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If you've spent time lately in the world of startup brands, as I have, you've almost certainly noticed a conspicuous trend. Maybe the penny dropped as you searched for recipes on Yummly or bought home-delivered meals from Feastly. Perhaps you've skimmed headlines on Reportedly, Collectively, or Newsly. Or you've played games on Scopely, tracked gasoline usage with Fuelly, or researched colleges on Admittedly.
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Over the last week, I have exercised on an elliptical trainer that had a SmartRate heart monitor; watched movies on a smart TV; applied a product called Smart Serum to my face; and checked messages on a smartphone that has Smart Stay, Smart Pause, and Smart Scroll functions.
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At the end of each year, while linguists and lexicographers cast votes for words of the year, I'm compiling a different list: the brand names that distilled the mood of the previous twelve months. To narrow the field, I add another criterion: the brand names must have linguistic or onomastic significance — onomastics being the study of names.
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The old adage about American and England being "two nations divided by a common language" — wrongly attributed to George Bernard Shaw, who never said or wrote it — may still hold true in some quarters. But in the language of U.S. commerce, it's fast losing its relevance. Terms that once seemed quaintly Olde English to Americans — from "bespoke" to "stockist" — are fast becoming the new normal.
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When the ABC-TV sitcom "Black-ish" debuted in September, it joined a growing set of titles and brands built on the odd little ish suffix. There's a lot more to ish than "sort of" and "more or less." Here's a brand-by-brand rundown of the ish spectrum.
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Stroll through the hipper districts of any American city in 2014 and you may experience the sense of time being slightly out of joint. On shop signs and menus, words that last flourished a couple of centuries ago—or earlier—have been making a comeback. But no word from the distant past is as antique, or as popular in commerce in so many disparate ways, as apothecary.
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In the world of branding, coined and contorted names often hog all the attention. Less commented-on are the successful contemporary brand names with long pedigrees: "real" dictionary words that have been used by English speakers for centuries.
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