Words I wish I had come up with

Brandquake

See article in Feb. 2001. Actually, scope out the whole thing. Interesting reading, if you want to get a glimpse of what's going on in the pharmaceutical industry.

In this case, brandquake refers to when consumers who are loyal to one brand suddenly get fed up with it for some reason, dumping it for another. The example given in the article involves tea, but it could involve anything, although the article doesn't thoroughly examine why Tetley's round tea bags were such a big hit to topple the top-tea PG Tips. Perhaps it has to do with the rise of TV in England, and how you only had a limited time to make tea between commercial breaks.

But the article makes a point. Whether it be technological innovation or a better-tasting brew, audiences are more fickle these days. Brandquake is the risk anyone or anything famous runs these days. One day you are bringing in the bucks, the next you are old hat.

A couple days ago, I thought I was incredibly clever, coming up with brandquake while in the shower (Don't ask. My creativity increases in direct proportion to the proximity to a bathroom. If I get desperate enough, my next novel will be written inside a port-o-potty.) I came up with the name while imagining a whole different origin for it...something about economic depressions and the death of products on store shelves. I was incredibly pleased with myself, thinking I was creating the next "cyberspace" or "doublethink" in the lexicon of literature-turned-mainstream words. To paraphrase that old religious saying, if you want make Google laugh, enter your "original" thought into its search engine.

Which brings me to my second already-used word...

Iconjack

Strangely, the word exists, but as a software application for altering desktop icons. I would have bet a box of Tagalongs that in this age of culture jammers and hacktivism "iconjack" would have been adopted as a way to corrupt the good image of a corporation as a spoof or a type of counter-advertising (say, using the Nike Swoosh as club to beat 13 year-old sweatshop workers into submission and therefore faster production). Plus "IconJack 32" just screams "cool media hacker nickname."

I can't rightly claim the words as my own, even though I can bring something new to them. The words exist, and I think I have to follow my friend Cori's advice of dipping back into the roots of proto-language to find something original or adequate.

Just a thought: Imagine if you could buy a word...I mean, own it outright. After all, what is branding if not owning a word in the public’s mind? You can bring lawsuits against those who misuse it...guarding the purity of what the word means, bequeathing it only when a new champion, honest and quick, emerges from the mists. It’ll be a guerilla movement to buy back words from corporations that turn nouns into verbs and reduce helpless collections of syllables into nonsense ("paradigm shift," "think outside the box," "downsize").

I call dibs on "axis" and "evildoer." I'll stop this damn war overnight with court action alone.

P.S.

Nothing like strange neo-words like brandquake and iconjack to make your spellcheck throw fits.

Today's Word: Vapor

From One Word


Hmmm. Didn't we do 'vapor'? No, I mean it. I swear we did it recently. I remember something about contrails and mist, summer days and being in a state between liquid and gas. It sounds terribly familiar. Yes, we did it on Feb. 26! Entry Number 93. Gotcha!