Fritinancy

November linkfest

It’s Word of the Year season, and two British dictionaries are leading the pack. Collins picked lockdown – a word we threw around here in the US but never experienced the way they did in the UK and elsewhere. (A friend of mine is literally confined to her London apartment after spending a month in France: she can’t go outdoors at all.) And Oxford Languages, publisher of the Oxford dictionaries, chose a phenomenon instead of a single word: the impact of the COVID-19 on language. “What struck the team as most distinctive in 2020 was the sheer scale and scope of change,” Katherine Connor Martin, the company’s head of product, told the New York Times’s Jennifer Schuessler. “This event was experienced globally and by its nature changed the way we express every other thing that happened this year.”

“Social distance”: sign in an Oakland produce-store window, May 2020.

What Does “Urban” Mean in Brand Names?

Back in March 2009 I wrote about the shifting meaning of “urban,” from the standard dictionary definition (“of the city”) to something tinged with politics and sociology. The emerging meaning of “urban,” I wrote, often translates to “dominated by a racial minority.” (@UrbanEnglish, for example, is the Twitter handle for something that calls itself Ghetto Translations™.) Although I mentioned a few brands with “urban” in their names—Urban Dictionary, Urban Outfitters, National Urban League—I focused on lower-case “urban,” puzzling over phrases such as “Oakland, like most urban cities…”

Since then I’ve continued to track the spread of “urban.” I’m still seeing redundant-seeming usages like this one, from Maggie Koerth-Baker’s 2012 book Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us: “Merriam isn’t a small town. … Yet Merriam isn't a suburb, either—or an urban city.” (Emphasis added.) But what’s really gotten my attention is an explosion of upper-case “urban” in brand names.

Granted, all of these brands originated in cities and cater to city dwellers. But that alone doesn’t explain the popularity of “urban” in their names. Rather, I suspect it’s a meme—a viral phenomenon. “Urban” here is shorthand for “cool” and “savvy”; with few exceptions, there are no racial overtones.

I should know better by now, but I’m always surprised when I see so many copycat names, especially in a concentrated geographical area. It’s as though each of these business owners felt compelled to tap out the same code, fearful that even a slight deviation (“urbane,” say, or just “urb”) would break the spell.

Here’s a far-from-complete rundown of the urban names I’ve noticed.

 

What Does "Urban" Mean?

I'm not talking about the dictionary definition: an adjective meaning "of the city," derived from Latin urbanus and ultimately urbs, "city." Because that doesn't explain what "urban" is doing in this phrase, reproduced verbatim from a report I heard recently on my local public-radio station:

Like most urban cities, Oakland...

Like most city-ish cities?

No, of course not. "Urban cities" may seem redundant, but the reporter had something else in mind. Increasingly over the last few decades, "urban" has acquired a secondary meaning: "dominated by a racial minority, usually African-American."