“Companies change their slogans and catchphrases all the time to keep themselves fresh in customers’ minds. But DiGiorno might be the only one that has kept the same catchphrase, but changed the implication.” (Eater)
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“Sometimes I look at license plates for new prefix ideas. Sometimes I borrow from the names of cats or dogs.” How two women in Chicago create all those names for generic prescription drugs. (David Lazarus for Los Angeles Times; via MJF)*
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My May column for the Visual Thesaurus talks about how we talk about e-scooters, the rentable two-wheelers from companies like Lime, Bird, Skip, and Spin that have swooped into San Francisco, Oakland, and many other cities.
Lime e-scooters at a downtown Oakland BART station.
Full access is restricted to subscribers for three months; here’s an excerpt:
Today’s electric scooters weigh between 25 and 40 pounds and are sometimes called LEVs, or “light electric vehicles.” (Almost all of them have four-letter brand names, for no reason I can discern other than copycatting.) Proponents tout them as a solution to the challenges of first-mile and last-mile transportation, terms that originated in the freight and supply-chain industries and now refer to getting people from their starting point to a transportation hub (bus stop, train station) or from the hub to a final destination. Naysayers have taken to prophesying scootergeddon: an aggressive “invasion” of two-wheeled vehicles as dire as the End of Days.
Then there are those who look at the big picture, regarding e-scooters as a necessary element of the micro-mobility movement, which seeks to shift the balance of city transportation from gas-powered cars to human-powered bicycles and to scooters and small cars powered by electricity. There’s even serious talk about Universal Basic Mobility, or UBM. Modeled on the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI), UBM recognizes freedom of movement as a basic human right. It might be implemented through a platform called mobility as a service (MaaS), a term modeled on “software as a service” (SaaS), which emerged during the late 1990s in the first dot-com boom. MaaS combines transportation services from public and private transportation providers “through a unified gateway that creates and manages the trip, which users can pay for with a single account,” according to a Wikipedia entry.
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The design-critique blog Brand New last week reviewed the new look of LNER, a British railway with a nearly century-old history under various names and owners. The most recent owner was Virgin, which operated the line as Virgin Trains East Coast (VTEC); the railway is now owned by the UK’s Department of Transport, and the LNER acronym – which stands for London North East Railroad – is appearing again for the first time since 1948.
The point of the review was, of course, the new LNER logo, but what caught my eye was a paragraph about three-quarters of the way down about the newest fleet of trains. Brand New says they’re “nicknamed” Azuma, but in fact Azuma is their official name.
Moreover, “Azuma” isn’t entirely new; the LNER/Azuma identity designer, Brand Cooke, tells us that it had been developed by VTEC – in 2016, according to a Wikipedia page – and was already familiar to passengers.
But what does this un-British-sounding name signify?
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This week, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) will consider approving a new permit program for private transit vehicles, or PTVs. These vehicles – currently, Chariot is the only one operating in the city – use shuttle vans and a smartphone app; they are “open to the public, charge individual fares and operate on fixed routes,” according to the SFMTA website.
Bureaucrats may call them PTVs, but these vehicles are better known by an old slang term: jitney. And I was surprised to learn that both the word jitney and jitney transportation have deep roots, and routes, in California.
A “super jitney bus” in San Francisco, 1970s. Photo via SFMTA.com.
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Thyristor: A A four-layered semiconductor rectifier in which the flow of current between two electrodes is triggered by a signal at a third electrode. (Source: Oxford Dictionaries.) Coined in the 1950s from thyratron, a kind of thermionic tube (from Greek thura, “gate” or “door”) and transistor. Pronounced THIGH-wrist-er.
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I spotted this ad from 511.org, the Bay Area’s transit and traffic hub, last weekend on the back of a 10-Townsend Muni bus in San Francisco:
“Every minute in traffic is a dream come true, said no one ever.”
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And yet, somehow, it did.
Outdoor ad for Lyft. Harrison between 8th and 9th streets, San Francisco, January 30, 2016.
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In New York City, you can summon a limo with an app called Gett.
TechCrunch calls Gett “Uber without surge pricing.”“Gett rides are $10 in central Manhattan, anywhere between Houston and Central Park South, no matter what day of the week.”
You can tell your Gett driver to take you to Lincoln Plaza to see a screening of Gett.
Gett—it's the Hebrew word for a religious divorce—is an Israeli courtroom drama that opened in the U.S. in February. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it “gripping cinema from start to finish.”
Curiously, the ride-hailing app Gett was developed in Israel, where Hebrew is, of course, one of the official languages. In most of the 32 cities in which it operates, the company is known as GetTaxi.
Confused? You could just stay home and watch getTV.
“A new television network that brings the classic films you love to your living room.” (Read my Visual Thesaurus column on “classic.”)
getTV is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment. It launched in February 2014.
Got it?
Danny Kaye and Basil Rathbone in The Court Jester (1955)
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The lights, the carols, the shopping-mall Santas: verily, ’tis ’Tis the Season season once again. The ’tis-ing started early this year (mid-October!) and shows no sign of abating. In fact, this year I discovered a Tis the Season store—correction, “Christmas Shoppe”—in Millersburg, Ohio. (The apostrophe on that Tis is mysteriously missing.) And if the website design is any indication, this is a place to shoppe till you droppe in a queasy stupor.
Cliché: check. White-outlined letters: check. Olde Englishe spelling: check. Busy background photo: check. Squiggly clip art: check.
Misspelled “its”: check.
So that’s where the apostrophe went!
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Historian Kevin Starr writes:
Freeways were initially given poetic-evocative names, drawn from historic, literary, or geographical sources: the Cahuenga, the Bayshore, the Redwood, the Ramona, the Cabrillo, the James Lick, the Nimitz. In the second phase of development, freeways tended to take on the names of their destinations—the Hollywood, the Long Beach, the Santa Ana, the San Bernardino—as in August 1954 when the Arroyo Seco Parkway became the Pasadena Freeway. In the third phase of development, freeways were to become known primarily by their numbers—the 10, the 5, the 880, the 101—for they were now part of an integrated state grid, scheduled for integration into an interstate system.
-- Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963. Golden Dreams is one of eight volumes in Starr’s Americans and the California Dream series; Kevin Starr is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and the former state librarian of California (1994-2004).
In the Bay Area, many residents (and traffic reporters) still refer to the Bayshore and the Nimitz (and to the Warren Freeway, State Route 13). No one in Northern California, however, would call the Nimitz Freeway “the 880”: up here, we prefer our freeway numbers anarthrous. For more on that subject, see the second half of my 2011 post “Thinking, Doing, Engineering, Amazing.”
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