This year marks the seventieth anniversary of Canoeing With the Cree, Eric Sevareid’s charming story about canoeing from Minneapolis to the Hudson Bay in the summer of 1930. Thank goodness for something timeless; the Minnesota Historical Society has been in charge of the last several reprintings—including a new anniversary edition—and they haven’t even reset the type. This of course runs against the nap and flow of every fiber in a modern brand-manager’s being.
Sevareid was a seventeen-year-old student who had scarcely been in a canoe when he and his friend Walter Port put in below Fort Snelling on the Minnesota River. Today, the book is an artifact of a bygone, genteel era—precocious gentlemen explorers dressed in canvas and wool, “encountering” wilderness and quoting Kipling, with hardly a thought for “turnkey solutions” or “value-added deliverables.” Sevareid and Port had no Gore-Tex, no freeze-dried food, no global positioning system. But they did have a sponsor—the Minneapolis Star agreed to buy for one hundred dollars the serialized narrative of their 2,500-mile trip. That sponsorship allowed Sevareid to eventually publish his account as a book, and that made the young man’s name. He went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most respected journalists. It is hard today to imagine the daily newspaper taking a chance on a nameless boy in jodhpurs; it is especially hard to make your name in a marketplace that does not need more names. But Sevareid got it right.
Getting it right is not necessarily, you know, getting it all the way right. Of course, the Cree did not call themselves the Cree—it was a name bestowed on them in the eighteenth century by French explorers and traders in James Bay. And much of Sevareid’s account records not so much a wilderness expedition through boreal wastes as an upcurrent slog through southern Minnesota, where the savages were mostly of European descent. In the intervening years, dozens of other canoeists have followed in the wake of Sevareid and Port. In fact, this month St. Cloud residents Scott Miller and Matt Lutz expect to arrive at York Factory on the Hudson Bay, and we’ve enjoyed reading their online journal, which has been published without the assistance or interference of the daily newspaper. Still, followers are inevitably less memorable than pioneers, and bloggers secretly crave print the way Simon Cowell craves to be an American idol.
You surely don’t watch that show, but its reputation has reached far beyond its name. Simon Cowell, the hateful, aggressively British panelist on American Idol, may be in a bit of a legal bind. He recently moved to Los Angeles, apparently to be closer to the source of his ill-gotten fame and wealth, but has apparently not yet taken his remedial courses on American copyright. The other day, Cowell and ABC announced plans to unroll a television program called The Million Dollar Idea, a show that rewards inventors for their original ideas. The only problem is that they seem to have pinched the name and the concept from Twin Citizens Jean Golden and Todd Walker, who have been locally producing a show just like that for two years, and who claim they pitched the idea to ABC a few months ago. Cowell perhaps cannot master the subtlety that it requires to steal an idea and give it the cover of a new name.
Then again, we should keep sharp writing instruments away from the wicked. Creating names has become bloodsport in the powerful economic recovery we’re told is underway. We paused last year when the financial department of Lutheran Brotherhood coined the new name “Thrivent.” It was not a word we’d heard before, and that made us irritable. (We have to admit that “Thrivent” briefly sounded like an erectile dysfunction medication, but then again, everything sounds like that these days, maybe because there are so many erectile dysfunction medications.) Still, it did not produce the same seizures in our copy-editing department as “Xcel” and “Qwest” did years ago. We get surly when commercial enterprises do legal and grammatical violence to the language. One sin leads to the other. Whole industries have sprung up to weld words together in strange spork-like configurations with not a lot of respect for the laws of language. This month, for example, American Express Financial Advisers officially becomes “Ameriprise,” and we’d like to issue a ticket for such a violation.
By now, the fashion police have taken notice that Macy’s has acquired Marshall Field’s, and the buzz around the block seems to be whether Macy’s will rename its new acquisition the way George Foreman named all five of his sons—you know, George Foreman. Twin Citizens probably don’t care one way or the other—most of us still think of that particular store at that particular location as Dayton’s. So we can’t muster a lot of sympathy for the idle Chicagoans resisting change at keepitfields.org.
On the other hand, the torch has finally dropped on one of our favorite local bands, the Olympic Hopefuls. Continuing correspondence with the United States Olympic Committee has resulted in a not-unfriendly caution that the USOC has trademarked the word “olympic,” and even goes so far as to suggest that there are federal laws requiring the committee to enforce the trademark. In other words, meet “the Hopefuls.” We think it’s a shame, and we want to make a stand right now against anyone who wishes to plant their institutional flag on any little dry spot within the borders of Webster’s. In fact, our view is that if the word is in common usage long enough to enter the Concise, then it falls within international waters, and ought to be open to all who wish to travel there. We wonder if the USOC has made special arrangements with the Olympic Penisula in Washington State, or, for that matter, Olympia beer. The Hopefuls are not the first local band to get beat up by the corporate poets; remember when Tilt-A-Whirl became Arcwelder?
If the tradeoff is more companies making up strange names that appear in no dictionary, the better to protect their legal and business interests, then fine. Frankly, we don’t foresee a sudden run-up in the stock of “Lucent” among poets and novelists, and we pledge never to use that word when another will do as well. Though we have taken note of how some of the world’s best-established brands become effective shortcuts in description (“Rollerblades”—an excellent word), other nonsense neologisms are headed for a richly deserved instant oblivion. May they rest in a deep, dark hole capped by a little ® manhole cover.
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