s.
It’s as if we locate the essence of childhood itself in that narrow historical period. There’s some logic to that. The early bound is set by the end of WWII, and the first generation of American kids fully protected by child labor laws. The end is the last cohort to experience childhood before the creeping cynicism of the Vietnam era. We signal “little kids” with names historically pinned to innocence and carefree prosperity.
If Verizon had wanted its young heroine to sound like she was born around 2002 or 2003, it could have given her a plausible name such as Ellie (rising fast over the last decade), Ava (in the top 25 since 2004, and #5 last year), or Emma (#2 in 2003, when “Susie” was probably born). A name like Lily (in the top 100 since 2000) would have said “21st century American girl” while also alliterating nicely with “lemonade.” “Emily’s Lemonade”—Emily was the #1 girl’s name in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007—has a nice ring and a satisfying anapestic dactylicmeter, too.
And if Verizon had wanted to be trendy and realistic and alliterative, it could have used the actual first name of its young star: Lennon. (Her last name is Wynn.) You just can’t ask for a more perfect example of the early-21st-century girl’s name style than Lennon: androgynous, celebrity-influenced, and historically rare. (Lennon has never been ranked among the top 1,000 baby names for either sex.)
But contemporary realism and fashion were clearly beside the point in the Verizon ads, despite their emphasis on GPS, 4G LTE, and other whiz-bang technology. “Susie” seems to have been chosen because it’s quaint and anachronistic. The name belongs to a dimly remembered past, a golden age in which kids didn’t need adult supervision or city permits to operate lemonade stands, and parents didn’t care if their kids’ names weren’t cool and unique. Normative was the way to go. By choosing “Susie” over the more-likely candidates, Verizon may be signaling that it’s counting on consumers to accept its brand as normative, too.
Nomophobia: Fear of being without a cellphone. Coined from no + mobile + phobia.
The first documented usage of nomophobia appeared in Britain in March 2008 after a study commissioned by the UK post office found that nearly 53 percent of people surveyed felt anxious when they lost their phone or had no coverage. The syndrome “has been found to induce stress levels similar to those of wedding day jitters and trips to the dentist,” reportedthe Metro (UK).
A more recent survey conducted by SecurEnvoy, which specializes in digital passwords, found that the numbers have increased to 66 percent. The Los Angeles Timesreportedlast week that “People 18-24 tend to be the most nomophobic (77%), followed by people aged 25-34 (68%). The third most nomophobic group is 55 and older.”
The Times story used the more-common American term cellphone. But as Ben Yagoda reported last year in his Not One-Off Britishisms blog, the British import “mobile” is on the rise in the US. “The traditional U.S. equivalents have been, in order of adoption, cellular phone, cell phone and cell,” Yagoda wrote. He pointed to a Google Ngramshowing the soaring incidence of mobile in American English between 1998 and 2008.
If you’re going to do it right, Yagoda noted, you should pronounce mobile “to rhyme with so vile.” And he added: “For a true telephonic Britishism, use on (instead of at) before giving your number, as in ‘Ring me on 555-1212.’”
