It’s About Making Babies!

Sharon at DailyWritingTips relates the tale of how the word Knickerbocker entered American usage, in Knickerbocker Story.

According to Chambers 20th Century, knickerbocker referred to the *descendants* of the original Dutch settlers of what became New York, Knickerbocker (capitalized) was a New Yorker, probably where Washington Irving came up with his pen name.

The Knickerbocker name came from the wide-breeched Dutchmen in Irving’s humorous History of New York.

Knicker is defined as ’same as nicker’. 1) (Scot) To neigh, to snigger - noun, a neigh, a snigger, a loud laugh. 2) A water monster. 3) A clay marble (same as knicker), or the round seed of a Caesalpinia, used for playing marbles.

Neigh - the cry of a horse, to utter the cry of a horse.

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Bock - a strong German beer, from Einbocker Bier - beer from Einbeck, Germany. Now often a glass or mug of beer (quarter of a litre).

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Remember bell-bottomed jeans? That originated as bell bottomed dungarees, part of Navy uniform? I imagine the legacy of the Dutch sailing trader empire to the New York colony included the wide bottomed pants. In boot camp we were told that if the ship went down, we could tie off the legs of our pants (dungarees), blow air into them, and use them for a float. I believe loose-legged pants have been traditional sailor wear for a long time, since getting the pants off easily if you go into the water might be the difference between floating and sinking. Thus the loose legs. Sailors from the days of sail kept the lower legs bare to prevent tangling in lines (rope) while aloft (climbing the masts and spars to adjust sail amount and position).

I imagine ‘knickerbocker’ was understood to be funny (horse’s laugh) beer drinkers, or maybe foreigners. Or maybe the knicker meant a blast of air - an allusion to the open, wind-inviting bottoms of the pants and bare legs.

Landed ‘gentry’ - anyone that owned property - considered common sailors (working at sea, but not an officer or petty officer) much below their station in life. Many city people would have found sailor-derived fashion as worth ridicule - that is, ridiculous.

I wonder what relationship the Knickerbockers of Washington Irving’s time had to the Puritans. The Puritans were a strict religious order that fled England to Holland. A few generations later the elders were disturbed at how the local (Dutch) people were corrupting their youth, and how the members of the order were taking on Dutch ways. So they packed up and looked for a region free of disrupting influences - Plymouth Rock. And survived because of what they learned from the local tribes.

The Washington Irving book on my shelf is ‘A Tour On The Prairie‘, from his journal. On the ship returning him from seventeen years in Europe, Irving met an officer intending to patrol what would later become Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas. Irving accompanied the officer and patrol, chronicling these plains and the native tribes for the first time. The expedition, and book, begin as they leave Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Today Seth overlooked a couple of concepts.

It’s a bad brand name because Central or Land or World are meaningless.

I follow Seth’s Blog regularly. Sometimes witty, usually valuable insights that apply to life, family, and business far beyond the focus of the blog - marketing.

But today’s message on dumb branding strategies doesn’t feel right. Computer Land says about the same thing to me as Best Buy. That is, “Hey, look! We have a whole enterprise, a single place for you to find (fill in the blank)!” I grew up with Koele’s Grocery Store. Down the road is Bartlett’s Lumber. The store is assumed in the name, sometimes, and really says exactly the same thing as the ‘world’, ‘land’, etc. - these are marketing synonyms for ’store’. And the market understands that context. Disneyland isn’t a place where Disney is (was) - Disneyland is a store, a marketed place to exchange money for recreation, a feeling of the stories and scenery from favorite Disney-related stories.

Possibly ‘land’ or ‘world’ is intended to imply this is the only place this particular product or collection is available. Or, at least, the only place you should go for that product.

And Seth wraps us with a dig at some names that succeeded against is ‘dumb branding’ rule - including Radio Shack. Radio Shack got its name from its roots - the magic early years of experimental and amateur radio, and the military term for the place where radios were kept. Radio Shack used to be a place to pick up a 120/3.6 volt transformer, a couple ceramic or paper capacitors, or a vacuum tube. You could test your vacuum tubes to see if they needed replaced. Later you could pick up a 2n3055 transistor, or an LM335 integrated circuit chip. The store in town no longer carries 1/4 watt resistors, and the store manager can’t read the color codes on a resistor. The ’shack’ in the Radio Shack name is not related to the ‘land’ part of Computerland - ‘radio shack’ was a current expression of the times at the the business began. Kind of like Game eXchange. The Radio Shack name used to represent a knowledgeable comrade in the craft and hobby of early electronics.