Fritinancy

July linkfest

Lots of news about Twitter this month; if you don’t care or are already saturated, feel free to scroll down to my Twitterless content.

The bluf: Twitter’s dark overlord, Elon Musk, announced on Saturday, July 23, that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” And lo, by the following day the Twitter logo and name—but not the word “tweet”—had disappeared from the platform, replaced by a grim, spindly “X,” Musk’s favorite letter. (In 2000, he wanted to rebrand PayPal as X. He was ousted as CEO, but bought back X.com and went on to found SpaceX, name the Tesla Model X, and sire a child named, alas, Æ A-Xii.)

It’s not quite the end of Twitter, but it sure ain’t what it used to be. I wrote for Medium about what I’ll miss—and am already missing—about Twitter, which I started using in 2008, a lifetime ago.

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Name in the news: Opill

Earlier this week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the non-prescription sale of Opill (norgestrel), a progestin-only daily oral contraceptive. Although norgestrel has been used in prescription contraceptives since 1973, Opill is the first oral contraceptive approved for over-the-counter (OTC) sale in the U.S.

Opill’s manufacturer, Perrigo—an American-Irish company with headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Dublin—said the contraceptive will be available in the U.S. in early 2024.

Opill package

 

The announcement represents mostly good news for, as the website puts it, “people capable of becoming pregnant.” (The fly in the ointment: Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies aren’t required to cover the cost of over-the-counter birth control. Opill’s retail cost hasn’t yet been disclosed.) But what about the naming news? Good, bad, or meh?

Word of the week: YIGBY

This acronym isn’t strictly new, but it was new to me when I saw it in the subject line of an email from California State Senator Scott Wiener, co-sponsor of SB 899, known as the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act. (Wiener, a Democrat, doesn’t represent my district, nor have I donated to his campaigns, but I get his emails anyway.)

The body of the email spelled out the acronym: “Yes in God’s Back Yard.”

Image via Giv4 Homelessness in San Diego

 

New writing on Medium

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been experimenting with publishing on Medium about once a week. It feels different from blogging here, although I can’t pinpoint exactly why—maybe it’s because I don’t yet have a clear sense of who my audience is there, so I’m trying subjects and approaches that are different from what I’ve become accustomed to during my almost 17 years (!) of publishing Fritinancy.

This week’s new Medium story is about what I call the Festival Suffix: the -stock in Woodstock that begat Artstock, Wordstock, Winestock, Zoostock, and all the other -stocks. Lately, some festival organizers have attempted to work the same magic with the -chella of Coachella, and the Coachella festival’s organizers are not amused.

Read: Coachella, Woodstock, and the Festival Suffix (friend link)

You’ll find links to all of my Medium stories here. Some of my other recent Medium stories include:

The Second-Biggest Brand-Naming Myth

Pepsi’s Weirdest Logo (not the new one—the 2008 design)

Some of the more “experimental” pieces I’ve published include:

The Monetized Life

When I Was Anglo-Saxon

My Name and I: A Hate/Love Story

Hanging Out with the Godless (the first piece I published on Medium, back in 2018)

If you like a story, don’t forget to “clap” for it. You can clap up to 50 times per story, and every clap contributes to my monetized life.

I’m also considering other writing outlets—a Substack newsletter, maybe? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

From the archives: The D-Words

Originally published on October 13, 2016; revised where appropriate.

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Earlier this week I spoke via Clarity, an expert-advice service, with a CEO who was considering changing his company’s decade-old name. He told me he didn’t have the budget for professional naming services, so he and his business partner, both tech guys, had attempted to come up with a new name themselves. After 12 (!) months of brainstorming, they finally had a couple of candidates. One name, the CEO told me, was a great description of their product. The other name described what their customers wanted. They’d already bought a bunch of domains – some for more than $1,000 – related to both names.

I kept silent, but I heaved a private sigh. Within five minutes, my caller had mentioned the two troublesome D-words of naming: describe and domain. One of those words can doom a branding project; the other is almost always a distraction.

I’d hoped to hear a different D-word, the one that matters: distinctiveness. But my caller admitted he hadn’t known it was a factor in brand development.

That CEO is far from the only client I’ve worked with who has focused, misguidedly, on descriptive names and “available” domains and neglected (or been unaware of) distinctiveness. It’s such a common oversight that I wanted to take some time to talk about it.

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.”

Bye-bye, DALL·E mini. Hello, craiyon (sic).

This is a story about a Very Online phenomenon with a Very Universal liability: a name that needed to be changed, pronto. The old name, DALL·E—styled with that little dot instead of a hyphen—is now craiyon, with a lower-case c.

Here’s the story.

In the beginning there was OpenAI, a company incorporated in December 2015 by Elon Musk—maybe you’ve heard of him—and five co-founders. OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial-intelligence lab with some serious goals, but it may be best known for an image generator dubbed DALL·E. I wrote about DALL·E in my January 2021 linkfest; the name, I explained, is a blend of “WALL-E”—a Pixar-coined acronym for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth Class”—and Dali, as in the surrealist artist. As of this writing, OpenAI’s DALL·E is not available to the public. Nor does OpenAI own any trademarks for DALL·E. (This last point will turn out to be a key factor in the story.)

You might say that repurposing WALL-E as DALL·E represented its own sort of load lift, to put it generously. Pixar, however, didn’t appear to mind. Then things got complicated.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Understanding 'Maven'

How did a Yiddish noun with Hebrew roots and a sardonic connotation become a popular brand name, a scientific backronym, and even a baby name?

That’s the question I address in “Understanding Maven,” my May column for the Visual Thesaurus. I trace the spread of maven in mainstream culture back to a regional ad campaign in the 1960s and to two widely read journalists, William Safire and Malcolm Gladwell. As for the “Maven” baby name, it seems to be an extension of the Irish girl’s name Maeve—even though “Maven” is a masculine noun in Yiddish.

Access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s an excerpt:

Maven’s real tipping point was … well, The Tipping Point, the 2000 book by Malcolm Gladwell that asserted that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” Long before “influencer” became a job description, Gladwell divided influential people into three groups: connectors, salesmen, and—you guessed it—mavens. Mavens, Gladwell wrote, “are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know”:

The critical thing about Mavens is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. It isn’t just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too. 

The Tipping Point became a best-seller and a favored reference in leadership seminars and marketing courses. It also enhanced our vocabulary. Not only did it make “tipping point”—a term used mostly by scientists beginning in the late 1950s—a household phrase, it educated thousands of readers about maven. Many of those readers went on to start companies that they named “Maven,” often explicitly acknowledging their debt to Gladwell and The Tipping Point.

Read the rest of the column.

UPDATE, May 27: The software company Mavenlink, which I mention in the Visual Thesaurus story, has been renamed Kantata following a merger. According to the press release, the new name “was inspired by ‘cantata’ – a classical music composition that intricately and beautifully combines multiple voice and instrumentation elements. This style of classical music is a metaphor for the collaborative creation that is the foundation of all successful professional services organizations.” 

Word of the week: Bookchella

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, first held in 1996, returned to the USC campus last weekend after a two-year Covid hiatus. Because April 22 through 24 was also the final weekend of this year’s Coachella Music Festival, held 130 miles away in Southern California’s Colorado Desert, someone—maybe the person in charge of the Times’s Twitter feed—decided it would be cute to call the literary festival #Bookchella.

And just like that, -chella became the new -stock: a portable suffix denoting “festival.”

Except it wasn’t exactly “just like that.” And watch your back, LATFOB: the music festival in the desert has a history of refusing to give up its -chella without a legal fight.

I don’t remember anyone calling it #Bookchella in 2019, when I attended, but that already feels like 50 years ago, so who knows.

Word of the week: Gringo

Last week Gustavo Arellano, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote about a kerfuffle last year in Chula Vista, the second-largest city in San Diego County, between the mayor, Mary Casillas Salas, and a councilmember, John McCann. The two ran into each other in a local Mexican restaurant; after some pleasantries, McCann “admitted that he thought the restaurant’s food was too spicy.” Salas replied: “Oh, John, you’re such a gringo.” And, according to Salas, McCann laughed.

Nine days later, McCann reconsidered. Rather than calling Mayor Salas—his acquaintance of 20 years—and talking it over, he filed a complaint with the city’s human resources department, alleging, Arellano writes, “racial discrimination by the mayor for her ‘gringo’ jab.”

An outside lawyer was brought in. The verdict: “Though Salas’ use of ‘gringo’ was ‘inappropriate,’ it didn’t constitute discrimination.”

Old Gringo (1989), based on Carlos Fuentes’s 1985 novel The Old Gringo (Gringo Viejo). The title refers to the (real) American author Ambrose Bierce, played by Gregory Peck in the film.

Arellano writes: “The Voice of San Diego broke the story last month and also found out how much this combo platter of victimhood cost Chula Vista taxpayers: nearly $16,000.”

Arellano goes on to compare this “weak-salsa Gringogate”—I love that—with a lawsuit, also in San Diego County, over what some public-school parents are calling an “Aztec prayer” (actually a poem) that had been used in the ethnic-studies curriculum. But I want to stick with Gringogate. Where does gringo come from, and what does it signify? And just how offensive is it?