Fritinancy

Book review: "Brand Naming," by Rob Meyerson

From time to time I’ve been asked—often by a college student or a copywriter—to recommend resources for learning the craft of name development. I’ve sighed and shook my head: It’s all about on-the-job training, I’d say. That’s how I learned to do what I do. There were no books, no courses.

I’m happy to report that I now have a different answer. Brand Naming, a new book from naming expert and podcast host Rob Meyerson, is a 162-page guide to just about everything a namer needs to know to get started and build a practice. (Disclaimer: I received a complimentary review copy of Brand Naming, and I’m cited a few times within its pages.)

The cover of Brand Naming is your first lesson: It includes some of the more than 100 alternate titles Meyerson developed—Namecraft, Naming Names, Verbal Identity, and more—before opting for the clear, straightforward, easily searchable choice.

 

Judy Protas, 1922-2014

Judy Protas may have been famous only within the insular world of New York advertising. But some of the ads she wrote, including the 20th-century classic “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye,” have been been famous across the country for more than half a century.

Ms. Protas, a retired executive at New York agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, died January 7 at 91. Margalit Fox wrote the obituary for the New York Times, which I commend to you.

Here’s Fox on the Levy’s campaign:

Though its evocative tagline is often credited to William Bernbach, a founder of DDB, or to Phyllis Robinson, the agency’s chief copywriter, period newspaper accounts and contemporary archival sources make clear that the actual writing fell to Ms. Protas, who, working quietly and out of the limelight, set down those dozen durable words.

We didn’t have Levy’s in California, so this may have been the first Judy Protas ad I ever saw:

The walls of the mezzanine of the Ohrbach’s store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles were decorated with ads like this one, which was far from current by the time I laid eyes on it. (The store, part of a New York-based chain, closed in 1987.) I remember my bemusement—a talking cat? in a fancy hat? with a cigarette holder?—and my delightthat this discount retailer valued advertisements highly enough to treat them as art. (Yes, I was an ad nerd even as a child.)

“Ohrbach’s … wanted to disabuse consumers of the notion that discount equaled déclassé,” writes Fox:

Beneath the headline — “I Found Out About Joan” — Ms. Protas’s copy went on, cattily, to describe the impecunious Joan’s pretensions to wealth before conceding, “She does dress divinely,” and concluding, “I just happened to be going her way and I saw Joan come out of Ohrbach’s!”

Protas also wrote the lyrics to the Cracker Jack jingle, “which in full (‘lip-smackin’, whip-crackin’, paddy-whackin’, knickin’-knackin’, silver-rackin’, scoundrel-whackin’, cracker-jackin’ Cracker Jack’) has the trochaic rush of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song,” writes the inimitable Fox.

The career of Judy Protas serves as a reminder that not all Mad Men from advertising’s golden age were men. For further proof, see my post about Lois Wyse, who coined the Smucker’s slogan; and my Visual Thesaurus column about “you deserve it” slogans, which includes the story of how Ilon Specht came up with the long-lasting L’Oreal slogan “Because I’m Worth It.”

Read more about the Levy’s Rye Bread ad campaign at Barry Popik’s Big Apple blog.

Insert Tongue into Cheek, Season to Taste

From today’s Telegraph (UK), a restaurant review in the best tradition of English satire*:

Much like Dr Martin Luther King before her, Basque superchef Elena Arzak has a dream: “a kitchen beyond our frontiers in the middle of London in the heart of the Halkin hotel”. While this has a less utopian ring than the good doctor’s promised land (it will, one presumes, be of more interest to Arzak’s accountant than her analyst), it has at least proved easier to realise: for Ametsa – which, spookily enough, means “dream” in Arzak’s native tongue – is already with us. Yet I mislead you. The full name is “Ametsa with Arzak Instruction” – and well done to all concerned for contriving something catchy and free from pretension there.

It gets even better. Read on.

(Hat tip: James Harbeck.)

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* Yes, it’s a joke.

Brilliant

This ad appeared in the New York Times on December 13:

 

 

 

The succinct copy is unafraid to use the other D-word, debt, to contrast absurdly overpriced diamonds with lookalike moissanite stones. “She’s forever … You’re forever” echoes the company name, itself a sly poke at the long-running slogan of the De Beers diamond cartel, “A Diamond Is Forever.” In fact, I’m kind of amazed that Forever Brilliant was able to register its name as a trademark. Well played.

For more on diamond marketing and the romantic-industrial complex, see my 2008 post, “Stones.” And read The Heartless Stone, Tom Zoellner’s account of how a “relatively common mineral” came “to signify love and eternal promises.”

In Others' Words

I’m busier than usual this week, so instead of blogging I’m quoting some tasty passages from other blogs.

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“Thuuz? Oh, Pleez” (The Name Inspector)

But then we have the name Thuuz. The Name Inspector is not a fan. Clearly it’s built on the bones of the words enthused, enthusiasm, and enthusiastic. So far so good–apt, if a bit pedestrian. But that syllable is pretty weird sounding. It’s really the first consonant and the vowel together that sound odd. The Name Inspector talked about this in connection with the name Thoof a while back. He quite reasonably declared that the “Thoo-” part was a bit counterintuitive in English, and then this smartypants named John commented that it was an accident of history that there is no word thoof, and The Name Inspector held his ground, and John was all “what about enthusiasm”, and The Name Inspector was like “good point but what about at the beginning of a word”, and John was all “historical linguistics blah blah”. So clearly The Name Inspector won that one.

(Note from Fritinancy: For more on Thoof, read my own 2007 post.)

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“Your Friendly Global Villain” (Johnson)

What is it about very nasty people that makes us use their first names as though they were our buddies? And why some but not others? “Osama”, “Saddam” and “Fidel” are common, yet no “Josef” or “Adolf”. No “Muammar” either, not even after he started having citizens strafed from helicopters.

First-name terms are obviously a way to diminish a feared enemy, especially in the triumph of his death or downfall. But merely being a bad hat isn't enough, it seems: he has to be extensively demonised before meriting the treatment, so maybe Libya’s mad, bad colonel just hasn't been in anyone's sights for long enough. And if a man is too evil—on the massacre-of-millions scale—then such jolly familiarity apparently becomes bad taste. Stalin was Uncle Joe once, before the truth came out.

(Note from Fritinancy: See also “What to Name the Villain.”)

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“Park Bench” (Nancy Nall)

Do you have Critical Mass in your city? Doing a little research on it the last few days, I’m amazed at the diversity of its impact. I first heard of it via Jon Carroll’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle some years back, and I gather the Bay area is where it was born. Much of cycling culture has its roots there, and Critical Mass rises out of a certain obnoxiousness born out of unpleasant encounters with cars. We can go back and forth on this and probably will, but it’s fair to say that in cities like San Francisco, or Chicago, New York and a handful of others, motorists and cyclists are the Israelis and Palestinians of transportation, and Critical Mass is a monthly intifada, a deliberate traffic jam of hundreds of cyclists moving through them on a rush-hour Friday, blowing lights, in yo face, saying, essentially, Fuck you.

(Note from Fritinancy: Jon Carroll still writes an excellent column for the Chronicle.)

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Want more reading material? Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic has linked to “Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism” published in 2010, from the famous and predictable—Malcolm Gladwell, Atul Gawande, Clive Thompson, Zadie Smith—to the too-good-to-be-missed (Beth Kowitt on Trader Joe’s, Mimi Swartz on the sex trade in Houston, John Gravois on the closing of the marijuana frontier in Mendocino County, Jessanne Collins on what it’s like to work for the notorious content farm Demand Media). Plus great stuff from The Awl, Planet Money, This American Life, and The San Francisco Panorama (which published just one issue). Yes, it will probably take you the rest of 2011 to read them all. Better get cracking.

“Sheer Celestial Hubris”

Frank Bruni, who writes The Tipsy Diaries for the New York Times, takes a skeptical look today at “Celestial Come-Ons and Other Booze-Selling Ploys,” starting with a spirit that seems to have a spiritual pedigree.

For weeks — months, actually — I could do little more than stare at it, this ostensibly precious nectar with an outrageously precious name.

Angel’s Envy, its makers call it, and they had sent me, as well as other journalists who write about spirits, a sample. Not a bottle: that would have been routine and would have suggested that their creation, a bourbon whiskey put through some unusually elegant paces, could be splashed around wantonly, in large quantities. Instead they packaged the sample in a vial of sorts, corked in the manner of wine. I was reminded of the tiny, gemlike vessel whose quaffable contents bestow youth (and no small measure of agita) upon Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in “Death Becomes Her.”

With an infusion of Angel’s Envy, what would become of me? On a recent evening I sipped the serum and experienced ... a whiskey sweeter and smoother than most, and appealing to a point. But its taste left less of an impression than its promotion, reflective of how fanciful, even silly, the marketing of boutique booze has become.

There is, for starters, that name: Angel’s Envy. I’ll try not to type it as often here as I’ve murmured it to myself, chuckling each time at its reach, its sheer celestial hubris. When you call something Angel’s Envy, you’re inviting mockery and sowing the seeds of disappointment, because you’ve basically promised nothing less than liquid rapture: heaven on the rocks.

What were the runner-up names? Zeus Juice? XanaDew?

Bruni also sampled a couple of pretentiously named vodkas:

A vodka called Xellent boasts of being made with water from the Titlis glacier in the Swiss Alps. But if you’re partial to the Austrian Alps, worry not. The vodka Puriste uses water from there. Please note the horizontal line over the I on the bottle, and make sure your pronunciation is guided by it.

Puriste sells for about $40 for a 750ml bottle; Angel’s Envy goes for $45.

That Puriste logo looked awfully familiar to me. Where had I seen something very, very similar? Oh, yes:

 

Look! A horizontal line over the E and a dieresis over the I! 

Read the rest of Bruni’s very amusing column.

Read my posts about Effen vodka, Vampire wine, Dead Letter Office wine, and assorted absinthe brand names.

The Trouble with "Reform"

Vanity Fair contributing editor James Wolcott finds fault with the sloganeering of the Democratic Party:

Are you telling me that with all the money pumped into consultants and pollsters, in a country whose media culture is built on advertising and catchphrases, that with all of ambitious little beavering minds who have studied the art and science of persuasion (and know Lakoff "framing" backwards and forwards, chapter and verse), that with all of that the architects and backers couldn't come up with something more inspiring and memorable than "health care reform"? Where's the creativity, the missionary zeal, the visionary spark? First of all, "reform" is one of the most boring fucking well-meaning meaningless words in the language. It's a word that carries no juice, no buzz, no friction, no color, no nothing.

Why is it that Republican consultants can coin something as cunningly diabolical as "death tax" (as a substitute for inheritance taxes) and sell the hell out of it, or contrive the "Contract with America," yet health reform is packaged in a plain brown wrapper with all the pizazz of a corporate restructuring plan. It should have been called something upbeat and flagwavey like "The American Health Freedom Act," guaranteeing health coverage and available, affordable insurance for all.

Other terms used by Wolcott: dead-dick policy term, fish-smacked, poison spitballing, rightwing pesticide spray tank, and Hitler in high heels.  Read the column.

Hat tip: JordieW.

Why Writers Like Scrabble

Judith Thurman writes in this week's New Yorker:

Scrabble is both mindless and cerebral, which may account for its appeal to writers—it gives you a chance to push words around without having to make them mean something.

Exactly.

Thurman's article, "Spreading the Word," is available online only to subscribers (the link above is to a summary, and doesn't at all convey the flavor of Thurman's writing). There's a certain aptness  there (or is it irony?), because the story is mostly about Scrabble's online revival and the copyright battle over Scrabulous, recently reborn as Lexulous. So you'll have to buy or borrow a copy of the magazine, or subscribe to the digital edition, to read it. Not such a bad idea. Meanwhile, here's a passage I liked so much I copied it for you:

Scrabble is enjoying a second heyday. The first was in the early nineteen-fifties, when demand for sets outstripped production. (In 1954, an advertisement in this magazine showed a wedding party stampeding from a church; the bride explains to the baffled clergyman that the toy shop next door has a new shipment.) Between one and two million sets are sold yearly; one in every three American households is reported to own one; and thirty thousand new games are said to begin, somewhere in the world, ever hour. Players of note are a heterogeneous confraternity that includes Barack Obama, the Queen of England, Madonna, Igor Stravinsky, Rosie O'Donnell, Duke Ellington, Nora Ephron, Meadow Soprano, Dustin Hoffman, Justin Timberlake, Chris Martin, Maya Angelou, Carol Burnett, Richard Nixon, and Ludacris, who plays "hip-hop" Scrabble, using words like "crunk," "hizzo," and "pajawa"—a version of the "dirty" Scrabble that was popular with Hollywood swingers fifty years ago. (I heard one of their ancient jokes at the tournament: "'Cervix' is my favorite opening.'")

Three-quarters of that paragraph is quintessential New Yorker: the scholarly use of statistics, the arcane vocabulary ("confraternity"), the long list, the lavish use of commas and semicolons. (In his marvelous book The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing, Ben Yagoda quotes E.B. White, who said the New Yorker was the publication in which "commas ... fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.") Then, in the final two sentences, Thurman winks, cracks her knuckles, and talks dirty. Bingo.

The Rationale

Cintra Wilson, the New York Times's Critical Shopper, extolling the versatility of a $3,290 olive sharkskin party dress she tried on at Oscar de la Renta:

[I]t was a dress you could wear to an illegal drag race, dinner with Henry Kissinger and a gay cruise-ship wedding, all in the same night.

Even if you think you don't care about fashion, you must read Cintra Wilson's columns in the NYT's Thursday Styles section. She's a dazzling, laugh-out-loud hilarious writer and one of the most perceptive social critics around. Fashion may be her beat, but that's like saying Tolstoy covered military strategy. Read what I wrote about her 2007 Times debut.

P.S. And read Cintra's blog, too.

Doing the Right Thing

I'd been nibbling at the edges of a couple of blog posts about language and names, but last night I read an essay by one of TheAtlantic.com's bloggers, and it stopped me in my tracks. So I'm going to send you over there to read what Ta-Nehisi Coates has to say about Barack Obama's Kansas grandparents. Take a minute to study the photo of them, taken (I'm guessing) in the late 1940s, just an average young white couple in the middle of the century, in the middle of the country.

Think about that country's history. About families. About race. About what doing the right thing means.

Think about the fact that it wasn't until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Loving v. Virginia decision (yes, Loving was the plaintiffs' surname), struck down the "anti-miscegenation" laws that prohibited interracial marriage. (California was slightly more advanced. Our state's Supreme Court made such unions legal in 1948.)

Coates writes:

What should be remembered is that, though our racial history is mired in utter disgrace, though the deep cowardice of post-reconstruction haunts us into the 21st century, at any point on the timeline, you can find ordinary white people doing the right thing.

Ordinary people of all colors, I would add.

Be sure to read all the comments, too.

Since he posted it yesterday, Coates's short essay has been flying around the Internet. Read what Orange Tangerine and Too Sense have had to say.

Here's my own take. Unlike most of the adults I associate with today, I went to a high school (large, public, big-city) in which white kids were the minority group. Most of my classmates were African-American; many were Asian-American. Some classmates spoke heavily accented English. I knew guys who looked a lot like Barack Obama and who, like him, went on to law school and public-service careers. One of my closest friends was a light-skinned black girl whose darker-skinned father, a doctor, sometimes accepted chickens as payment from his patients. In homeroom I sat behind a mocha-skinned boy who shared my surname; at a class reunion years later I asked him about it, and he told me the name came from a German-Jewish ancestor named Friedman who had immigrated to Louisiana, where he bought a plantation and took a slave "concubine," as my classmate put it.

I would never presume to know what it's like to live in the United States as a dark-skinned person. But I do know what it's like to live around people of all skin colors and all kinds of family stories. And I know a bit about racism. I had white friends whose parents lied about their street addresses so the kids could attend the mostly white high school in the next district. (Those oh-so-genteel parents referred to the black kids at my high school as "the element," as if they were argon or calcium rather than actual people.) I also had black friends whose parents warned them not to accept invitations to parties at white kids' houses. (My black friends ignored the warnings. We had some excellent parties.)

So when I think about Barack Obama and his ordinary extraordinary life, I don't think in abstractions. I think about people I've known and cared about. And I am pretty damn excited about what this country just might be on the verge of. Or, in fact, has already achieved.