November linkstack
New names for birds, odd nicknames for sneakers, early WotYs, and more
But first, a few words about me
Back in August I wrote about starting work on a short documentary film about six swimmers, all over the age of 70, who successfully swam the English Channel as a relay team. Here’s the progress report I promised back then: The film has a title — 21 Miles, Six Feet, and 439 Years — and a three-minute teaser, available to view on YouTube. We hope to complete the film by early 2024.
Over on Medium I recently published “Those Crazy Drug Names” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Milk’.” Those links bypass the paywall; if you’d like to read all of my stories (82 so far), plus stories by thousands of other writers, all you need is one $50-a-year Medium membership.
Speaking of milk and “milk”
The milk wars test the power of marketing as a climate solution (AdWeek)
What to call the not-meat meat?
New research supports the term “cultivated meat.” (Good Foot Institute; h/t Anthony Shore)
One really excellent long read
Caity Weaver’s story for the New York Times Magazine about Stephanie Courtney, who has been portraying the chirpy and only slightly annoying “Flo” for Progressive Insurance since 2008, is the best profile, and the best piece about branding, that I’ve read in a long time. Courtney was 37 (“a number unheard of in Hollywood”) and “so stinkin’ broke” when she auditioned for her first Progressive commercial; today, according to Progressive’s chief marketing officer, 99 percent of consumers “know Flo” and the company’s stock price has risen from $15 to $157.67. (Gift link)
Just for kicks
The stories behind sneaker nicknames: “As ‘the culture’ has evolved, ‘sneakerheads’ have developed and coalesced around unique nicknames for various shoe models, colorways, and collaborations. These nicknames can be a reflection of the shoe’s design, history, or cultural significance. Some pairs are even released with a pre-established nickname.” (A Hundred Monkeys)
The year in words and names
Kraft Real Mayo made a bold attempt to encourage Merriam-Webster to make moist the word of the year for 2023, but the dictionary held its (dry) ground, instead selecting authentic — “the term for something we’re thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more than ever.” Authentic scored high among dictionary look-ups, likely because “with the rise of artificial intelligence—and its impact on deepfake videos, actors’ contracts, academic honesty, and a vast number of other topics—the line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ has become increasingly blurred.”
Across the pond, Cambridge Dictionary named hallucinate its word of the year for 2023. “AI tools, especially those using large language models (LLMs), have proven capable of generating plausible prose,” the dictionary explained, “but they often do so using false, misleading or made-up ‘facts’. They ‘hallucinate’ in a confident and sometimes believable manner.” I wrote about this sort of “hallucination” in February.
Still to come: the American Dialect Society’s word-of-the-year vote at the society’s annual conference in early January. You can submit your own nominations online (be sure to read the rules and the lists of past nominees and winners).
I’ll be posting my own WotY nominations in mid-December; if you have suggestions, leave a comment below! You can see my 2022 WotY nominations here; scroll down for earlier WotY posts (all the way back to 2009!). Related: My January 2023 story for Medium about word-of-the-year contests. (Friend link)
And let’s not forget name-of-the-year contests. There’s already a lively discussion over at the Namerology blog, where “Barbie,” “Elon,” and “Xitter” are among the contenders for the NotY crown. Leave a comment there to submit your own nomination.
Worst new name of 2023?
How do you solve a problem like Solventum? “The brand naming brief must have called for a cold, distant, uncaring, inhuman, faceless megacorp, dark void vibe. A bold choice for a healthcare company.” (Igor)
Naming trend: “Citizen”
Citizen Hotel, Citizen Eatery, Citizen Ink, The Citizenry: “We’re all ‘citizens’ in the republic of branding,” reports Karen Loew. (New York Times gift link, h/t Mark Prus)
Design trend: Abandoning cursive
Brands keep dumping their script logos. Which brand will be next? Johnson & Johnson and Eddie Bauer are the most recent cursive quitters, but James I. Bowie reports for Fast Company that script wordmarks will survive “for as long as their owners perceive that the humanity, authenticity, and personality that they communicate outweigh their connotations of outdatedness and decrepitude.”
Renaming: yea or nein?
Dozens of birds, including ones named after white supremacists, are being renamed. The American Ornithological Society announced on November 1 that it will “remove names given to North American birds in honor of people and replace them with monikers that better describe their plumage and other characteristics.” (Yahoo News) In a similar vein, I argued a few years ago that buildings shouldn’t be named after people (even nice people).
Speaking of new names for birds, Washington Post humor columnist Alexandra Petri has a few suggestions. “Bluebirds: Now, this is ridiculous. Who let them get away with ‘bluebird’? Also, there are blue birds that aren’t bluebirds. This name is a disaster.” (Gift link)
Germans recoil at push to rename “Anne Frank” day care. The proposed new name, “World Explorer,” was said to be “more child friendly.” (New York Times gift link)
A hot domain
AI fever turns Anguilla’s “.ai” domain into a digital gold mine. The tiny Caribbean nation — population 15,753 — may bring in $30 million this year from domain sales. The figure in 2021 was just $7.4 million. (Ars Technica)
Meet Steve, the proton arc
When it looks a little like an aurora but is something entirely different, what do you call it? Some citizen scientists in Alberta, Canada, dubbed the phenomenon — a “visually bright, narrow, and structured” proton arc — the Steve, a name they borrowed from the 2006 animated film Over the Hedge, “in which a group of animals are frightened by a towering leafy bush and decide to refer to it as Steve.” Inevitably, perhaps, the astral Steve became a backronym: Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. (CNN, via Language Hat)
Emoji on the way
A leafless tree, a fingerprint, and a harp are among the new emoji that will be introduced in 2025. —
, Did Someone Say Emoji?The golden age of gadget catalogs
“The photos. The copy. The gadgets. The pitch. There was so much to take in. That’s the DAK Catalog.” (Cabel.com, h/t Kottke)
So long for now, and don’t forget your belongings
The untold story of NY’s celebrity taxi program by
(no relation), in which I learned the term “cab face.”
For decursivization, is Madewell next?