Fritinancy

New on Medium: The zen of everything (and more things)

My latest story for Medium was inspired by Medium’s own Project Zen, which promised to deliver a “zen-like reading experience.” What, I wondered, could that possibly mean? And what does zen mean in all those company names: Zendesk, Zenify, Zenhub, Urban Zen, and on and on? If you too are curious, hop over to The Zen of Everything, and don’t forget to clap (with one hand, if that’s your zen-like jam. And if you want to stay in the flow, here’s a referral link for Medium membership.

A few things I omitted from that story:

A Zen koan from Google

This outdoor ad is composed of simple English words, 10 of which have only one syllable. And yet it’s enigmatic nearly to the point of unintelligibility.

 

“Now goes viral, then scrambles to scale. Next means everyone goes to the launch party.”

 

And pop goes the weasel?

I spotted the sign on Van Ness Avenue, near San Francisco’s Civic Center and some distance from Google headquarters (35 miles away), Pier 48 (four miles away and the site of the Google Cloud Platform Users Conference, which begins today), or any other relevant landmark. It’s a short stroll from the ad to the symphony hall and opera house, but I doubt music aficionados are in the target demographic.

Here, for the benefit of everyone who isn’t fluent in Techlish, is my attempt at decryption:

Flowifying the Name Trends

A mysterious blogger whom I know only as The Least Shrew—her Twitter bio identifies her as Kaylin in Akron, Ohio—has done me the great honor of turning a peculiar research project of mine into a flowchart that she calls “How to Name Your Website.”

 

“Is your brand cutesy? Hardcore? Buddhist? None of the above?” View and embiggen the full chart.

 

That’s right: she studied my Pinterest boards of naming trends—Names That End in -ly, Brand Names with Gratuitous Umlauts, and all the rest—and applied linear logic to them.

Of course, for strict accuracy, the label should be “How to Name Your Company or Product”—this is a lot bigger than websites. And until I told her about The Name Inspector’s Wall of Namifying—the project that inspired my own collections—The Least Shrew hadn’t been aware of it, so all those -ify names—Rockify, Subsify, Wingify, et al.—don’t get proper representation.

But those quibbles aside, it’s a brilliant infographic. I’m deeply flattered.

Thanks to Karen for the tweet that sent me there.

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.

 

Follow-Ups

New sightings in categories I’ve written about previously:

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“Plus.”

Edward Banatt (@ArmaVirumque) recently tweeted a photo of a verbified “plus” he’d seen in the wild:

The menu is from the fast-casual restaurant chain Chili’s, which uses “Plus Up Your Steak” throughout the franchise.

Commercial verbifying of “plus” began at least 70 years ago with Walt Disney; “plus up” has a specific, non-Chili’s meaning in governmental budget negotiations. Read more.

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“Hero.”

Camera company GoPro has been advertising its new Hero3 models. (I’d missed the Hero1 and Hero2, which may not have been promoted as aggressively.) The company’s tagline is “Be a Hero,” which is slightly awkward. (“I am a camera”?) Tip: Never use your product name generically.

The Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, maker of Noah’s bagels, exhorts customers to “Be the Office Hero”:

 

Also spotted: TradeHero, a stock-trading app; and the unrelated Screenhero, “an app that turns any Mac or PC into a completely collaborative environment,” according to a TechCrunch report.

Read more about “hero” worship in branding.

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Comparatives.

You know about Dumberer. Now there’s Smarterer: “over 900 crowdsourced assessments tests to help thousands of recruiters and job seekers around the world quantify any skill in minutes.”

More neo-comparatives here, here, here, here, and here.

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“Zen.”

I recently encountered the term “annoyvation,” one of whose definitions is “an innovation born of a small annoyance.” TicketZen fits into this category. As its home page puts it, “Parking tickets suck. Paying them doesn’t have to.” (Good idea, fuzzy syntax, what with those confusing -ings.)

For more on the Zen of brand naming, see my Pinterest board and “Zen and the Art of Startup Naming” in Bloomberg Businessweek, in which I’m quoted.

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“ -Licious.”

Jessica wrote in her Beauty Marks blog about Samplicio.us (“Simply Better Surveys”). Mr. Verb wrote about “the hilariously named” Englicious, which “aims to be a complete online resource for teaching English grammar in UK secondary schools.” And scientist/educator Marc D. Hauser’s new book about human cruelty is called Evilicious.

More -licious names here (and follow the link in that post for still more -liciousness).

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Dictionary definitions.

Last week I received an email from Democrats.org with the gratuitously syllabified “com•pro•mise (v.)” in the subject line.

 

And yet in both the featured quote and the call to action “compromise” is a noun.

 

 

 

Read more about dictionary definitions in advertising and branding in my Visual Thesaurus column “Branding by Definition.”

Names of Interest

A few bulletins and follow-ups:

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I was interviewed by Businessweek for “Zen and the Art of Startup Naming,” about the proliferation of “zen” names (Zendesk, Zendrive, Zenify, etc.). For more, see my Pinterest board of Zen names.

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Zen names notwithstanding, it looks like Y is the new Z. Last week I wrote about names that substitute Y for I, and I just recently I discovered a new double-Y name, Swayy. It’s a startup that “brings you the best content to easily share with your audience and followers, based on their interests and engagement.” Is the name meant to be pronounced with a plaintive ayy? Or is it just another case of “We rejiggered the spelling to get a cheap domain”?

Speaking of Sway(y), here’s your rhumba interlude.

 

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And speaking of trends, will we ever see the end of the -ly naming fad? Evidently not, if Evidently is any evidence. The Toronto-based “creative content agency” (their phrase) also hops aboard the “you deserve it” bandwagon with this statement on its Facebook page:

There’s an asterisk after “We produce the engaging content your brand deserves”; the clarifying footnote reads “Deserves, in a good way.” Yes, “deserve” can flip its meaning—“Shame on you; you had it coming” or “You’re a winner!”—as I noted in my June column for the Visual Thesaurus, “The Ads We Deserve.”

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I love a name with a good story and a clever double meaning, which is why I’m so pleased by Rich Brilliant Willing, “America’s premier contemporary lighting and furniture design manufacturer.” The company was founded in 2007 by three RISD graduates whose surnames are—pay attention now—Richardson, Brill, and Williams.

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Another name that pleased me: she++, “a Stanford-based community for innovative women in technology.” The name is a pun on the programming language C++. I love the logo, too.

Read more about “plus” in branding in my April column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Shall We Plus?”

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Finally, here’s your bad name of the week: Twibfy, a dopey and nearly unpronounceable name for a company that calls itself “an inspirational platform.” (Translation: Pinterest wannabe.) You won’t find the name story on the Twibfy website, but on Twitter a company spokesperson said it’s an acronym (!) for “The World Is Beautiful From us to You.” (Random capitalization and awkward syntax sic). When you search for “Twibfy,” Google asks whether you mean “Twiggy.” That spells twouble. (Hat tip: Catchword.)

The Zen of Namifying

It’s the trend that refuses to give up the ghost.

The latest namifying example to catch my attention is Zenify, a relaxation drink. The manufacturer was handing out free cans at last weekend’s Brewery Art Walk in Los Angeles.

Brother, can you spare a hyphen?

At least the makers of Zenify have made up a story about their verbifying suffix. It’s poorly articulated, but it’s something:

Zenify is a Zen state of mind, clearing away mental clutter to the power of the Phi(fy), which represents the perfect balance between excess and insufficiency. When you drink Zenify, you will be in a Calm, Sharp & Focused [sic] state and this feeling will allow you to react at peak performance in over-stimulating times. Zenify helps you harness your existing energy without being distracted by your surroundings.

Elsewhere on the site, you learn that by “the power of the Phi(fy)” they’re referring to the “golden ratio” or “golden mean,” a mathematical concept expressed by the Greek letter phi. What does all that have to do with the exponential numeral in “Zen²”? I’m in a state of not-knowingness.

The “zen” part of Zenify is even more pervasive in commerce than the “-ify” suffix. As I wrote in a 2008 column for the Visual Thesaurus, zen often stands in as “a synonym for ordinary nothingness”:

Zen can be combined with mail to describe “an incoming e-mail message with no message or attachments.” Zen spin is a verb meaning “to tell a story without saying anything at all.” And to zen a computing problem means to figure it out in an intuitive flash — perhaps while you’re plugged into the earphones of your ZEN MP3 player, now available from Creative with a 16Gb capacity.

Since then, we’ve seen Zenbook, Zencoder, Zendesk, Zenfolio, Zen Lounge, Zenmap, ZenPayroll, Zenprise, ZenQA, Zenverge, ZENworks, and Mommy Zen. And many more: the USPTO trademark database includes 627 live marks with “zen.”

Zendesk

 

Then there’s The Daily Show’s Moment of Zen, the brief video clip that ends each show. Satori not included; a better title for the segment might be Moment of Eye-Rolling, Forehead-Slapping Bemusement.

For more evidence that the -ify trend has jumped the shark, see my previous posts and the 86 pins on The Name Inspector’s Wall of Namifying.