July linkstack

Medicaid names, Coca-Cola branding, Trump the namer, and more.

Greetings to new subscribers and followers, and welcome back to the linkstack, a monthly roundup of news about words, brands, and the language of commerce from Substack and beyond. Here’s the June linkstack, where you’ll find a pathway to previous installments.

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Medicaid names

“Prepare for the upcoming storm once people on Medicaid lose insurance coverage,” writes brand consultant Mark Prus. “The name is different in each state and it is not always called ‘Medicaid.’” Here’s a gift link to a New York Times article about the $1 trillion in federal Medicaid spending cuts signed into law by President Trump this month. And here’s the American Council on Aging’s state-by-state list of alternate names for Medicaid. Some of the more distinctive: Turquoise Care (New Mexico), STAR+PLUS (Texas), Apple Health (Washington), and Healthy Connections (South Carolina). In California it’s Medi-Cal, a name I admire but which I worry may be insufficiently transparent.

Thought of train

Other countries have trains, but only North American trains have cabooses (cabeese?). James Harbeck tracks the history and etymology of the word. (Sesquiotic)

Pyramid scheme

San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid — widely loathed when it was completed in 1972, now a beloved landmark — hasn’t housed the Transamerica Corporation since 1999, when headquarters were moved to Baltimore. But the building’s silhouette still serves as Transamerica’s logo, because although Transamerica no longer owns the physical building, it does own registered trademarks for the image. But that’s not all: Transamerica also has a trademark registration for the actual building. (Yes, buildings can be trademarks.) In fact, the intention from the get-go was to have the pyramid serve not merely as office space but as a brand symbol. (Roman Mars’s Guide to San Francisco, 99% Invisible podcast)

Baltimore company, San Francisco building: Current Transamerica logo, announced in January 2025.

Coke is for squares

In 1969, Coca-Cola — by then an 83-year-old company — made a design decision that permanently changed the way the brand was perceived. And it named that choice for a different brand: “The overhaul was nicknamed Project Arden as a nod to the Elizabeth Arden beauty salon, best known at the time for its signature fire engine–red front door. Project Arden’s core visual system, the simple-yet-versatile Arden Square, would become one of the most influential branding assets of all time.” (Grace Snelling for Fast Company)

The Arden Square.

Meddler-in-chief

It took years from the Washington football team and the Cleveland baseball team to finally change their offensive brands (Redskins and Indians, respectively). On July 20, Donald Trump, “whose quest to make the intellectual and public-service classes miserable is a cornerstone of his presidency,” demanded on social media that both teams revert to their old names, and threatened to “not make a deal” with the Washington Commanders, né Redskins, for a D.C. stadium if they fail to fall in line. “Trump is unlikely to get anywhere with his demands,” writes Beau Dure (The Guardian). “The deal to build a new stadium for the Commanders isn’t his to make — in fact, it’s mostly being made without him” (MSNBC). As for Cleveland, “We've gotten the opportunity to build the brand as the Guardians over the last four years and are excited about the future,” the team’s president of baseball operations told the press (USA Today).

Cleveland Guardians wordmark.

Read my 2014 blog post about the Redskins and the Indians (“Troubled Names”), and my 2021 update on the new Guardians name (“Cleveland’s Baseball Team Is Now the Guardians”).

Punctuation punches back

The em dash responds to the AI allegations: “Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here. I am not novel. I’m the cigarette you keep saying you’ll quit.” (Greg Mania for McSweeney’s)

Bonus punctuation humor:

If u cn rd ths

“The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a radical, little-known educational experiment trialled in British schools (and in other English-speaking countries) during the 1960s and 70s. Billed as a way to help children learn to read faster by making spelling more phonetically intuitive, it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight. And then it vanished without explanation.” (The Guardian, via Stan Carey)

New words

The OED added dozens of words in June, including apols (“apologies”), baguazhang (“a traditional Chinese martial art, characterized by footwork that describes a circle, and by strikes with the palm of the hand”), and declinism (“The belief that a particular country, society, institution, etc., is in a state of significant, and possibly irreversible, decline”). (OED press release)

I wrote about declinism back in 2011. Things have declined since then.

And here’s a new word I learned via Erin McKean’s delightful “Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things”: A squatchee is the button on top of a baseball cap. (Uni Watch) The word is “a rare example of a sniglet breaking containment,” Erin notes. What’s a sniglet? Glad you asked.

I spy some four-letter words

Espionage novels that give a fuck about profanity: three posts by Michael Adams for the Strong Language blog about Mick Herron’s “Slow Horses” series. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Icky words

Do you detest the sounds of certain words? There’s a word for your condition: misophonia. Jake Eaton breaks it down for The Ick. (“The ‘Moist’ Mind Virus)

A new name: ETA TBD

Poor Oakland International Airport: It tried, clumsily, to change its name in 2023. When SFO across the bay lodged a strong legal objection, OAK tried again (press release, July 10). Will “Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport” fly? Not if SFO has its way. (Mercury-News, July 11)

Here’s my post about the original name change: