Mike Pope on Facebook yesterday, about this banner on e-mail that had come to him:
— MP: I mean, wtf is “Zix®” and why would this banner across an email in any way reassure me about anything?
Followed by this exchange between Mike and me:
— AZ > MP: Ordinarily, I’d expect you to look it up yourself, but as a Z-person (and indeed as Zot, son of Zip), I had to check it out myself. To discover that …
Zix Email Encryption is now Webroot™ Advanced Email Encryption powered by Zix™
— MP > AZ: I CAN look it up, but I’m playing the part of Ordinary Email User here, for whom something like this banner is … nothing. … If I were spoofing/phishing emails, it would be very easy to add this same banner to my outbound emails to provide an illusion of security.
I take Mike’s point here, but will now forge on to something completely different, in a substantial alphabetic digression inspired by the trade name Zix, which manages to pack two association-rich letters from the end of the alphabet, Z and X, into a monosyllable.
But first, a note that the encryption company was not the first to see the imaginative potential in a Z…X name.
A modern fairy tale. A predecessor in the Z…X department, from 120 years ago. From Wikipedia:
Queen Zixi of Ix, or The Story of the Magic Cloak, is a children’s book written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Frederick Richardson. It was originally serialized in the early 20th-century American children’s magazine St. Nicholas from November 1904 to October 1905, and was published in book form later in 1905 by The Century Company. The events of the book alternate between Noland and Ix, two neighboring regions to the Land of Oz. Baum himself commented this was the best book he had yet written. In a letter to his eldest son, Frank Joslyn Baum, he said it was “nearer to the “old-fashioned” fairy tale than anything I have yet accomplished,” and in many respects, it adheres more closely to the fairy tale structure than the Oz books.
The plot (summarized at length in the Wikipedia article) turns on a magic object and the granting of wishes (so it’s reminiscent of the Aladdin story from One Thousand and One Night), but it’s way more convoluted than ordinary fairy tales and more complex even than Gilbert & Sullivan’s often-intricate plots, including that of their 1882 fairy opera Iolanthe, while lacking Iolanthe‘s explicit social and political satire.
Footnote. To as Zot, son of Zip above.
Zot — a play on the Z of my family name, from the anteater’s slurping noise in the B.C. comic strip — was, briefly, my nickname in college. And Zip — again, a play on the family name, this time a tribute to the bearer’s amiable get-up-and-go — was my father’s nickname in college, and then he stuck with it throughout his life (my mother called him Zip); he was first-generation American, with a distinctly foreign last name and an old-fashioned, “funny” first name, so the monosyllabic Zip conjured up a colorful American (male) identity that suited him.
Z…X names. English has only one monosyllabic word spelled Z…X (an obscure term that for most of us comes up only in crossword puzzles and Scrabble games):
zax (also sax) ‘a small tool for cutting roof slates’ (with a BrE variant zex)
Otherwise, Z…X items are proper names and are spelled with initial caps (the case of the other two letters up for grabs). One example for each of the five vowel letters:
Zax: a restaurant and watering hole, Moab UT
Zex: a Canadian punk and metal band’
ZiX: a heavy metal band
ZOX: company making elastic bracelets
Zux: a clothing company in Rio de Janeiro
Associations. Word-initial Z has associations with exoticness — foreign origins and unusual or very specialized things. Samples:
Zanzibar, Zeus, zhuzh, Zulu, zebra, Zwingli, zebu, zombie, zaftig. Zorro, zabaglione, Zed of Zardoz, zweiback, zirconium, zamboni
And then by itself Z or repeated — ZZZ — can represent the sound of snoring or sawing. Or buzzing. Or fizzing.
But now I’m going to shift my attention to monosyllables with X-final spellings, and here the possible associations of the letter X are many, including:
the unknown; the risqué; missing, dead; NO; X marks the spot; a kiss; Christ, the cross; Satan; Roman numeral X ‘ten’
In some cases, it’s hard to know what the people picked a name had in mind (and there are surprises; for instance, business names sometimes use the airport code for the local airport, so there are a number of JAX and Jax businesses in Jacksonville FL). But here’s a sample of X-final commercial names:
Max: a movie streaming service
Jax / JAX: a hair salon in Menlo Park CA (owner Jack Ajluni)
PAX: a vape companyMEX: a taqueria and bar in Cambridge MA
Lex: a word processor
Lex: an LGBTQ+ on-line social networkKix and Trix: breakfast cereals
Bix: a San Francsco supper club
D.I.X. / DIX: a sports bar in Milwaukee WISox: Chicago White Sox and Boston Red Sox baseball teams
ROX: nonprofit authority on girls (Ruling Our eXperiences)
Cox: a cable tekevision companyLux: a laundry detergent and a face soap
Lux: a nail salon in Menlo Park CA
Lux: eyewear stores on the San Francisco peninsula
Flux: a footwear company
Among the naming strategies at work:
existing words (flux ‘change’)
existing names (personal Max, Rex; family Cox, Dix)
borrowed words (Latin lux ‘light’)
acronyms (ROX)
spelling X for /ks/ (White Sox, Red Sox, Jax)
clipping (of maximum, luxury, Mexican, lexicon)
September 24, 2024 at 5:03 pm |
From Mike Pope on Facebook:
My response:
September 25, 2024 at 1:55 pm |
I am not familiar with the Baum; but I was intrigued by the names of the two regions. I probably would not have noticed Noland (“no land,” I suppose?) if my attention had not been grabbed by Ix. That was the name of a planet in the Dune universe, whose name was derived, in long lost lore, from the fact that it was the ninth planet from its sun. I feel sure that Baum had no such association in mind for his Ix, though.
September 25, 2024 at 3:37 pm |
The Dune novel is from 1965, so Baum could hardly have been influenced in 1902 by the 9th planet from a sun in the Dune universe. And the number 9 plays no role I can recall in Zixi of Ix. So the name Ix is just an accidental resemblance.
Or maybe I’m missing your point.