Fritinancy

Say Hi, Boo!

Britain’s Yell Group, which publishes Yellow Pages directories but prefers to call itself “a leading provider of digital services within the emerging local eMarketplace for consumers and SMEs”—aren’t you glad you asked?—will henceforth be known as Hibu.

 

 

The name was developed by global branding giant Landor after a five-month exploration. What does it mean? Nothing.

Here’s how the Telegraph reported the news:

Mike Pocock, chief executive, said the company needed to find a new name because it was “viewed as a dinosaur”, but admitted that hibu was “just a word” with no real meaning.

“Don’t read anything into it...It doesn’t have any pure meaning behind it,” he said. “It needed to be short, easy to pronounce and to sound edgy and innovative. It doesn’t mean a lot by itself, but if you turn the clock back, neither did Apple [sic] and Google or Yahoo!”

Or, say, Hulu.

As Yell Group, the company had a clever if vestigial linguistic connection to “Yellow.” It also had a lot of debt. It undertook the rebranding, Pocock told the Evening Standard, because “Yell had low awareness online, especially among those aged under 35.”

Hibu—the company prefers to spell it with all lower-case letters, but they aren’t the boss of me—is pronounced “high-boo.” Despite the don’t-read-anything-into-it directive, the marketing department has labored mightily to do exactly the opposite. This is from the Our New Brand page of the corporate website:

What’s the thinking behind the brand identity?
In addition to being consumer oriented and a symbol in its own right, we wanted our identity to tell a story. We have developed a new positioning for the organisation – ‘connecting communities’. Communities are built on the connections people make and people are connected at the heart of the hibu logo. The identity utilises typography with soft shouldered edges like the human body and coloured dots represent the people behind the identity, diversity, connections and conversation. By using bold lower case typography with soft edges we project a human and approachable company.

Aha—dots are people! And here I was reading it as yet another happy smiley umlaut.

UPDATE: Twitter friend Ian Preston notes that in French, hibou (ee-boo) means “owl.”

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Thanks to Benjamin Lukoff of the American Name Society email list for the tip.

Follow-Ups

Revisiting a few topics I’ve blogged about previously:

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Yet another happy-umlaut-embellished brand name to add to the list: BüK (“pronunciation: boook”).

A BüK is an actual paper product that costs $1.49 and is 16 to 32 pages long. Choose from a variety of themes, including CookBüK, WordBüK, and SpookBüK (horror stories). If you’re in the hospitality business, you can order some PillowBüKs (love that name and all it implies) to leave in guest rooms.

BüK joins Füd, güd, Häagen-Dazs, and other brand names in which the umlaut serves no purpose other than decoration.

(Hat tip: Suzanne Mantell.)

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By now, Dunkin’ Donuts should really be called Dunkin’ Toroids: the chain is, believe it or not, the number-one retailer of bagels in the United States. Last week the company jumped on the “artisan” bandwagon and introduced Artisan Bagels, which feature “a soft and chewy texture with bolder flavors.” Dunkin’ Donuts is now positioned to compete with Domino’s Artisan Pizzas, Starbucks Artisan Style sandwiches, Tostitos Artisan Recipe chips, and Panera Bread’s “artisan fast food” for top honors in the Culinary Buzzword Olympics. More about the artisaning of American brands here and here. (Via The Impulsive Buy.)

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In a January post about “slut” in brand names, I mentioned Eggslut and Bookslut but neglected to include the most venerable slut of all, Los Angeles’s Retail Slut (“Rude and Nasty Clothes for Chicks and Dicks”). The original store opened in 1983 “as one of the first shops to bring punk and gothic style to Melrose [Avenue].” Over the years it changed locations four times; the Wikipedia entry says it finally closed in 2005. There’s no merchandise available on the website, which appears not to have been updated in a while but which does include a long list of celebrity shoppers, among them Andy Warhol, Madonna, Pat Benatar, Iggy Pop, Ice-T, and one Buster Bloodvessel.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Branding the Umlaut

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, The Ündeniable Ümlaut, is now online. In it, I take a look at rock dots (Blue Öyster Cult, Motörhead); the frozen-dairy umlaut (Häagen-Dazs, Freshëns, Yogen Früz); the flexible umlaut (YogaMöm); the restaurant umlaut (Füd, Seäsonal); the Brooklyn umlaut (Bed|Stü); and miscellaneous diacriticals (Børn Shoes, Melōränge melons).

Access to the full article is restricted to subscribers; here’s a täste:

Most sources trace the American fad for gratuitous umlauts back to Blue Öyster Cult, the rock band founded in 1970 in upstate New York. According to the band’s Wikipedia entry, the music critic Richard Meltzer suggested the umlaut “because heavy metal is Wagnerian.” Motörhead followed suit in 1975 (“I only put it there to look mean,” the group’s lead singer said of the umlaut); the double-umlauting of Mötley Crüe, formed in 1980, is said to have been inspired by the label on a Löwenbräu beer bottle. These “metal umlauts,” or “rock dots,” were spoofed in 1984 by the parody band Spinal Tap, whose Gothic logo contained an umlauted N.

 

Read the rest of the column! And for even more on umlauts, read my previous posts on accented brands.

UPDATE: John McGarvey, a copywriter in London, has informed me via Twitter of a UK dessert brand called Gü Puds (that’s pud as in “pudding,” British for “dessert”; pud has a very different meaning in American English). Yep, it’s another yummy smiley umlaut:

The company explains the name (punctuation sic):

Back when we were born in 2003 – we thought long and hard for a suitable name for our decadent treats. We began by playing around with the word goût – French for taste. However, gout in English refers to an unsightly disease of the foot; not at all appropriate for puds! We eventually came up with Gü (pronounced ‘goo’) – which evokes the gooey oozing nature of our puddings.

Yummy Smiley Umlauts

Less than 24 hours after I published a post about güd products from Burt’s Bees, I spotted two more brand names with umlaut-spangled, smiley-face U’s.

Füd—it’s pronounced “fōōd,” the website helpfully offers—is a vegan restaurant in that cradle of carnivorism, Kansas City. “The mentality of the Midwest is, green is garnish,” owner Heidi Van Pelt-Belle told A.G. Sulzberger of the New York Times.

The umlaut is garnish, too.

Then there’s Yogen Früz, which opened in Toronto in 1986 and now has 1,200 fro-yo “retail concepts” around the world.

In the AMC Metreon 15, San Francisco.

If you see an echo in Yogen Früz of fellow frozen-dessert purveyors Häagen-Dazs and Frusen Glädjé, it’s probably not coincidental. All three brands employ gratuitous accent marks; in the case of Frusen Glädjé (which has been defunct for almost 20 years), the superfluous mark is the acute accent.

Yogen Früz takes that smiley U very seriously: it’s always depicted in a contrasting color, and it often stands in for “you.”

 

 

The company has created a “ucard,” possibly for frequent fro-yoers. Hard to say exactly.

The “Yületide” promotions were cute-bordering-on-cloying.

 

The latest twist: “Ü Serve” locations that let you “explore your inner ‘Yogurtista’.”

Enough already! I’m füll.

The Extrasensory Umlaut

Burt’s Bees, the natural-personal-care company, has launched güd, a new line of body, hand, and hair products, self-described as “a novel and extrasensory approach to natural beauty created for the of-the-moment woman…that’s you!”

There’s an umlaut (or dieresis) over the u in “güd,” but these aren’t Motörhead-style rock dots.

Pictured: Orange Petalooza body mist. It took me several minutes to realize that it’s petal-ooza (the oozings of petals?) and not pet-alooza, which looks like something you’d spray on an animal companion. Products are also available in Floral Cherrynova and Vanilla Flame, names that have been strenuously engineered to appeal not so much to an “of-the-moment woman” as to an 11-year-old girl.

Everything about güd is cute—make that cüte—from the URL (gudhappens.com) to the girlish lower-case name to the rollover copy (“Hey, it’s time to boogy till you just can’t boogy no more”). The About page reminds us that “the name güd actually has a smile built right in.”

OMG, it does! LOL.

Sometimes the copy is downright icky, as in this header for the body lotion section: “Skin will be wonderfully hydrated. But not so hydrated that you make a sloshing sound when you walk.” Let’s hope not.

The güd line is being sold at Walgreen’s, Target, and Ulta stores. “Or,” confides the über-chatty copy, “you could just buy whatever güd stuff you’re looking for on this very site! Aren’t the interwebs wonderful?”

Grüvy!

Additional unlikely umlauts here, here, here, and here.

Names in the Wild: Melōränge

Yes, a macron and an umlaut. It’s a diacritic-gasm!

Melōränge display at Berkeley Bowl Marketplace. The white spot is my flash.

According to the USPTO database, the Melorange (no diacritics) trademark was registered in October 2007 to a Dutch company, De Ruiter Seeds. I couldn’t find an explanation for the diacritical marks: They’re not Dutch, and they couldn’t possibly influence the pronunciation, which I take to be similar to that of Mel Orange, associate band director of the Pitt Panthers. The marks seem to be tacked on like glitter, simply to make the name look a little festive (and exotic).

The mel- prefix suggests a truncation of melon, which was originally a Greek word meaning “apple” and, by extension, any foreign fruit. It also suggests Latin mel, “honey.” (Compare mellifluous and Melissa.) The -orange part refers not to citrus but to the color of the flesh. The word is easy and fun to say—or would be if one weren’t momentarily stumped by the diacritical marks.

According to The Packer, a produce-industry publication, the  melons in US markets were developed by the global seed company Monsanto (ugh, but I didn’t know the connection till I’d already bought a melon). The ones I saw this week were probably grown in California or Arizona.

Here’s a Melōränge in captivity (i.e., my melon-colored kitchen):

 

Small melons like the Melōränge—the one in the photo is only about 4 inches in diameter—are part of a “personal-size” trend. Watermelons are shrinking, too, Kim Severson wrote last year in the New York Times: “These days, a good watermelon … has to be small enough so people pushing grocery carts in big-city stores will buy it.”

The Packer article noted several other new named varieties of melons that will come to market soon: Avatar, Fascination, SweetPeak, SummerSlice, Sugar Heart, and Sugar Coat (love that one).

Those names reminded me of a verbal-branding project I worked on a few years ago for a growers’ cooperative in Minnesota that had developed a new apple varietal. Those growers were just about the nicest people I’ve ever worked with, and from a creative standpoint, it was a wonderfully satisfying project. So even though in the end the client (nicely) rejected all of my names—many of which were pretty fabulous, if I say so myself—and went with the inappropriate, hard-to-spell, internally generated name they’d unfathomably favored all along, I can’t complain. They did pay me promptly, and generously. And they were awfully nice.

And now I have a long list of swell names for fruit varietals, ready for picking. Not one of them involves diacritical marks. Call me!

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More odd umlauts: shoes, yoga, body cream.

The Brooklyn Umlaut

Whether or not you’re a New Yorker, you’ve probably heard of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. It’s been a center of African-American culture for decades. It’s where director Spike Lee has set many of his films. Many famous folks have called it home: Lena Horne, Norah Jones, Jay-Z, Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan, Mos Def. The neighborhood got its name when the Village of Bedford merged with Stuyvesant Heights, named for Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New York. Bedford-Stuyvesant is often shortened to “Bed-Stuy”; the second syllable rhymes with “sky.”

All of which is background to this name:

It’s a shoe company that makes footwear with an intentionally scuffed-up look, just like the logo. And yes, the name—odd umlaut and all—is meant to evoke Bedford-Stuyvesant:

Bed|Stu is lean, fast, and tough like the streets that inspired our shoes from day one and as long as we can make our way, we will make shoes and other products for those who have no use for the beaten path.*

The umlaut appears only in the logo. Elsewhere on the website, the name appears variously as BED|STU, bed|stu, Bed|Stu, and Bed Stu. Nordstrom, which carries the brand, spells it Bed Stu. The spelling inconsistencies—ack!—make me wonder whether the name is actually pronounced “Bed Stew” rather than like the neighborhood’s actual nickname.

FYI, there’s no umlaut in “Stuyvesant” (even in Dutch), and an umlaut does not change the pronunciation of /u/ to /aɪ/.

And here’s the kicker: Bed|Stu (to pick one of the spellings at random) isn’t based in Bed-Stuy. It isn’t even in New York. In fact, it isn’t anywhere in the Eastern time zone.

How’s this for incongruity: The company’s headquarters are in Camarillo, a pleasant bedroom community of about 65,000 in Ventura County, California, that was incorporated in 1964. According to 2010 census figures, about 75 percent of Camarillo’s population is white. The major employer in Camarillo is WellPoint, the big health plan; the major attraction is the Premium Outlets mall. Patagonia, the outdoor-clothing company, is about 11 miles away.

So here we have a company in a sunny, mostly white Southern California hamlet with a Spanish name (pronounced ca-ma-REE-yo), one hour north of Los Angeles. The company names itself, kinda-sorta, after a mostly black Brooklyn neighborhood that’s more than a century old. And to add a little spice or ambiguity or urban je ne sais quoi, it plops a couple of röck döts atop a vowel.

Confused? Me, too. 

Read my posts about the yoga umlaut and the spa umlaut.

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* This is a company with an unhealthy affinity for wordiness and dependent clauses: “Fundamentally based in nature…” “With multiple lines to choose from…” “Capitalizing on a love of…” “After converting…” “Boasting a cult following…” And that’s just the About Us page.)

The Flexible Umlaut

It's not just for heavy metal bands any more:

 

Öömmm...

From the Mailbag

This post is guaranteed to be 100 percent reader-generated!

Mark Gunnion forwards a link to his favorite new product name: the Looj™ remote-controlled gutter-cleaner from iRobot. Yep, it shoots down your gutter just like a little luge and "blasts out debris, clogs and sludge." Comes with a handy holster, too!

Christa Allan thinks someone should have paid closer attention to the way this domain name looks: http://goredforwomen.com. "The campaign is to draw attention to women's health, specifically heart problems, by wearing red," Christa writes. "I suppose being gored for women is the ultimate sacrifice." (¡Olé!) For more insights into unintended parsing issues (remember Pen Island?), check out Tate Linden's post on Putincups.com.

"The umlaut is officially no longer hardcore," declares Dan Holbrook, who blogs at Language Is the People's and therefore knows about the heavy metal umlaut (aka "rock dots"), as in Mötley Crüe. He forwards photographic evidence:

  

The Spä line is made by a company called BeautiControl, which does sound a tad Teutonic. (Photo swiped from eBay.)

Judith K. thought I'd like NuttyBuddy, which she discovered while shopping for equipment for her adolescent son. She was so right. NuttyBuddy's tagline is "Protecting the Boys"; its product is "the first athletic cup that was designed to protect the full groin area of the male body." You've got to love the "size tool" that tells you whether to order "The Hammer," "The Boss," "The Hog," or "Mongo."

Jan Freeman, who writes about language for the Boston Globe, is amused by an ad she saw in the New York Times for a jewelry store on Fifth Avenue. "The headline is 'My Kingdom for your Old Jewelry,' from, of course, Shakespeare's libellous play about the last of the Plantagenets, Richard III. The picture is a portrait of Henry (Tudor) VIII, son of the Henry whose rebellion killed off Richard and his line. The name of the store is Windsor Jewelers Inc.--and though Windsor is old, it wasn't a royal name till the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha royals decided WWI was a good reason for the name change."

Jan adds: "Perhaps I was sensitive to this because I just finished reading Josephine Tey's classic pro-Richard III mystery, The Daughter of Time. But I would think many a Shakespeare fan would notice the odd juxtaposition. Or am I too optimistic?"

By the way, I highly recommend Jan's Sunday columns, which examine newsworthy issues such as the spurious origins of the phrase "belly up to the bar." 

Fahrvergnügen Alöft

Remember "fahrvergnügen," the much-parodied slogan that Volkswagen used in its 1989 U.S. ad campaign? The ad jingle included a pronunciation lesson: Fahr. Verg. Gnu. Gen. It sounded silly, but fahrvergnügen was (and is) a real German word, meaning "driving pleasure." Like "schadenfreude," it's one of those words for which there's no English equivalent. Unlike "schadenfreude," we managed to get along pretty well without it, as it turned out.

Now Lufthansa is reviving the spirit, if not the letter, of those ads with its "changing the language of air travel" campaign. This time around, the words aren't really German--they're "Germlish" (Lufthansa's word, not mine). They're sprinkled with gratuitous umlauts and supported by needless pronunciation guides:

Eazenträvel
adj. (ee-zen-trav’l)

Der Schnöozenseat
noun (schnoo’-zen-seat)

Öntimenleiven
verb (on-time’-in-leev-un)

Nohassleböarden
verb (no-hass-ul-bord’-un)

Ach, du lieber! Das is sicken-gemachen.