From the annals of eccentric wine naming, the remarkable
Vampire® Coffin & Cape Red Wine Trilogy
from Vampire Vineyards.
Archive for the ‘Trade names’ Category
Red, red wine
November 27, 2025On the ZW watch
July 17, 2025It went past me briefly before I deleted it from my Facebook feed, but of course I caught the name; I’m primed for Z, and really primed for ZW:
ZIWI pet food
RESIST
July 7, 2025The message from my fellow QUESTer — another Queer University Employee At Stanford — Ryan Tamares, on a postcard mailed to me on 6/19, in the middle of Pride Month:
Happy Pride !
Pride always ! !
— RESIST —
The holiday moment has passed, but now we’re in a world where we have to actively resist, on a daily basis, against the brownshirts and blackshirts serving our overlords. And join with the drag queens and thrown-away club kids who, in one of our foundation tales, fought back against the cops who came to ruin their lives, and ours.
“I am th’ skee-ball”: Zippy’s arcade poem
January 12, 2025In today’s Zippy strip, the muu-muued Pinhead is at the arcade, celebrating the game of skee-ball in verse in which he identifies with — becomes one with — inanimate objects, the material elements of the game:
(#1) Zippy’s self-reflective poem, which I’ll title I Am Th’: three quatrains — of metered but unrhymed verse — that steadily build in complexity, to end in a self-reflective version of Zippy’s tag line Are we having fun yet?
Now: a few words on the poetry of I Am and then on to skee-ball, skee-ball machines, and the games of my childhood and adolescence.
Slip into a plush penguin
November 26, 2024From Chris Ambidge (one of the Wardens of the Spheniscid Zarchives) on Facebook this morning:
(#1) [CA > AZ:] Arnold! Have you considered … penguin slippers? Keeping Feathers McGraw underfoot might be the best way to make sure he doesn’t get into mischief
From the Coddies website:
Coddies® Wallace & Gromit Feathers McGraw slippers:
Silent but villainous, Feathers McGraw is the ultimate plush slipper icon!
Slip into the soft embrace of Wallace & Gromit’s Feathers McGraw himself with Coddies’ new plush slippers, designed to capture the essence of Aardman’s criminal mastermind. They fit like a glove – not unlike the red rubber glove perched atop Feathers’ head – a disguise so brilliant in its simplicity that it once outwitted Wallace and even the local law enforcement.
Gimme a Z, gimme an X
September 24, 2024Mike 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.
Annals of mishearing: effing gee, the carpet store
September 16, 2024A frequently experienced tv commercial in recent days, encountered at first only through the audio, which I heard to be for a local carpet company called, apparently, effing gee or effing G, involving the verb F or eff /ɛf/, an initialistic euphemism for fuck. Given my nature and my professional interest in taboo vocabulary, it would be fair to think of my perception as Freudian mishearing, of who knows what original. But, surely, a carpet company wouldn’t choose a name with fucking encoded in it, maybe playfully conveying that it was fucking good (though that would be a bold commercial move).
The next time I heard the ad, I understood the company name to be effigy, which is at least an English word (and not a swear), but baffling as a company name. Significantly, having heard the name originally as beginning with /ɛf/, that perception persisted.
Next time around, I shifted my perception to something more likely, in which /ɛf/ is in fact a letter name: FnG, that is F&G. This would be a common pattern in company names; a sampling of F&R companies:
F&R Auto Repair (Woodland CA), F&R Auto Sales (Hialeah FL), F&R Towing (San Jose CA), F&R Engineering (Roanoke VA), F&R American Fine Fragrance (Winston Salem NC)
Finally, I looked at the screen, and saw that the company’s name was indeed initialistic, but was S&R, not F&R. /f/ and /s/ are minimally distinct acoustically, so are often confused in perception. My initial perception was skewed towards /f/ because of my bias towards fucking — and so towards fucking and effing — and once established that perception persisted, despite repetitions of /s/.
IMMIGRANTS EAT OUR DOGS
September 12, 2024So reads a sign — a genuine sign, not an achievement of digital image-making — reproduced widely on Facebook in the past two days:
(#1) The sign at the Wiener Circle / Wieners Circle / Wiener’s Circle, 2622 N. Clark St., Chicago IL 60614; two things about it — its’s a joke, a pun dogs (short for hot dogs ‘frankfurters’) on dogs ‘domestic canines’; and it’s a piece of political mockery
A mockery of Grabpussy, in the US Presidential debates on 9/10, who cited as fact preposterous on-line rumor stories, among them that Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH are preying on people’s pets, eating their dogs and cats — thus painting immigrants as dangerous invaders, monstrous inhuman beasts.
Flavor of the Week
August 9, 2024The New Yorker cover for the August 12th, 2024 issue is a great big Roz Chast cartoon. With the accompanying cover story, “Roz Chast’s “Flavor of the Week”: The artist’s enticing (and not so enticing) tweaks to one of summer’s enduring pleasures” by Françoise Muhly on 8/5/24:
(#1) Along with plain Vanilla, there are strangely modified real flavors, in it for the alliteration (Microchip Mint, First Avenue Fudge); actual food names not especially attractive in an ice cream (Lard Swirl, Hardtack, the potato variety Yukon Gold); and lots of totally non-food allusive names (Placebo, Bitcoin, Tumbleweed, Amnesia, Tsunami, and the noble gas Xenon)For the cover of the August 12, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Roz Chast — who has delighted readers since 1978 with her opinionated and peculiar takes on life’s indignities — gives ice-cream makers some suggestions for new flavors. “There are a lot of things I like about ice-cream stores aside from the ice cream itself,” Chast said. “I like looking at the different colors and patterns of all the bins. I like comparing cones: wafer flat-bottom or pointy classic? And the names of the flavors: the more preposterous and baroque, the better.”
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about Roz Chast and her work)
Preposterous and baroque naming schemes run riot in several domains: famously, for colors, especially of paints and of fabrics; and then widely in the word of ice cream flavors, where many frozen-confection firms exult in their naming practices. I’ll comment on just three US companies, with three different approaches: Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, and Ben & Jerry’s.
Datoro!
July 19, 2024Two Datoro cartoons from the July 22nd New Yorker (the one with Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” — six 45s and three women — on the cover): Joe Dator offering goldfish snacks in a cat bar, Tom Toro offering a summer food pun with a dubious union between plant and animal (interkingdom breeding! quelle scandale!).