Fritinancy

Names in the wild(ish)

Some names I’ve noticed lately, for better or for worse, on my travels in the real and virtual worlds.

I spent a few days in Chicago in late April, where I spotted these Ostrim “sports nutrition meat snacks” on display at a Freshii quick-serve “wellness” restaurant. (Freshii is worth a brief sidebar. The company, which was founded in 2005 and is based in Toronto, has a peppy online presence and a brand-enforcing fondness for double-i’s: A limited-time menu special is called Biiblos – no, I don’t know what that means – and the store payment card is called Monii. “Let’s transfer energii!” chirps the copy.)

 

 

As for Ostrim, as far as I can tell, the product name is a blend of ostrich and trim, probably because the original “meat snacks” were made from ostrich. Today, though – 22 years after the company’s founding in Greensburg, Pennsylvania – Ostrim snacks are equally as likely to contain beef, elk, chicken, or turkey. Moral: Don’t box yourself in with a name that can’t grow with your company.

Also: Consider how your name might be misinterpreted.

Sounds like bone support and weight loss all in one - with surprise ostrich.

— Jessica Stone Levy (@BeautyMarks) April 28, 2018

 

December linkfest

The last linkfest of 2017! Let’s exorcise this miserable year with some amusing and edumacational links. And have yourselves a merry little Festivus.

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Drew Magary is back with the 2017 edition of his Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma catalog: “More than any reindeer parable or silly children’s rhyme, it is THIS catalog and its splendidly useless items wherein you and I can discover the TRUE meaning of Christmas, which is that it delays the pain and horrors of this shit world at least until after New Year’s.”

“You listen to me, Williams-Sonoma: There will NEVER be a fondueassaince. Ever.”

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April Linkfest

Don’t read “How to Name a Baby” to learn how to name a baby. Read it for insights into historical baby-naming trends and to confirm your hunches (e.g., “the popular girl name Reagan is for Republicans”). Also: charts!

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Given names are “one of the last social acceptable frontiers of class war.”Also: nominative determination, implicit egotism, and how the Internet has made baby naming more difficult. Part 1 of a four-part podcast series about names from Australian radio network ABC. The presenter, Tiger Webb, has an interesting name story himself. (Hat tip: Superlinguo.)

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The not-so-secret jargon of doctors is full of acronyms: a flea—fucking little esoteric asshole—is an intern, an FLK is a “funny-looking kid,” and an “SFU 50 dose” is the amount of sedative it takes for 50 percent of patients to shut the fuck up.

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Ever wonder what value-creating winners do all day? Here’s Business Town to enlighten you. It’s “an ongoing project attempting to explain our highly intangible, deeply disruptive, data-driven, venture-backed, gluten-free economic meritocracy to the uninitiated. With apologies to Richard Scarry.”

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Stop your whinging, Brits: a lot of those so-called Americanisms you profess to detest—like “gotten” and “fall”—were originally English.

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The spectacular neon art of the Walker Collection of American Signs, a swath of advertising history auctioned earlier this month in Proctor, Arkansas.

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Attention, domain shoppers and everyone who believes the best defense is an offensive offense: the .sucks domain went on sale in early April. There was an immediate buying frenzy; consumer advocate Ralph Nader promoted it in a commercial as “a protest word.” Now ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has asked U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies to determine whether the the domain’s high price—$2,499 during the “sunrise” period—is illegal. (For more about the unusual relationship between Vox Populi—which secured the rights to sell the .sucks domain—and ICANN, see John R. Levine’s blog.)

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“The decision is made. The name won’t be changed.” – Tim Mahoney, head of marketing for Chevy, speaking to the Detroit Free Press about the Bolt electric vehicle, whose name is strikingly similar to that of the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. In fact, a Spanish speaker would pronounce the two names identically. (Hat tip: Jonathon Owen.)

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I’ve been saying this for ages, but now I can quote the Harvard Business Review: Group brainstorming is a waste of time.

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“A brand of snack bars is made ‘in small batches at our own makery’. Makery? I am guessing that ‘makery’ is a portmanteau for ‘made-up bakery’.” Steven Poole on why the language of food packaging makes him sick. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy.)

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Remember wack slacks, lamestain, and swingin’ on the flippity-flop? Of course you don’t. Why grungespeak was the greatest language hoax of the 1990s.

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Chart: How to say “It’s all Greek to me” in 30 languages. (For Greeks, it’s all Chinese.)

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Negative polarity item, critique drift, and other terms—many of them linguistic—that have caught the eye of tech writer/editor Mike Pope.

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Lindström, Minnesota, is getting its umlaut back.

English is the language where diacritics go to die. Except in Minnesota. #missionumlaut. h/t @SPNoir @JKealing pic.twitter.com/8q80R4n6nR

— Patrick Cox (@patricox) April 15, 2015

And don’t forget all those gratuitously umlautted brand names!

The Internet of Thyngs

Why slurp from a brain-dead plastic cup when you can drynk from a rechargeable Vessyl that’s lynked to your smartphone?

 

Capacity: 13 ounces (385 ml). Colors: Shadow, Snow, and Steam. Compatible with iOS and Android devices. Not dishwasher safe. 

Please turn down the volume on your speakers for the following explanation of Vessyl:

VESSYL AUTOMATICALLY KNOWS AND TRACKS WHAT YOU'RE DRINKING IN REAL-TIME

But wait—there’s more!

IT KNOWS WHAT’S INSIDE

It’s not magic, but close to it… the Vessyl knows and aggregates everything you drink. No more guessing or journaling. It keeps track of what’s important to you… all automatically.

I’m sure you’ll agree that an automatically aggregating cup designed by the famous Yves Béhar—does his name hold a clue to the Y in Vessyl?—is worth $99 plus $10 shipping and a wait of six months or more. But hurry! That price will go up to $199 soon. 

How does the mnemonic go again? “The Vessyl with the pessyl has the brüe that is trü…”

 

 Danny Kaye in The Court Jester (1955).

 

 

Via Mark Morford, who observes that “obnoxious spellings make all the cool kids swoon.”

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More Y-substitution names here. Brands with gratuitous umlauts here.

November Linkfest

Great news for researchers and thesaurus-lovers: the Historical Thesaurus of English is now fully online, with many new features. It’s based on the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and its supplements, with additional materials from A Thesaurus of Old English. (Via Marc Alexander.)

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I linked to the Wordbirds blog back in 2009. Now this “irreverent lexicon for the 21st century” is available as a book containing more than 200 neologisms—150 of them not on the blog—coined by Liesl Schillinger and illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel. An excellent gift for the person who finds himself rushing cell-mell to a clusterfete, wouldn’t you say?

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On his excellent Big Apple blog, Barry Popik documents the rise of “spicedictive” (Sonic Drive-in’s portmanteau of “spice” and “addictive”) and “beefulness” (McDonald’s South Africa’s blend of “beef” and “fullness,” and yes, I thought it had something to do with beekeeping). By the way, you can finally follow Mr. Popik on Twitter!

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And speaking of Twitter: “The wind tickled Jack’s ears as he rushed toward the Stock Exchange…” The opening line of “The Unfollowed: A story of heartbreak, longing, and betrayal on IPO day,” by Ellen Cushing for San Francisco magazine.

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Fourteen common words that didn’t exist 20 years ago. “Blog” and “Google” (verb) are just the beginning. (Via Ben Zimmer.)

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You know what else got started 20 years ago? The “Got Milk?” ad campaign. Ad man Jeff Goodby, who was present at the creation, tells how “the most boring product imaginable” inspired “the most remembered tagline in beverage history, outstripping those of beer and soft drink companies with budgets many times the size of ours.” (Not mentioned in Goodby’s story: The campaign didn’t translate well into Spanish: “¿Tiene Ud. Leche?” means “Are you lactating?”)

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All the good domains are not taken. Name developer Anthony Shore shows how to create them.

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“Afternoonified,” “chuckaboo,” and 54 other delightful Victorian slang terms you should be using. (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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In Canada, Dutch-owned bank ING Direct was sold to Scotiabank and is now called Tangerine. Design blog Brand New says the name choice is “ballsy”: “At first, the name sounds like a late 1990s, early 2000s doomed clever company name, like Monday, but the longer you watch the video ... and the more you let the name sink in, it’s a rather impressively sticky name. It’s memorable. It stand outs [sic] in the banking sector. It’s interesting.” Name development by Bay Area agency Lexicon; logo by Toronto-based Concrete.

(Also see my post about Tomato Bank.)

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William Germano and I have something in common: a minor obsession with gratuitous umlauts. Germano writes in Lingua Franca  about “the rise of the reckless diacritical,” a meditation triggered by a sighting of Clöudz travel blankets and pillows. And it gets worse, writes Germano: “The Tommy Hilfiger clothing line has launched, with a linguistic swagger, a global marketing campaign entitled Cärpe-díem Mañana.” (Also see my Pinterest board of brand names with gratuitous umlauts and my Visual Thesaurus column on the Ündeniable Ümlaut.)

Uphill Climb

Here’s a an interesting-looking niche product: goggles that allow climbers to look straight ahead yet see the crag or pin above them.

Source

 

I wish an equivalent amount of imagination and research had gone into creating the product’s belabored name: Belāggles.

The macron over the A is telling us that the name is pronounced “belay-gles,” as in belay plus goggles. But the macron-ized word appears only in the logo: everywhere else – in the web content, in media reports, on Twitter and Facebook – it’s plain old Belaggles. And my brain does not interpret “Belaggles” as “Belay-gles.”

English may be a “shifty whore,” as lexicographer Kori Stamper has so delicately put it, but our written language does have some commonly acknowledged rules that most of us have internalized. One of those rules says that when a vowel precedes a doubled consonant, it takes a short sound: waggle, gaggle, bedraggle, straggle, haggle. Slapping a diacritical mark over that vowel doesn’t change the rule; in fact, I bet most of the population doesn’t see the little horizontal line as anything more than an embellishment.

(Besides, even when I pronounce it right, the name sounds comically wrong. Want some shmear with those belāggles? Stop belāggling me! My new puppy is a Labrador-beagle mix – a belāggle!)

The pronunciation isn’t the only thing that feels forced about the name. I found myself working altogether too hard to decipher the peculiar Gs in the logo: they look like a hybrid of a 4 and a 9, but they may be mountain peaks on sled runners. Or sailboats.

Mostly, though, the problem with Belāggles is a familiar one: the Awkward Portmanteau, aka the strenuous mashing-up of words to create a descriptive name. The strategy is misguided – your name should suggest, not describe – and the tactic is amateurish. Instead of jamming “belay” and “goggles” together, I’d have aimed for a name that communicates a benefit: reaching the top, seeing vertically, saving your neck.

See more names with gratuitous macrons, umlauts, and other diacritical marks on my Pinterest board. More bad portmanteaus here, here, and here, for starters.

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(Hat tip: Vic Mitnick.)

Endlessly Namifying

There’s just no stopifying the relentless namifying juggernaut, is there? At least Trotify, a wooden device that makes your bike clop like a horse, “Monty Python-style” (according to Laughing Squid), doesn’t ask you to take name or product too seriously.

£19.99 + shipping (does not include coconut halves)

 

Also just for fun: a whole family of -ify apps from Appt.ly – yes, -ly names are also ubiquitous – that transform, or transformify, your iPhone photos: Oldify, Baldify, Fatify, Stache-ify, Browify, and Vampify.

(Hat tip: Dawn McIlvain Stahl.)

 

I don’t get the appeal of My Little Pony even on a meta-meta-ironic level, but I am not you, and you, for all I know, may be a brony. In that case, knock yourself out with Ponify, a browser extension “which uses intelligent case-adaptive technologies to replace non-pony related words with ones that are pony-related” – hand into hoof, for example.

 

Then there’s Nüdifier, which is a twofer name: nominalized -ify suffix and gratuitous umlaut! The app lets you select an area of a photo for pixelated fake-nudity censorship.

 

 

See many, many more -ify names on The Name Inspector’s Pinterest Wall of Namifying. While you’re over there, check out my own stuff, including my Brand Names with Gratuitous Umlauts board and Names That End in -ly (132 133 of them!).

Nora Ephron, 1941-2012

I didn’t know Nora Ephron, but that isn’t stopping me from taking her death—yesterday, of leukemia—very personally. Just a couple of weeks ago, after all, she’d been in my car, talking about her career at the New York Post, her incipient bald spot (she called it “my Aruba,” and you really have to hear her explain why), and that travesty known as the egg-white omelet. She sounded feisty and funny and thoroughly, you know, alive.

OK, she wasn’t physically in my car. But her voice was there, reading her most recent collection of essays, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, an audiobook I’d checked out from the library. I listened to all three discs, and then I listened to them again. And I remembered, again, how much Nora Ephron has meant to me.

Most of the tributes to Ephron have focused on her hugely successful movies. I’m sorry to say—which is, by the way, a phrase I associate with Ephron, as is “by the way”—that I remain a grumpy skeptic. Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally are too slick and schmaltzy for my taste, with heavy-handed soundtrack cues telling you exactly what to think and when to weep.

It was her journalism and essays that made me an Ephron fan, beginning with pieces in Esquire like “A Few Words About Breasts” (whose slam-bam ending was shamelessly swiped by Lionel Shriver in her novel So Much for That) and continuing through her sharp-eyed, hilarious work for The New Yorker and Huffington Post, some of which was collected in I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006) and I Remember Nothing (2011). Here was a woman who could be smart and funny on deadline. I loved her ear for the rhythm of a sentence and her eye for everyday nuttiness and sadness. I wanted to learn from her. I wanted to imitate her. I wanted to be her.

Except, probably, for the miserable marriage to that two-timing bum Carl Bernstein. Which, of course, she turned into a best-selling novel and hit movie, both called Heartburn. Take that, Watergate Boy.

You can listen here to an excerpt from the title essay of I Remember Nothing. (Thank you, Amazon.) And here—because you know how much I love umlauts—is an excerpt from one of my favorite recent Ephron essays for The New Yorker, a Stieg Larsson parody called “The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut”:

Salander opened the door a crack and spent several paragraphs trying to decide whether to let Blomkvist in. Many italic thoughts flew through her mind. Go away. Perhaps. So what.Etc.

“Please,” he said. “I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.”

He was cradling an iBook in his arms. She looked at him. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she did what she usually did when she had run out of italic thoughts: she shook her head.

“I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”

But it wasn’t all wit on wry for Ephron. Read or listen to “Pentimento,” her essay about Lillian Hellman, in I Remember Nothing, to see how Ephron could illuminate the contradictions of a legendary personality and eulogize the painful end of a long friendship.

The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy, who interviewed Ephron for a 2009 profile in the magazine, has written a graceful remembrance. The New York Timesobituary, by Charles McGrath, is comprehensive and revealing. (I’d forgotten all about Ephron’s directing debut, This Is My Life, which flopped.)

Then there’s NPR’s tribute, which combines a report by Neda Ulaby (whose name would no doubt have tickled Nora Ephron no end) with an intro and outro by “Morning Edition” anchor Renee Montagne. In the outro, at about 3:23, Montagne flubs the title of Ephron’s final essay collection, calling it I Can’t Remember Anything.

I wish Nora Ephron were here. She’d have the perfect comeback.

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More on Ephron: Noreen Malone at New York magazine and Emily Yoffe atSlate (both via Nancy Nall).

 

If You Give a Dog an Umlaut

I spotted this Yöghund display in the window of Holistic Veterinary Care here in Oakland.

 

 

Let’s zoom in on the logo:

The Yöghund website puts it slightly differently: “Yöghund is the first frozen yoghurt treat made for dogs.” A long-overdue breakthrough in gelato-lacto-canine nutrition, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But wait—is it yogurt or yoghurt? And what’s up with the dotted O—the Spot spots, you might call them?

As it happens, I’d just read Lynne Murphy’s recent post at Separated by a Common Language about “yog(h)urt,” so I was already pondering why Americans usually spell it yogurt and Brits spell it yoghurt. Here’s some background from Lynne:

This word comes to English from Turkish yoğurt, but English doesn’t have the letter ğ or the sound that goes with it, so we had to figure out what to do with it. I’m relying on Wikipedia here, but it says that in some dialect(s) ğ is not pronounced as its own sound, but instead lengthens the preceding vowel. That would explain why it turns up as yaourt in French (and has also made appearances with that spelling in English). In another dialect(s?), ğ is pronounced as [ɰ], which is a velar approximant. So, it’s like a [w], but without the lip-rounding. This is all to say that it's not a hard-g sound at all.

Hmm, no umlauts in evidence—just the little Turkish flourish over the G. As for the UK/US spelling distinction, Lynne writes:

I can't help but think that the relative popularity of the yoghurtspelling in the UK has something to do with how its pronunciation is evolving. … This is to say: a frequent, modern British pronunciation of the word has a first syllable that rhymes with dog (in the same dialect, at least. The [ɒ] vowel ofBritish Received Pronunciation (RP) does not really exist in American English.) …

Americans pronounce it more like the older pronunciation--except without that cent(e)ring of the vowel that RP does. And if you're still having a hard time imagining any of these sounds, listen to the first two pronunciations of yogurt at Forvo. The first is the modern British, the second American.  Actually, Forvo also has a Turkish pronunciation, the vowel of which doesn't directly correspond to any of the English ones (it's this one).

Still no umlauts! I think we may safely conclude that what we have with Yöghund is yet another case of gratuitous decorative dotting. The company that makes Yöghund isn’t in an umlaut-using country like Finland or Germany. And it isn’t in a “yoghurt” environment, either: it’s based in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Even without the dot-confusion, Yöghund poses a pronunciation challenge. The -hund suffix obviously signifies “dog,” but to aspirate the H you need something like a glottal stop after the Yög-, and that’s awkward for English speakers. (It starts to sound like “yoga-hund.”) Of course, if you take the umlaut literally you also have to pronounce the O through semi-pursed lips. And that’s a lot of work for lazy American mouths.

I don’t have a dog, so I can’t give you a report about the product itself. But in case you were wondering, here’s good news from the FAQ:

I thought dogs were lactose intolerant? Won’t Yöghund upset my dog’s stomach?

Dogs are lactose intolerant, but rather than upset a dog’s stomach, Yöghund may actually settle it!

Hürräh!

 

Bloggiversary 6

Today is this blog’s sixth birthday! Help yourself to a cupcake.

And please remain seated while we review the last 12 months in bloggage.

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June 2011: Why do so many startups’ names end in -IO?

July 2011: Campus Crusade for Christ changed its name to the peppy, preppy Cru.

August 2011: What’s in cheez?

September 2011: Netflix tried to introduce a new service called Qwikster. Then it changed its mind.

October 2011: “Siri, tell me what your name means.”

November 2011: Why do so many startups’ names end in -LY?

December 2011: The security contractor formerly known as Xe, and before that as Blackwater, changed its name to Academi.

January 2012: Why do so many companies’ names include gratuitous umlauts?

February 2012: Why are so many companies’ names spelled wth no vwls and in ALL CAPS?

March 2012: How to build a better tagline: Part 1 and Part 2.

April 2012: What does “tribal” mean in fashionspeak?

May 2012: How pleasant it would be if people in power cared about using language correctly. Alas, they don’t.

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And for scholars of paleo-blogging, here’s my first post, about naming a new nanoparticle.

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Cupcake photo from Crazy for Crust.