Author Archives: Angela Tung

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The Name Game: Tate Linden and Stokefire

“Let me be clear; this is going to suck.”

Those are usually the first words out of the mouth of today’s interviewee, Tate Linden, the latest in our series on the art of naming, when he discusses what working with his firm is like. He’s been heading up Stokefire, a strategic branding and advertising firm in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, since 2005. All things considered, he seems to be doing pretty well.

In an industry where fun times, team building, and corporate retreats are the norm, Linden’s approach to developing names and brands tends to raise eyebrows and voices. With an education in philosophy and classical music performance from UCLA and a background in Fortune 500 product management, you might think he’d be mild mannered.

He is not.

He’s constantly poking, prodding, and provoking. A quick scan of his @Thingnamer twitter feed or Stokefire’s blog makes this abundantly clear. He’s not afraid to stir things up or to call into question the very foundation of the industry in which he makes his living.

His Twitter bio reads, “I brand stuff. With… My… MIND.” But we’re hoping he’s not quite so succinct in our interview.

How did you get started in the naming business?

The official version of the story has me figuring out how to brand stuff while employed for a decade by various Fortune 500 firms, and then parting ways to start up my own firm to specialize in it. Unofficially, the things that made me great at branding also made me intolerable as an employee of a conglomerate.

Around 2002 I left and began freelancing, then started up Stokefire in 2005 to focus almost exclusively on the verbal aspects of branding. Today we’re no longer a pure naming agency, but we do take on projects that have naming as one component of the larger brand.

What types of customers and clients do you work with?

Early on a pulse and a bank account were the only qualifiers, and the pulse was just a ‘nice-to-have.’ Now we have a bit more leeway to engage in projects that present the most interesting and unique challenges.

I look for great organizations that may be struggling to better connect with or have an impact on their audiences. We’ve worked with organizations like Google, Motorola, Charles Schwab, Heinz, and the largest caucus of the United States Congress. A couple of the most intriguing projects we’ve taken on have been the branding and advertising of concrete in North America, and a complete overhaul of the US Department of Defense’s DARPA brand.

Oh. And there’s also a living online dictionary whose leader called us a few years ago and asked us to help her team figure out a name. The result of that project was something your readers may know: Wordnik.

How would you describe your naming process?

Pretty easily. “Painful” or “cathartic” both fit well. And I’m not stretching the truth. We put an immense amount of pressure on the name and the people and products that will be defined by it. We do this in order to ensure everything works effectively together and will stand up to the potential real world pressures to come. In my view a fun naming process is one that is likely to result in a name that serves a client well only until something goes wrong. As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” A client is better served by experiencing those blows in private and learning to respond to them than they are by the experience of being TKO’d in public.

Process? We’ve got all sorts of proprietary tools, worksheets, and tables, but so does every branding and naming pro out there. Our stages are roughly in line with what you’d see anywhere else. It’s the guiding philosophies and the way that we apply them to what we do that makes us different and potentially more effective.

As for those philosophies, the one I reference most frequently is based on a quote attributed to Gandhi. He said, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Ultimately Gandhi’s concept of happiness is the framework for all of the brands we craft. It’s not about slathering on a new coat of paint that will begin flake off the moment our team leaves. We strip organizations to the bare wood and help them display what makes them genuinely strong. When we leave there’s no questions from panicked leaders asking how to respond to something because what we’ve left them with is who they genuinely are rather than what Stokefire or their target audience wants them to be.

What are some resources that you use?

When naming, the books I pull down more than any others are my crossword dictionaries. They present words as answers to the questions a strategist might ask rather than as definitions we might not know to look for. Strangely, I’ve not migrated to the web for this resource, though I’m sure there’s something equivalent available.

When I do go online I have a few sites that draw me back time and again. There are some good reverse-lookup dictionaries, and there’s Wordnik’s ability to show how a term is currently being used, and to link to various kinds of related concepts. It’s a site I hit consistently with every project.

My best resource, though, is the network of creative professionals I’ve had the good fortune to work with over the years. Knowing that I can turn to someone like copywriter and naming pro Nancy Friedman when I need perspective or have a project that isn’t in my specialty area is invaluable. Back in the day I even relied on Wordnik’s own Erin McKean to share her lexicographical chops and entice a client to take the right path.

Living resources trump static resources almost every time, and you don’t get much more living than a person. Well, unless they’re dead.

What are some mistakes you’ve seen companies make in terms of naming?

Contrary to what I read in blog chatter and in the news, I think risk avoidance causes more problems than anything else. The number of brands that fail for lack of risk far exceeds the occasional Icarus-like ones that fail for too much of it.

The next time someone tells you that they can’t accept a name with risk, consider asking them if pouring money into a brand that no one notices and no one cares about is more or less risky than investing in one that just might have a shot.

What are some trends you’d sooner see die off?

All of them.

Back in early 2007 I spent about a week analyzing the impact of naming trends on the success of organizations. At that time the trends mostly involved prefixes like the e in eBusiness and the then revolutionary concept of personalization through the use of I, My, or You, as in iPod or YouTube.

My findings suggested that names that followed trends had only a 4% chance of being attached to a successful organization while those that avoided any identifiable trend had a success rate more than 250% higher. I knew copycat naming was a bad idea on principle, but I’d had no idea it was so strongly linked to organizational success.

I’m not suggesting that the trends themselves are causing companies to fail. I think that any organizational leadership that believes following a naming trend would be more effective than discovering a genuine way to express itself has larger problems. A copycat name is like a warning beacon to clients and investors that the organizational leadership views their product as a commodity, takes shortcuts, lacks strategic vision, and isn’t comfortable in their own skin.

Other than that, though, it’s no big deal.

Any last words?

Just that I’m honored to be included with the likes of Nancy Friedman, Anthony Shore, and the : : CRONAN : : crew; a talented group by any measure.

Also. It was mostly pain free. So, thanks Wordnik!

After our interview but before publication we learned that Michael Cronan passed away and reached out to Tate for comment.

I met Michael very briefly around 2006 and recall being awed by how his work and thinking consistently avoided trends, and even started them on more than one occasion. His passing this New Year’s Day was a blow to the identity industry, and indescribably difficult for the friends, family and peers that battled cancer alongside him for the past five years.

If Gandhi was right and happiness truly is “when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony,” then from my vantage point, even considering his more recent health battle, Michael looks to have led a wonderfully happy life.

To my way of thinking there’s no higher praise a man can earn.

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Letter Writing Week Contest: A Letter from Your Future Self

Happy Letter Writing Week!

This week in celebration, instead of our usual Word of the Day Perfect Tweet Challenge (sorry twooshers!), we’ll be holding a special contest.

You may have heard of Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year Old Self. We’re asking you to write a letter from your future self.

This could be from the near future (“Don’t have Mexican on Thursday”) or the far (“The jet packs are awesome. Don’t bother exercising”). The only requirement is that your “letter” fits in a single tweet, with or without the hashtag #futureletter. If you don’t use the hashtag, @ us the tweet or a link to the tweet.

The contest will run from today through Friday the weekend. On Monday we’ll post our favorites right here.

In the meantime, enjoy our post on different types of letters and notes.

Happy letter writing! Or tweeting, we should say.

[Photo: stock.xchng]

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Best of Language Blog Roundup 2012

WORD

WORD by Xuilla

Earlier this week we shared our favorite TV words of 2012. Today, we present to you our favorite language stories of the year.

Blah people

Rick Santorum kicked off 2012 with some comments about (cough) blah people. Mark Liberman took a closer look.

Apostrophe catastrophe!

In slightly less controversial news, the United Kingdom’s “largest high street bookseller,” Waterstone’s, decided to forgo an apostrophe and become Waterstones. Stan Carey deemed the decision “reasonable” and rounded up some great reactions. At Language Log, Mark Liberman poked fun at this “apostropocalypse,” while Geoff Pullum clarified some muddled apostrophe arguments and wondered about the apostrophe and sound.

Lin-sane linguistics

February was all about Jeremy Lin and the linguistics of Lin-sanity, as Ben Zimmer put it. The American Dialect Society went as far as to deem Linsanity a possible contender for 2012 word of the year, but after Lin fell out of the spotlight, it seemed Linsanity, though not Lin’s career, was over, at least for finicky linguists.

The other four-letter word

Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh celebrated the leap year by calling law student and women’s right activist Sandra Fluke a “slut,” then faux-pologizing for it. Johnson examined Limbaugh’s onomatapology while at NPR, Geoff Nunberg took a look that four-letter word in question.

Passings

We were saddened by the passing of several great authors this year, including Helen Gurley Brown, Maeve Binchy, Nora Ephron, Adrienne Rich, Encyclopedia Brown author Donald Sobol, Ray Bradbury, Berenstain Bears co-creator Jan Berenstain, and beloved children’s author Maurice Sendak. Some delightful interviews from The Colbert Report helped us miss Sendak a little less (part 1, part 2, and the uncensored outtakes).

See here for more notable author passings.

English language wars and anti-Americanisms

As the weather warmed, an English language war heated up between a couple of New Yorker prescriptivists and, it seemed, all the descriptivists, including Ben Zimmer, Nancy Friedman, Christopher Shea at The Wall Street Journal, Ben Trawick-Smith at Dialect Blog, and Johnson at The Economist.

Later, September saw some (unnecessary, we thought) anti-Americanisms. But luckily, Stan Carey and Robert Lane Greene had a thing or two to say about that.

Jubilympics and brand police

June was a big month for London with both the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics (hence, Jubilympics). Meanwhile, the brand police were busy making sure ambush marketers didn’t get too olympic about their advertising.

Higgs boson metaphors

In early July, scientists found a new subatomic particle, the Higgs boson, as “imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.” What this means, probably only other theoretical physicists know, but at least we got lots of Higgs boson metaphors, including the smoking duck variety.

The modesty of The New York Times

The New York Times failed in taboo avoidance when they described the noun cocksuckers as “Offensive Adjective Inappropriate for Family Newspaper.” As Arnold Zwicky wrote, “Adjective, noun, who really cares?” The NYT then refused to print the name of the website, STFU Parents, resulting in STFU-gate, which Zwicky also discussed, along with the seemingly new NYT modesty.

Stormy words

October closed with superstorm Sandy wreaking havoc on Cuba, Haiti, and much of the U.S. northeast. At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal helped us sort the fake Sandy pictures from the real, while Jen Doll provided a dictionary of storm words.

The language of politics

The latter half of 2012 was dominated by the U.S. Presidential election. The campaign team of Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, made some spelling errors. A new meme was born out of the Republican National Convention.

After the Vice Presidential debates, we got a lot of malarkey, my friend, from Ben Zimmer, Jen Doll, and Nancy Friedman, as well as a sketchy deal, binders and barb words, binders full of women, and binder reviews. Meanwhile, after the Presidential debate, President Obama came up with a wit of the staircase, and later coined a new disorder.

We also learned where red states and blue states come from; the semantics of voting and standing in (or is it “on”?) line; a razor-tight mixed metaphor; and the We are all the X now trope.

“Lies! Murder! Lexicography!”

Finally, the headline of Ben Zimmer’s piece in The New York Times sums up the last big language story of the year. A former Oxford English Dictionary editor deleted a bunch of words and it was terrible, but no, not really. We mean, really not really.

Whew, that’s 2012 in a language blog nutshell. See you next year!

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Xuilla]

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The Words of Rudyard Kipling

Cecil Aldin (1870-1935) - Mowgli, Bagheera and Chil (logo illustration for Letting In the Jungle by Rudyard Kipling, Pall Mall Budget, 13 December 1894 Christmas Number)

Photo by ketrin1407

This Sunday marks the 147th anniversary of the birth of British writer Rudyard Kipling. The author of The Jungle Book was highly prolific, penning numerous short stories and poems, and three novels. Along the way, he coined and popularized quite a few words. Here are 10 of our favorites.

it

“’Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women’ll stay in a man’s memory if they once walked down a street.”

Rudyard Kipling, Traffics and Discoveries, 1904

Kipling’s is the earliest recorded use of it meaning “sex appeal (especially in a woman).” The term was later popularized by British novelist and scriptwriter Elinor Glyn in her 1927 novel, It. Glyn went on to help “make a star of actress Clara Bow for whom she coined the sobriquet ‘the It girl’.”

just-so story

“But these days, some of the most frequent and pungent disparagements of Kipling have been delivered not by defenders of political correctness, or even by the gatekeepers of literary greatness, but by, of all people, biologists, for whom ‘just-so story’ has become a phrase of opprobrium.”

David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, “How the Scientist Got His Ideas,” The Chronicle Review, January 3, 2010

A just-so story is “a story that cannot be proven or disproven, used as an explanation of a current state of affairs.” The phrase comes from Kipling’s Just-So Stories, “fictional and deliberately fanciful tales for children, in which the stories pretend to explain animal characteristics, such as the origin of the spots on the leopard.”

kissage

“Ere they hewed the Sphinx’s visage
Favoritism governed kissage,
Even as it does in this age.”

Rudyard Kipling, Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads, 1922

Kissage, another word for kissing, may have regained popularity from its usage in a 1998 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “It’s like, freeze frame. Willow kissage – but I’m not gonna kiss you.”

grinch

“It’s woe to bend the stubborn back
Above the grinching quern,
It’s woe to hear the leg bar clack
And jingle when I turn!”

Rudyard Kipling, “The Lament of the Border Cattle Thief,” Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, 1897

Grinch in this context means “to make a harsh grating noise,” says the Oxford English Dictionary, and may be related to the French grincer, “to grate, creek, screech.”

Related to grincer is grincheux, a cranky person. Some speculate that Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, may have been influenced by grincheux when coming up with the name of that ultimate holiday killjoy.

old-school tie

“After which, it is only fair to tell you that I tied up my platoon on parade this morning owing to an exalted mentality which for the moment (I was thinking over the moral significance of Old School ties and the British social fabric) prevented me from distinguishing between my left hand and my right.”

Rudyard Kipling, Limits and Renewals, 1932

Old-school tie refers to “a necktie that has the colors of a British public school”; “the upper-middle-class solidarity and system of mutual assistance attributed to alumni of British public schools”; and “the narrow clannish attitudes characteristic of the members of a clique.”

Old school, meaning “of the old school; of earlier times; as originally or formerly established, propounded, or professed; old or old-fashioned,” is much older, originating around 1749, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

overseas

“All things considered, there are only two kinds of men in the world—those that stay at home and those that do not. The second are the most interesting. Some day a man will bethink himself and write a book about the breed in a book called ‘The Book of the Overseas Club,’ for it is at the clubhouses all the way from Aden to Yokohama that the life of the Outside Men is best seen and their talk is best heard.”

Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Travel, 1920

Kipling’s usage is the earliest recorded of this meaning of overseas: “of, relating to, originating in, or situated in countries across the sea.”

Overseas Chinese refers to “a person or people of Chinese ethnicity, living in a non-Chinese country.” Overseas experience, says the OED, is either “experience of life and culture in an overseas country,” or a New Zealand term for “an overseas working holiday, usually to Britain or Europe, undertaken by young New Zealanders and freq. considered as a virtually obligatory part of an informal education.”

penny-farthing

“Remembering what she had done, it was pleasant to watch her unhappiness, and the penny-farthing attempts she made to hide it from the Station.”

Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888

Penny-farthing, or pennyfarthing, meaning “ineffective,” was formed by combining penny and farthing, “an English piece of money equal to one fourth of a penny,” says the Online Etymology Dictionary, “the two together making but a small sum.”

Penny-farthing, “an early bicycle having a large front wheel and much smaller rear one” (perhaps named for the different sizes of the coins), came about later in 1927.

slack-jawed

“Look you, I have noticed in my long life that those who eternally break in upon Those Above with complaints and reports and bellowings and weepings are presently sent for in haste, as our Colonel used to send for slack-jawed down-country men who talked too much.”

Rudyard Kipling, Kim, 1901

Slack-jawed means “with the mouth in an open position and the jaw hanging loosely, especially as indicating bewilderment or astonishment,” or “unsophisticated or unthinking; dimwitted in appearance.”

Cletus Spuckler, aka “Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel,” is a stereotypical redneck character on the animated TV series, The Simpsons.

squiggly

“The squiggly things on the Parsee’s hat are the rays of the sun reflected in more-than-oriental splendour, because if I had real rays they would have filled up all the picture.”

Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories, 1907

Squiggly may come from the older squiggle, which originally meant “to work wavy or intricate embroidery,” according to the OED, before it came to mean, more commonly, “to squirm and wriggle,” or “to move about like an eel.”

Svengali

“’I’m glad Zvengali‘s back where he belongs.”

Rudyard Kipling, A Diversity of Creatures, 1917

A Svengali is “a person who, with evil intent, tries to persuade another to do what is desired,” and is named for Svengali, “the hypnotist villain” in the 1894 novel Trilby by George du Maurier.

Kipling’s is the first recorded figurative use of Svengali. In the quote, the speaker is referring to “a dog with a mesmeric stare,” says the OED.

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by ketrin1407]

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Best of Word Soup 2012: TV Word Love

bob's television dream

bob's television dream, by Robert Couse-Baker

Welcome to the first annual Wordnik Word Soup Awards!

All year we’ve been collecting interesting, hilarious, ridiculous, and sometimes NSFW words from TV, and now it’s time to award the best of the best.

Best Use of a Grammar Term on the Comedy Channel

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, anaphor

“You didn’t build that,” proclaimed President Obama during a campaign speech this July, but that wasn’t all he said. Unfortunately, as Stewart stated, by saying “you didn’t build that,” Obama created confusion by “using the demonstrative singular pronoun, ‘that’ instead of the plural anaphor, ‘those,’ which of course would be referring to the antecedent, ‘roads and bridges’,” all of which promptly gave Stewart a grammar wedgie.

Best Use of a Controversial Word on a Comedy

30 Rock, transvaginal

Some states have tried to make transvaginal ultrasounds required for women having abortions. “You’re being so transvaginal right now,” Liz told Jack regarding his invasiveness about her decision to adopt or remain childless.

Best Made-Up German Word

Perfektenschlage, The Office

Fans of The Office know that Dwight Schrute is of German ancestry, and according to Dunder Mifflin’s top salesman, Perfektenschlage is “when everything in a man’s life comes together perfectly.” The second meaning is “perfect pork anus.”

Runner-up: Bildenkinder, for landlords, the feeling that building residents are like biological children.

Best Use of a French Swear Word

Mad Men, calice

Megan uttered this Québécois French swear word when her surprise birthday party for Don was spoiled. According to Slate, calice “has its origins in Roman Catholic ritual—it’s the communion chalice.”

Best Eponym

Ferris Buellerian, Community

This was a tough decision. There was 30 Rock’s normal-Al, the opposite of Weird Al, and their equally hilarious reverse-Urkel, to de-nerdify a black nerd. In the end we went with Community’s Ferris Buellerian – “Winger’s critics suggest he merely improvised hot-button patriotic dogma in a Ferris Buellerian attempt to delay school work” – a unique usage of the hooky-playing character.

Best Name for a Made-Up Rebel Movement

Sanguinista, True Blood

We found Sanguinista to be a clever and appropriate name for a faction of rebel vampires. The word is a blend of sanguine, “bloodthirsty; bloody,” and Sandinista of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Runner-up: Lauffeuer, Grimm. Lauffeuer translates from the German as “wildfire.”

Best Made-Up Psychological Disorder

accusational opposition disorder, Community

Leave it to psych major Britta to come up a pseudo-psych term for disagreeing or arguing with someone. The runner-up is also from Community: hypernarcissosis, excessive narcissism or love and admiration for oneself, which apparently plagues the vain Jeff Winger.

Most Ridiculous Portmanteau

unwindulax, 30 Rock

“We’re just camping out and unwindulaxing,” says one of Jenna’s fans. In October, we noted that the word is a blend of unwind and relax, but where does that ‘u’ come from? Who knows and who cares? Just unwindulax and enjoy the word.

Best Use of Portmanteaus – TIE

The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Stewart and Colbert “puninator” was hard at work this year what with generating a proliferation of puns, portmeanteaus, and blends.

There was sanitipsy, a blend of sanitizer and tipsy, based on a report that teens drink hand sanitizer to get drunk; assassitunity, using the assassination of Osama bin Laden as a PR opportunity; gaffestronomist, those who measure political gaffes “using the exact science of gaffestronomy,” according to Stewart; and many more.

Best Show for Eggcorns

Raising Hope

An eggcorn is a malapropism that makes sense to the speaker, and Virginia of Raising Hope is the Queen of the Eggcorn. “I was immediately inquizzical of this mystery,” she has said. What’s the doctor who examines ladyparts? A vaginacologist of course. And that thing that repeats itself by one’s own doing? “A self-refilling prophecy,” says Virginia.

Most Educational Show About Current Events That Wasn’t The Daily Show or The Colbert Report

The Newsroom

Sure, The Newsroom was maddening in a lot of ways (all that yelling, for instance), but we did learn a thing or two. We learned that EKIA stands for “Enemy Killed in Action,” and that RINO isn’t an ungulate but a “Republican in Name Only.” We learned about the Glass-Steagall Act and the story behind the greater fool. Now if only Aaron Sorkin would learn to stop calling women girls.

Best Made-Up Sex Slang

30 Rock

This is the semi-NSFW part. While a nooner for some means sex at lunchtime, for Liz Lemon it means “having pancakes for lunch.” Normalling is a fetish for kinky Jenna and Paul: behaving like a “normal” couple. A sexual walkabout is like a walkabout only while, um, “doing every depraved thing [one] can think of with as many people as [one] can,” according to Jenna.

Bang brothers are men who have slept with the same woman (see also Eskimo brothers). Pokemoning means having a wide variety of lovers, as in the video game in which one must collect “all of the available Pokémon species.” A synonym is Great Escaping. Finally, a sex-idiot is is an intellectually challenged yet attractive person used for the sole purpose of having sex.

What are some of your choices for noteworthy words from TV?

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Robert Couse-Baker]