Naming briefs #3

More short takes on names of note.

In the naming business, a naming brief is a detailed written document that serves as a road map for name development and legal review. (Read more about the naming brief here.) The naming briefs in this newsletter are something else: short reports on names I’ve spotted in the wild or in my reading. Third in a series; read Naming Briefs #1; read Naming Briefs #2. Have you come across an interesting company or product name you’d like me to critique? Let me know in a comment.

I’m stepping cautiously outside my usual sphere in this edition of Naming Briefs because two of the three names are UK brands that have little or no traction in North America. Bold? Foolhardy? You decide.

Calm Amongst the Chaos.

Here’s the rule: Use among (or “amongst” if you can’t resist sounding pretentious, or British¹) with plural countable nouns and amid (or amidst, grrrr) with non-countable nouns: I stand among[st] giants. We paused amid[st] the bustle — or the chaos. This rule is equally valid in the U.K., where Calm Amongst the Chaos is ungrammatically based, and in the U.S. So while I applaud the brand’s commitment to bringing “calm and carefully considered clothes” to the shopping public — even if those clothes are considerably more shapeless than I’d personally prefer — the name makes me extremely un-calm amid the chaos.

Calm Amongst (grrrr) the Chaos wordmark.

Fussy.

Here’s another U.K. brand. I love the concept behind Fussy natural deodorant: refillable, compostable deodorant tubes that cut down on plastic waste. But I’m the fence about the name for a couple of reasons. Yes, it’s short and memorable. (And who knows, maybe it’s a youthful nod to -ussy, the suffix that won the American Dialect Society’s word of the year contest for 2022.) But fussy comes packed with negative connotations: Throughout the English-speaking world it means “busy about trifles,” “full of petty details,” “overly ornate” (when said of clothing or furnishings), and “irritable and whiny” (when said of a baby). Fuss is not something you want customers thinking about when they place an order, and fussy is one letter removed from fusty, which means stale-smelling. Not a good association for a deodorant!

Then again, sometimes a word with negative meanings can be turned on its head to become a successful brand name: Think of Banana Republic or Virgin Airlines. So I’m willing to maintain an open mind.

Fussy deodorant. The brand launched with help from a 2020 Kickstarter campaign; backers were called “fussers” (lower case).

But hold on, because I spot another red flag: There’s a century-old deodorant brand called Tussy whose name is one letter removed from Fussy’s. The Tussy name has a delightful origin story: In the 16th century a tussy was a nosegay or small bouquet of flowers, and over the years the reduplicative form tussy-mussy (sometimes spelled tussie-mussie) became popular. (I learned about tussy-mussies when I wrote copy for a flower catalog, so the term still has some currency.) I haven’t been able to confirm that Tussy is sold in the U.K. or whether Fussy has designs on the North American market, so this may be a non-issue. Still, the names’ similarity would worry me.

I’m going to be a little fussy myself and complain about how the Fussy name is employed on the brand’s website. While “We’re fussy for you and the planet” puts a positive spin on fussy — suggesting, perhaps, “fastidious” — it also downgrades the brand name to a lower-case modifier, something trademark lawyers strongly discourage, because it genericizes the name. I also don’t like the comma splice in the product copy: “Choose your case, it comes in five eye-popping colours.” I’d prefer a colon or an em dash.² And I’m unhappy that reviewers’ glaring misspellings — one misspelled “deodorant,” another misspelled the brand name (as “Fuzzy!”) — appears on the website. It’s totally okay to make minor corrections and spare both the customer and your brand the embarrassment.

Thanks to Luena Amaral of LAAM Editorial for bringing this brand name to my attention in a LinkedIn post. Have I mentioned that LinkedIn is fun now? .

Piecemeal Vintage.

Once again I bow to

Blackbird Spyplane

, arbiters of groovy stuff, for introducing me to Piecemeal Vintage, a home-furnishings store right here in my hometown of Oakland, California. Talk about fussy: This shop, whose definition of vintage leans toward mid-century modern, is open only on Sundays from noon to 4 “or by appointment.”

But even more than attitude (and groovy stuff), what entranced me about PV was that word piecemeal, which sent me down a delightful etymological rabbit hole.

How cool is the Piecemeal wordmark?!

Since the early 1300s piecemeal has meant “piece by piece” or “one piece at a time.” That explains the piece element. What about that -meal? Are we supposed to eat the pieces?

In a sense, yes. The meal we now think of as breakfast, lunch, or dinner originally meant “an appointed time” or “an occasion.” Here’s an explanation from Etymonline:

[F]rom Old English mæl, Anglian mēl, "fixed time, occasion; a meal," from Proto-Germanic *mela- (source also of Old Frisian mel "time;" Middle Dutch mael, Dutch maal "time; meal;" Old Norse mal "measure, time, meal;" German Mal "time," Mahl "meal;" Gothic mel "time, hour"), from PIE *me-lo-, from root *me- (2) "to measure."

(That’s not the same mæl we see in maelstrom, by the way: That word comes into English from Dutch elements meaning “to grind” — compare “mill” — and “stream.”)

Old English mæl was once a fairly common suffix: styccemælum meant “bit by bit” and gearmælum meant “year by year.” Besides piecemeal, the only remnant we still see today — and not often — is inchmeal, which means “inch by inch.”

1. Alas, amongst and amidst (and, fer cryin’ out loud, whilst) have been making a perverse comeback in the U.S. over the last couple of decades. Ben Yagoda investigated the trend in a 2013 essay for Lexicon Valley; he called it a “Runyon-correction,” which I love.

2. I’ve noticed that British writers and editors are far more tolerant of comma splices — sometimes called run-on sentences — than we Yanks are.