Archive for the ‘Trade names’ Category

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jackery at the jackery

May 13, 2024

(Playing around with English morphology and male masturbation, so not to everyone’s taste)

It all started with a chance encounter with an ad for Jackery portable power stations, like this one:

(#1)

Given the orientation of my imagination, I was immediately taken to the idea of jackery ‘male masturbation, jacking off’, at places especially devoted to the practice, jackeries (aka jack-off / jerk-off / JO clubs). Clearly not what the Jackery Company had in mind, but where did they get their name?

From the “get to know Jackery” page on the company’s website:

(#2)

Jackery was established in 2012 and co-founded by a former Apple senior engineer and a CEO called Z Sun, a pioneer in the field of Li-battery technology. The original founder developed a battery jacket for the Apple iPhone, which is where the name Jackery comes from.

… Jackery makes portable power stations, solar panels, solar generators, and accessories for the outdoor and mobile market, but they are best known for their portable power stations.

So Jackery has the derivational suffix –ery  (denoting ‘a place where some occupation, trade, or activity is carried on’) attached to an abbreviated form of jacket, referring to one of the company’s first products.

The details of words with the the noun-forming derivational suffix –ery are not at all straightforward, full of oddities of history; it’s not a particularly productive suffix. But there’s enough there that you can play with it.

On to this interesting messiness in some detail, and moving from battery jackets to male masturbation.

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Posted in Derivation, Furnishings and tools, Language of sex, Morphology, Names, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

Name that taqueria

April 29, 2024

From the annals of remarkable commercial names, a delicious punmanteau name for a Phoenix AZ taco truck, which just flashed by, without remark, in the first sentence of the piece “Motor Mouth” by Aaron Timms in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:

Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix.

Juanderful = Juan (a stereotypical Mexican name) + wonderful, so conveying something like ‘wonderfully Mexican’ or ‘wonderful in a typically Mexican way’.


(#1) The sprightly logo (you can imagine the patter: “Hi! I’ll be your carnitas tacos today! Enjoy my meat!”); the food truck has a website, here

(more…)

Posted in Grammatical gender, Language and food, Language in advertising, Libfixes, Music, Portmanteaus, Puns, Spanish, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

Powdery residue falls on Canadian plains

March 12, 2024

It’s held on the tips of three fingers, it’s orange, it’s fully erect, and it leaves a messy powder. But is it art? Is it edible? Is it, omigod, about to shoot? A swirl of questions envelope the phallic cheese puff resting in the Cheetle Hand of Cheadle, Alberta, shown here accompanied by a bag of the cheese snack Cheetos, for scale:

(more…)

Posted in Art, Language and food, Phallicity, Trade names | 4 Comments »

The profusion of names

December 9, 2023

Suppose you investigate a cultural domain, or category, with many things in it — samples of the color pink, forms of the letter T, pieces of flatware, hybrid tea rose plants, and so on. It will turn out that people distinguish a (large) number of different subtypes, or subcategories, within that domain — different shades of pink, different typefaces, different patterns of silverware, different cultivars of hybrid tea roses. And then they will need labels for reference to these subcategories. These could be given code numbers of some sorts (and for some purposes such coding is entirely adequate), but people, quite reasonably, want memorable and at least somewhat meaningful names, in a language. Flamingo pink, a Times typeface, a Shell silverware pattern, the Mr. Lincoln rose, that sort of thing.

In the real world, especially for commercial purposes, the number of subcategories in a domain can be immense, reaching into the hundreds in some domains, and (in some of them) ever-expanding. So names will have to be coined by the barrel, churned out by the yard, and often the best a name creator can do is pick a name with positive associations. It would be entirely possible for there to be an Imperial pink, an Imperial typeface, an Imperial silverware pattern, and an Imperial rose.

Every now and then, I’ve commented on this blog about the profusion of names within some domain. Most recently, in my 12/3/23 posting “Waxed amaryllis” (with lists of some named amaryllis cultivars). You can find some meaningful themes in these lists; plenty of the names for solid red cultivars are associated with Christmas (with its red and green) and Valentine’s Day / love (with a red heart). But then there are Hope, Miracle, and Grand Diva. For solid white cultivars, Amore and Festive Parade. For red with white stripes, Ambiance. For white with red stripes, Besties. At some point, names will have to be plucked out of the air.

Which brings me to Karen Schaffer posting on Facebook on 9/13 about the melons in her garden.

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and food, Names, Trade names | 1 Comment »

Ditto ditto my song

November 17, 2023

A serenade on my Apple Music in the dark night of 10/13, Danny Kaye singing Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs, with warmth rather than the sharp edges of the D’Oyly Carte patter specialists; at my 2 am whizz break, he had arrived at the Lord Chancellor’s “Nightmare Song”, from G&S’s Iolanthe, with its concluding:

the night has been long —
ditto ditto my song —
and thank goodness
they’re both of them over!

Being (more or less relentlessly) a linguist, I asked myself, not for the first time: What kind of word is ditto? It looks a lot like some kind of adverb here, with the crucial line paraphrasable as (awkward) thus thus my song, or (better) also also my song, or (even better) so too my song. (Although you might argue that ditto‘s a special kind of noun, since it’s paraphrasable as the same.) And, while we’re on the subject: Where on earth does it come from? I entertained speculations about some connection to double, maybe Greek di– ‘two’, or possibly to dot, given ditto marks.

My etymological speculations are provably off-base; the closest English words are diction and dictate, from the Latin stem dict– ‘say’. Meanwhile, my off-the-cuff part-of-speech assignment is flatly contradicted by the authority I look at first, NOAD (a lexicographically respectable dictionary of manageable size, and — unlike AHD or the M-W dictionaries — one accessible directly from my browser). NOAD is based on the resources of the OED, and the OED (which I can access on-line) on ditto classifies the word as a noun — but in an entry from well over a century ago, so we need to look critically at its evidence for this classification. Which shows that in the 18th century the word was incontestably a noun (with a plural dittoes). That usage, however, is long dead. The question is what to say about modern usage, and there my adverb idea has a lot going for it (and is also the classification given in Merriam-Webster’s word history for modern ditto).

So we’re in for a bumpy ride, much like the Lord Chancellor’s, with possibly more questions than answers. Hang on.

(more…)

Posted in Conversion, Etymology, Grammatical categories, Language change, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Music, My life, Performance, Trade names, Verbing | 4 Comments »

niblings

August 15, 2023

Provoked by the Merriam-Webster site‘s “Words We’re Watching: ‘Nibling’: An efficient word for your sibling’s kids”: some reflections on the portmanteauing that gives rise to nibling ‘niece or nephew, sibling’s child’; on “having a word for X in language L”; and on neologism and its discontents.

First, the fun. There’s a book for kids, and there’s a t-shirt for kids, too.

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Posted in Books, Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Compounds, Derivation, Gender and sexuality, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Naming, Portmanteaus, Trade names | 5 Comments »

Donut burgers by another name

August 14, 2023

In response to my “DONUT BURGER” posting yesterday, Kyle Wohlmut wrote on Facebook:

Isn’t that “just” a Lutherburger? (with a Wikipedia link)

Well, screw you, Snark Boy; if I’d known about Lutherburgers / Luther Burgers I would have posted about them, so your slagging me for not mentioning them is just gratuitous assholery. I think you need a humongous sticky donut burger stuffed up your raggedy butt.

The Wikipedia article does make it clear that the donut burger has spread much further than I’d realized in my posting — something I’d contemplated there. But I had no idea …

So here’s all the stuff from Wikipedia (where I learned that, whew, Martin Luther had nothing to do with Luther Burgers; who could possibly want a burger designed by a humorless, pleasure-wary, fiercely dedicated Protestant reformer?). We don’t need the pictures, though; no one needs more pictures of, omigod, bacon cheeseburgers crammed between two glazed donuts.

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Posted in Language and food, Language and religion, Language in advertising, Naming, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

The commonification of Magic Shell

August 10, 2023

A comment from Bill Stewart this morning on my posting from yesterday, “The states of matter: coconut X”, with reference to the third of the  (temperature-sensitive) states of coconut X considered there: not the free-flowing oil nor the spreadable semi-solid fat / cream, but a firm solid:

You remind me that I can take advantage of this unwanted by you hardening to make our own Magic Shell. Not that we need the ice cream anyway, or even the decadent indulgence of Magic Shell, which we’ll impose upon our grandson.

What caught my eye was the treatment of Magic Shell, obviously a proper noun (and a brand name), as a common noun (and a generic name): you can make your own.

But then I had to face up to the hard truth that I was utterly ignorant of what (commercial) Magic Shell or (homemade) magic shell might be. From Bill’s context, some sort of killer dessert, with coconut X as an ingredient.

So, the first order of business was to learn about Magic Shell. Then some recipes for making your own stuff. Then some comments about the generification / genericization of brand names, and the commonification (my term) of proper nouns.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Common vs. proper, Language and food, Opposition, Semantics, Trade names | 1 Comment »

You put it in your mouth and suck on it

August 2, 2023

Another chapter in the annals of phallicity. From Owen Campbell on Facebook yesterday:


(#1) Owen sucking on an Otter Pop

Owen’s comment:

At my job, teenagers deliver freezies [AZ: freezies ‘Otter Pops’]

otter pops (often no longer understood as a brand name) are also known as freeze pops or ice pops; freezies might be a regional term, but I’ve been unable to get information about it in any of the likely lexicographic sources: the OED, GDoS, and DARE. For what it’s worth, Owen’s in Winnipeg MB.

Now, two things: about Otter Pops; and (very briefly) about Owen.

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Mascots, Phallicity, Trade names | 5 Comments »

The Belgian beer glass

July 1, 2023

More backlog, this time from Ernesto Cuba posting from Toronto on May 27, with this glass he was served beer in at the Prenup Pub there:


A beer glass from the Delirium Taproom in Brussels, Belgium; note the pink elephants

From my 5/27/23 posting “Puer mingens at the Prenup Pub”, about the pissing boy statue there:

the pissing boy is a replica of the famous Manneken Pis statue in Brussels, Belgium, and the Prenup Pub specializes in Belgian and German beers and food, so the statue fits right in at the pub, even though the pub’s in Toronto (ca. 6100 km or 3800 mi from Brussels, across the Atlantic).

So: not just the Manneken Pis statue replicating the Brussels original, but also the actual glassware from the Delirium Taproom there.

Posted in Language and food, Trade names | 2 Comments »

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