Fritinancy

"Unpregnant"

Waiting to cross a street in my Oakland neighborhood, I noticed this sticker on a telephone pole:

“Need to be unpregnant?”

 

The blurry text on the left reads “Juniper Midwifery abortion pills by mail.” There are several services around the country that call themselves Juniper Midwifery (possibly because juniper needles are an abortifacient); this Juniper is based in New York and provides abortion pills in six states, including California, where surgical and pharmaceutical abortions are (still) legal.*

“Juniper” is a good name, but what really piqued my interest was unpregnant. I hadn’t seen the word previously—or thought I hadn’t—but in fact I just hadn’t been paying close enough attention.

Un-titled

I’ve finally gotten around to watching “Unforgotten,” the British detective show, now on Netflix, starring Nicola Walker (whom I liked a lot in “Last Tango in Halifax” and the National Theatre’s brilliant Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time). Something about the title jogged my memory: It felt like I’d been seeing a lot of un- titles and names lately. So I did some digging. And I was right.

The Little Unmatched Girl

I received this email from Saks Fifth Avenue last week:

What caught my attention was the email’s subject line, repeated in the text I’ve circled in the ad’s upper right-hand corner: “Shop Burberry outerwear for unmatched style.” (See the full-frame ad here.)

“Unmatched” was almost certainly chosen to parallel “unblemished” and “unquestioned” (which are also strange, but for different reasons). The problem with “unmatched,” though, is that it can mean either of two things: “matchless” (peerless, beyond compare) or “mismatched” (clashing, not matching). And because the latter meaning is the one that first occurred to me, I was surprised not to see a jumble of colors and patterns in the coats.

As I’ve previously written, ambiguity isn’t necessarily a bad thing in commercial language. But it succeeds only when all of the possible meanings support a positive message, as in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s ad line, “Making Cancer History.”

About those other uns in the Saks ad:

Unblemished? At these prices – the red coat is $1,250, the khaki one $1,995 – I should certainly hope so. “Unblemished” is a word a grocer might use to describe perfect fruit; it’s odd and out of place in fashion copy unless you’re writing for a second-hand store.

“Unquestioned”? Well, that depends. I question whether the Cropped Shearling/Leather Jacket ($2,295) might make me look like a baked potato. And across the pond, there have been questions about Burberry’s reputation, which has only recently recovered from its “chav” (lower-class) associations.

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Further reading:

My other posts about peculiar Saks-speak: “opportunistic” and “leave you wanting more.” 

My post on the confusion about mismatched, mixedmatched, and mixmatched.

My posts on “un.”

Notes from UN-derground

In retail and design, the un also rises.

Exhibit A: Unemployee.

 

“Eno, 28, non-actor from the U.S.”

 

“Unemployee of the Year” is a worldwide contest open to unemployed people age 18 to 30. The contest is part of Benetton’s #UNHATE campaign, which began last year with photos of world leaders kissing. Read more at AdFreak.

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Exhibit B: Uncrate.

 

Uncrate calls itself “the leading buyer’s guide for men.”

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Exhibit C: Unbeige.

 

Unbeige is a MediaBistro blog “where designers read about design.”

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Exhibit D: Uniqlo.

I’m being mischievous with this one — Uniqlo isn’t really an “un.” The low-price, high-quality Japanese retail chain’s name comes from “unique clothing warehouse” and is pronounced “you-nee-klo” in English and “you-nee-koo-ro” in Japanese.

The company is Japan’s leading retailer in terms of sales and profits. The first Uniqlo store opened in Hiroshima in 1985; the first U.S. stores opened in 2005 in New Jersey, but they performed poorly and were shut down. A year later, Uniqlo came back with a 36,000-square-foot store in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, and the company has grown its U.S. presence steadily ever since. The three-story, 29,000-square-foot San Francisco store, opening October 5, will be the chain’s first West Coast location.

According to a recent company profile in the Wall Street Journal, Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai is decidedly un-Japanese in his outspoken emphasis on entrepreneurialism. He has even declared English to be Uniqlo’s official corporate language.

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Read my June 2012 post about the “un” ad campaign for the Smart “un-car.” Also see Ben Zimmer’s 2009 New York Times column about “unfollow,” “unfriend,” “unconference,” and other 21st-century un-isms.

 

 

That's Un-possible!

Monday’s mail brought a little brochure from Smart, the micro-car brand that’s manufactured by Daimler AG and distributed in the U.S. by Mercedes-Benz.

The brochure is a real un-fest. Here’s the cover:

Unthink. Uncrowd. Uncomplicated. Unlandfill. Uncar.

 

Inside, another headline declares the Smart to be “Unpricey.”

There’s even more Un on the Smart website:

Untame. Uncar. (Can anyone tell me what “tridion” is?) (UPDATE: See the first comment.)

The Pure coupe is the “unboring” “uncar.”

The Passion coupe (yep, a car called Passion!) invites you to “unleash” … something.

There’s also a Passion cabriolet, which can be unroofed.

 

These 2013 models seem to have replaced the original Smart Fortwo, which I have chosen to pronounce “Fort Wo.”

We haven’t seen this much unning since April 2009, when KFC introduced its “UNthink” slogan to accompany the UNfried menu. Later that year, Ben Zimmer devoted an “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine to what he called “The Age of Undoing”: he discussed social-media coinages such as “unfriend” and “unfollow” and the business world’s “unconference” and “unmarketing.” (Ben followed up with a more scholarly analysis for the Visual Thesaurus.)

The granddaddy of Un-branding—the ur-Un, you might say—was J. Walter Thompson’s positioning of 7Up as “The Uncola” in a campaign that lasted from 1968 to 1974.

 

The first 7Up Uncola ad from 1968. 7Up was “un in a million”; the company even produced glassware in an inverted Coke-glass shape. See more Uncola ads in a 2004 student paper about 7Up posted on the Duke University website. (Link broken.)

 

Compared with those old 7Up ads, Smart’s TV campaign from last fall is underwhelming. 

But I’ll give it this much credit: it’s an improvement over tiny-car rival Fiat 500’s original slogan: “You Are. We Car.”

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Credit for the title of this post goes, of course, to Ralph Wiggum.

Just Think!

My latest column for Visual Thesaurus, "The Thinkers," was published today. It expands on observations I've made here, in March and April, about the recent proliferation of think and rethink in corporate slogans. In the VT column, I've thrown KFC's "Unthink" into the mix. Access to the column is, as always, restricted to subscribers; here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

The last time "think" made this much advertising news was in 1997, when Apple introduced its "Think Different" ads, created by the Los Angeles agency TBWA\Chiat\Day. Instead of product shots, the ads featured striking black-and-white photos of famous people — Albert Einstein, John Lennon, Martha Graham, Muhammad Ali, and others. But it was what some people saw as the ungrammaticality of the slogan that touched a nerve. The reasoning: "Different" is an adjective; ergo, it can't modify the verb "to think."

Not true, as it turns out. Looking back on the campaign from the vantage of 2006, linguist Eric Bakovic wrote in Language Log that "it's not so clear that different is supposed to be an adverb in this case." He went on:

[D]istinctions between many adjective/adverb pairs have been slowly but surely eroding in English. Different/differently is among these pairs; the OED lists different as an adjective or an adverb, in the latter case meaning the same thing as differently and with the caveat "Now only in uneducated use." I think the erosion has gone so far that the "educated/uneducated" distinction made in this OED usage point comes close to simply separating pedants from most other folks; thus, the ad campaign benefitted from the slight double meaning: Apple thinks different(ly), and (therefore) Apple is different.

What often got lost in the debate over parts of speech was Apple's bold strategy, based on image and ideation rather than product features and a sales pitch. It succeeded: 1997 marked the beginning of Apple's climb back to profitability. (It was also, not coincidentally, the year of Steve Jobs's return to the company he had co-founded.) The slogan was retired in 2002, but a hypercorrect spoof — "Think Differently" — appeared in a 2008 episode of "The Simpsons."

 

Read the rest of the column.

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Image: "The Thinker," by Auguste Rodin.