Word of the week: Jones

Why have brands started jonesing for this common name?

It’s a surname, of course — Jones is the most popular surname in Wales, and common elsewhere in the Anglophone world as well. But lately I’ve been seeing a different Jones in some new (or newish) brand names.

What sparked my interest was

Emily

’s Feed Me newsletter (“I’m Doing an Ad for Little Nicotine” — love that) about a nicotine-replacement company called simply Jones.¹ In the trademark record the company is called HC Jones, but neither of the founders is a Jones; I’m guessing that the initials come from their first names: Hilary and Caroline. The company was founded in 2022 and is based in Brooklyn.

What does Jones sell? “Holisitic [sic²] support to help you reach your goals with nicotine, whatever they may be.” You can “vape a little, less, or not at all.” I don’t smoke, and I already vape “not at all,” so I’m not the target customer for Jones’s nicotine lozenges, which come in expensive-looking packaging emblazoned with an elegant wordmark. I do like the Quitter cap. though. Everyone is some kind of quitter!

Nicotine lozenges from Jones.

There’s no name story on the Jones website, but I bravely deduced one anyway. “Jones” is an American slang term for drug addiction, and by extension any craving. It’s also a verb: to long for, to crave.

Jonathon GREEN

’s Green’s Dictionary of Slang (GdoS) traces it the mid-1960s; the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has a 1962 citation for “Jones: a drug habit.” In those early years, the object of the jonesing was heroin; in the decades that followed jonesing would come to apply to almost anything, from cocaine to ice cream to a hot bath. When Kara Kovalchik looked into the word’s history for Mental Floss, in 2023, she found that “Mr. Jones” had been beatnik slang for heroin in the late 1950s; GDoS cites a source for “Jones Alley in Manhattan where junkies, with their ever-present longing, used to live.”

We may never know the precise origin of jones, but that may not matter for Jones NRT. The bottom line: If you’re jonesing for a hit of nicotine, exchange your jones for a Jones. Nice.

(By the way, I would have guessed that slang “jones” was of 1930s vintage, but in fact that was the era of “yen” (noun: a craving; verb: to crave), which still crops up frequently in crossword puzzles. Yen — from a Cantonese word for “smoke,” and possibly influenced, per GDoS, by “yearn” — has been with us since the early 1900s, when it was associated with opium smoking. The word for the Japanese monetary unit comes from a different Chinese source, yuan, “round object.” The yuan is, of course, current Chinese currency.)

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There’s no jonesing inherent in Jones Road, a makeup brand founded in 2020 by Bobbi Brown, who had achieved fame and fortune with her eponymous label, which she sold to global cosmetics titan Estee Lauder. The Jones Road name came about through a lucky accident. As the website puts it:

If you don’t know, the name Jones Road was not ideated with a team of experts at a round table. Instead, it happened one day when Bobbi and her husband took a drive, she held the phone to guide them and Waze showed her ‘Jones Road’ was the street ahead. It wasn’t where they were supposed to turn, but the name would be the direction where Bobbi was about to bring her new brand.

I find nothing objectionable about that story, or the Jones Road name, but neither one is especially meaningful or enchanting, either. (The repeated vowel sound does give the name a glimmer of musicality.) A team of experts, or at least one expert, might not have been such a terrible idea.

Nevertheless, Jones Road has attracted a fan base, no doubt thanks in part to Ms. Brown’s energetic promotion of the products. (She even writes a Substack newsletter. Sixty bucks a year.) I succumbed to the bombardment of ads for something called Miracle Balm, and I am here to protect you from a similar fate. I tried a couple of shades (like Ms. Brown’s newsletter, not cheap), and found the product to be sticky and difficult to apply, with no favorable results. Needless to say, I am not jonesing for it.

The famous Jones Road Miracle Balm, which worked no miracles on me.

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Let’s finally consider Jones Soda, the oldest of the three brands under my microscope today. As with the other brands, “Jones” is not a founder’s name; the company was launched in Vancouver, BC, in 1995 — it’s now based in Seattle — by Peter Van Stolk and Victor John Penner. Why “Jones,” then? I haven’t found an official answer, so I’m going to guess it’s for the historic “craving” reason.

Jones Green Apple Soda. Jones is famous for its unusual flavors, many of them suggested by customers. I wrote about one of those flavors back in 2007.

Lately Jones Soda has been branching out into other jonesing areas. In late 2023 the company launched the Mary Jones brand of craft sodas, “which derive their THC” — the psychoactive compound in marijuana — “from hemp delta-9” — aka HD9 — “as opposed to cannabis.” The main headline on the Mary Jones website: “Same Jones. More Mary.” Marijuana has been known as “Mary Jane” since at least the 1920s; “Mary Jones” gives the slang term a proprietary twist.

Available only online. Note the backward N in “Jones”; when you mouse over the wordmark on the website, it wiggles.

From the Mary Jones website:

Since 1996, a small team of soda enthusiasts have dedicated themselves to bringing you the best damn cane sugar soda possible and we’re not stopping anytime soon! Now, our mission at Mary Jones is to keep you satisfied and cannabis-infused with flavors that stimulate your palette [sic and also sigh³] and your spirit. Mary Jones is all about real; real people making real good stuff since Pluto was still a planet. Enjoy!

I also note a new trademark application from Jones Soda for Jones+. It’s not a streaming service; the description in the trademark record specifies “nonalcoholic beverages.” But the plus symbol looks a whole lot like the green cross that marks many medical marijuana dispensaries here in California ad elsewhere. Stay tuned!

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There are, of course, many other JONES brands. I’ll mention just two of them here.

Jones New York, the women’s apparel manufacturer — sorry, the “global lifestyle brand rooted in classic styling, redefined for the modern woman” — was launched in 1966 by nobody named Jones. The founder was Sidney Kimmel; the chief designer was Rena Rowan. The reason for the Jones New York name? Maybe it just sounded WASP-y.

Then there’s Jones’n, a cabinetmaking business in St. George, Utah. It comes by its name legitimately: the owner is Ronald Garron Jones. And Mr. Jones has chosen to lean not into cravings but into the ’n element of his business name: One of his projects is a “Dome’n Wine Room”; another is a “Brace’n Tiki.” Well played, Mr. J.

1. I learned on my own that products like Jones’s are called NRT — nicotine-replacement therapy — which has echoes of HRT, or hormone-replacement therapy.

2. A sponsored Google link for Jones is headlined “Discrete [sic!] Quitting Products.” (I took a screenshot.) Thousands for design and SEO, but not one cent for proofreading? Yes, this Sets! My Teeth!! On Edge!!!

3. Why are these people so averse to proofreading? That semicolon after “real” should be a colon or an em dash, by the way.