Mailbag: Drug Names, Cow Abductions, and the “Ass-Intensifier”

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It has been noted by Stoner movies and people with too much time on their hands that if you say a word enough times in a row, you can make it strange.

I'm not even talking about the obvious words like arboreal or bureaucracy or water,

but even just like cat.

Cat.

Cat.

Why is that our word for our most self-possessed housepet?

Sometimes a word doesn't need repetition or narcotics to get weird to you.

In fact, in the ots, a word behaving in a very specific way jumped out to Eric Scheuer, an animator in Portland, Oregon, just in the course of a regular conversation.

I definitely remember the first time a friend of mine came to me and said, like, somebody was talking about her son being a grown-ass man, and I've never heard that before.

Eric couldn't remember hearing or noticing someone drop ass into a phrase for emphasis before either.

I'm pretty white, I'm pretty Caucasian, most of my friends are, and I know that slang, by the time that we're using it, or me,

it is old news by decades elsewhere.

Old news or otherwise, he took a shine to it.

Somehow to my ears, it made complete sense immediately.

After that, you couldn't stop hearing it.

You know, he's a grown-ass man.

You're, you know, get your stupid ass face away from me or whatever.

I'm a grown-ass man.

Campbell's soup.

It's just wet-ass food.

I think I wore this nice-ass shirt for her today.

You know, you got a big-ass knife sticking out of you?

Big ass, nice-ass, grown-ass, dead-ass, hard-ass, badass, stupid-ass, silly-ass, goofy-ass, loud-ass.

There seems to be no adjective you can't make funnier or more forceful just by dropping an ass on it.

It just seems like the word ass intensifies.

It's like it's a slightly more risque way of saying very.

Eric has even come to think of this linguistic quirk by a special name.

The ass intensifier.

He's now spent years wondering about the ass intensifier, and he's accumulated a number of questions about it.

I'm curious about how the word ass got in there and linguistically, functionally, what it's doing there.

I'd like to know like in English, like historically, what records do we have of it?

And then I'd be curious about similar phenomena in other languages.

Do other languages have similar things?

Luckily, he emailed exactly the right people to get him some answers.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

We're very lucky to get a lot of fascinating fascinating questions from our listeners.

And so, as we do from time to time, we're opening up our mailbag to try and answer some of them.

In addition to looking at the creative ass use of, well, the word ass, we're going to make sense of the seemingly wild world of pharmaceutical names and probe the special relationship between cows and aliens.

That's all today on Decodering.

Thanks to you.

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So we're going to pick up with Eric's question about about the origins of what he calls the ass intensifier, which turns out to be its proper ass name.

We actually do call it ass intensifier in the scholarly literature.

Nicole Holiday is an acting linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

There is another like wonderful scholar who calls it the anal emphatic,

which like, wow, chef's kiss.

Nicole explained to me that linguistically, an intensifier is any word or phrase that emphasizes another word.

Something that can basically replace anything where you're trying to use like very or extremely.

So like she's a grown-ass woman.

That's just saying like she's very grown.

Yes, that is the intensifier.

And like similarly, like I woke up at ass o'clock in the morning.

That's just like I woke up very early in the morning.

Right.

But it also carries some association of informality, naughtiness, familiarity, right?

I could say I'm very tired, but I could also say I'm ass tired.

And then it doesn't just mean, yes, I'm extremely exhausted.

It means I'm extremely exhausted, ha ha, or we're informal, or we're joking, or we're friends.

And why do we do this?

Because we're creative and it's fun.

A researcher named Wilson J.

Miller traced the usage of the ass intensifier back to 1942 and Marines serving in the Second World War.

Somewhere in the South Pacific, a powerful task force of United States Marines begins offensive action to retake the strategic Solomon Islands.

They had this abbreviation, B-A-M-BA-AM, for big-assed Marine.

And used it on women, like women Marines at that time.

Big-assed Marines.

And so it's asked.

And you can see how you get that as sort of an adjective, big-assed.

But then it starts to get dropped because that sound, like a T or a D, when it follows an S, like gets dropped all the time, right?

That final sound sort of disappears.

So then you see a little bit later, the Marines also calling a plane a big ass bird.

So then you get big ass.

These are the oldest written examples we have of the ass intensifier, but it was almost surely used in spoken language earlier.

And Nicole says there's a real possibility that it came out of one community in particular.

It could be African American English that was introduced to white GIs during that time.

It wouldn't be surprising.

It's very widespread in African American English, but we don't exactly have recordings from pre-1940s to know that for sure.

Whenever exactly it started, after the war, it began to spread.

The first time that you see it attested outside of this military usage is the Oxford English Dictionary has it in 1945 talking about a police with a nightstick, a big ass nightstick.

And it sort of seems to flow out from there into the culture and expand in use for the next 80 years.

I mean, how many more times am I gonna have to listen to a sad-ass pity party?

Shit, I can't afford this nice ass car.

I swear, I don't know who is the worst between you and that lazy ass brother yours.

Have we just been using it as much as we use it now for a long time?

Or do you think we use it more now?

I think we use it more now.

This is interesting because things like intensifiers are not supposed to be invented, right?

They're supposed to be what we call a closed class.

So we come up with new nouns every day.

Who knew what an Uber was as a noun before 10 years ago, right?

So nouns open class.

Intensifiers are supposed to be closed class.

We don't invent new things like very all the time.

But when you get one that starts to function this way, it becomes extremely productive.

So words like very are very, very high frequency.

We say that word every day, right?

So once you see that it can be used like this, it becomes sort of expansive.

The other thing is this big ass thing has to occur in an informal register.

So we're just less formal.

You can see it like in clothes.

Nobody's wearing stockings and suits to the office all the time, unless you're like on Wall Street or something.

So there's some arguments that profanity has become more socially acceptable, especially in the last like 20 years.

And so as we've become more accepting of profanity, I think it just allows for this to be used in informal and humorous contexts more often.

I also just noticed in sort of like

big-assed marine, big ass bird, big ass nightstick, like

a literalism almost in the early examples of it, where it's like, an ass can be big.

right like the thing on our bodies yes can an ass be crazy it can't mom is a crazy ass

yeah so ass itself is a really interesting word.

So its original meaning is donkey, and it's attested from the 11th century.

So that is when we were speaking something like German.

That's before the Norman conquest of 1066 when English got all these French words.

So it's an old, old word as far as English goes.

And it was ass like donkey, which we still use that way, but it's kind of antiquated.

Then you start seeing it used as a pejorative in the 13th century.

So like ass like that guy's like an ass like a fool or a jerk or something, right?

So so for 900 years we have this word as a noun and then in the 40s you get it with this kind of usage when did it start to be buts it looks like ass for but is from the 17th century so yes it's had that meaning since long before we got this big ass

are there other things that behave like this in English?

Yes.

I was thinking a lot about dead.

Yeah.

So in New York City, you get dead ass.

Are you serious?

Dead ass.

So like it means seriously.

Yeah.

I'm dead ass.

Or like, he was dead ass right.

That kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you get things like dead tired.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dead tired.

Like it just never occurred to me until this moment that dead is working as an intensifier.

Yeah.

You can also be dead broke.

Right.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like we do this with butt, right?

So like butt ass ugly.

Butt ass, butt ass ugly.

You could also be butt ugly.

Yeah, yeah.

Right?

Just like ugly ass or ass ugly, I guess.

The other thing is a lot of the examples that we've been talking about are like stupid, ugly, dumb, like one and two syllable words.

But there have been claims that ass can't attach to words that are longer than three syllables or that people kind of don't like it.

You can't say like, that was a significant ass claim.

Fantastic ass claim.

Yeah, fantastic ass argument.

Like, maybe, but it doesn't sound as good as ugly ass.

It's like we just something about that sounds wrong to all of us.

And the linguist Jeff Pullum says that that that's actually because it has to be informal and long words in English tend to come from Latin.

All of our fancy words are Latin and they're longer.

So that's why you shouldn't get something like articulate ass.

Like he's an articulate ass guy.

Like

is it because it's long or is it because it's a fancy word?

Like we don't know.

Do other languages have things like this or do you, I mean, yes.

So I found a paper from 2021 by a danish guy binkston who says that danish has ass intensifier and it's ov r-o-v o with the like slash through it so it's a vowel we don't have does that word mean ass yes and it does exactly the same thing

That's amazing.

It's crazy how much we all just know what everything means, even though we can't articulate it.

Yeah.

And so because we're all using language all the time, like we are creative, we make mistakes, we're accidentally hilarious, right?

The language is changing.

One mandate that children and teenagers have is to change the language.

Like in every society that has ever existed, the children will change the language because they need it to work for them.

Yeah.

And they'll do it sometimes in really dramatic ways and sometimes in really subtle ways.

And there's this interaction with like what's happening in the society and identity and race and culture and gender and all this stuff.

But that is why we get so frustrated when the old people complain about language change.

It's just like, you did too.

And all of this tells us something about the cognitive ability of humans that is really awesome, right?

Like, one day, some Marines were like, hmm, literally, one dude probably was like, big ass Marine.

And everyone was like, that cooks.

Like,

we like it.

This lap.

When we come back, some cow-ass-loving aliens.

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Even if you are trying to avoid watching the video of Charlie Kirk's shooting, social media makes it really hard.

And it's not like it's some crazy niche thing where you have to go and, you know, find a snuff film somewhere.

It's actually on the biggest social media platforms in the world, which is kind of crazy.

Now that platforms have essentially ditched content moderation, is this our future?

There's probably never been a time in human history where you had so much extremely graphic, violent imagery that not only was available to you at the drop of a hat, but also that in some cases, whether you wanted it or not, might end up showing up in front of you.

I'm Lizzie O'Leary.

Listen to my conversation with Craig Silverman, one of the smartest journalists thinking about the internet, on Friday's What Next TV D, wherever you get your podcasts.

Our next listener question comes from Stason Goldman in Stowe, Massachusetts.

It occurred to her a few months ago when she was watching her son play a video game called Scribble Knots.

And he was very, very frustrated.

On the screen was an alien that was telling him, Give me what you want and I'll leave in peace.

And he looked at me and he said, I don't know what the alien wants.

And I looked at the screen and it was a little green man in a UFO and I said, oh, he wants a cow.

Stacy's son was baffled.

He did not understand why the alien would want a cow.

And I said, just trust me, that alien wants a cow.

So he dutifully typed in the word cow.

And then a cow appeared on screen.

And the alien took the cow and flew off in peace.

And my son was even more confused.

He said, why did he want that?

How did you know that he wanted that?

And I couldn't tell him.

I had no idea.

But I knew as soon as I saw the alien in the UFO that aliens abduct cows.

I have no idea where I got this notion.

I don't know where I saw it the first time, but I know that I've seen it around.

It's just in the culture.

Aliens just abduct cows.

Stason's right.

Aliens' particular interest in cows is all over the culture.

Moo.

Moo moo moo.

It's there in the first episode of South Park when aliens determine that cows are the most intelligent beings on planet Earth.

Moo, moo, moo, moo.

What the hell are they talking about?

It's in the opening scene of the movie Mars Attacks when the Martians set a herd of cattle on fire.

In a classic got milk ad from the mid-auts, a couple of aliens are awed by the image of a cow on a dairy barn.

And yes, cows and aliens also co-star in many, many video games.

Which brings us to Stason's question.

How do we all think this?

Why do we all think this?

As ubiquitous as the idea of cow abducting ETs has become, it didn't originate in movies, TV, games, or even in the 20th century.

So, this idea that aliens like to abduct cows seems to have started in the year 1897 with a farmer from Kansas by the name of Alexander Hamilton.

Greg E.

Gigian is a historian at Penn State University and the author of After the Flying Saucers Came, a global history of the UFO phenomenon.

Alexander Hamilton gets awakened one night.

It's about 10.30 p.m.

His tenant and his son are also there because they hear this kind of unrest among their cattle.

His cows are going crazy, making a racket.

So he goes outside.

And he says what he sees about 600 feet in the sky is this massive, massive, what he called airship.

It's huge, 300 feet long and mostly red.

And there's a carriage on the underside made of glass so that he can see six alien beings inside.

And then he notices something that makes it all even stranger.

There are wires or cables or something along those lines that has a hold of one of his heifers by the neck.

Lifting this heifer off of the ground, the ship then flies off with the heifer in tow.

The The next day he gets a visit from a local farmer who lives around four miles away, who says he's made a gruesome discovery.

I have found the hide, the legs, and the head of your heifer.

Everything else is gone.

And what's really, really strange is all of those remains were on my farm, but there were no footprints around it.

And that's the story Alexander Hamilton told.

And Hamilton wasn't the only one to report seeing mysterious airships in the sky.

For a couple of years in the late 1890s, people around the world were sharing stories of similar sightings.

Alexander Hamilton's version caught on so quickly that it didn't seem to matter when he confessed just a month after his initial story ran in a local Kansas newspaper that he had made the whole thing up.

Alexander Hamilton belonged to a community of men called the Liars Club.

And the Liars Club was a group of guys who would spend their free time trying to tell the most outlandish story.

It was kind of a competitive thing.

And so all of this seems to have been part of that.

Despite his confession, Hamilton's tall tale lived on for decades.

It was relatively obscure, even among scholars of the supernatural.

But then it came the atomic age, and with it, the golden era of the flying saucer.

They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear.

They appear to be hovering in midair with what I believe to be a spinning action.

I believe that the flying saucers are objects from another planet.

In the mid-1960s, when flying saucers are a really, really big thing, some of the very famous really advocates and proponents of flying saucers start to repeat the story as if it is 100% the God's honest truth.

And then in the 1970s, this notion of aliens abducting cows zoomed into the mainstream, thanks to a phenomenon that at first didn't seem like it had to do with extraterrestrials at all.

You start to hear these stories of cattle mutilations.

Thousands of cattle, horses, and other animals have been cut up in strange ways.

Today, nearly 15,000 mutilation reports have been received.

Across the country, but especially in the West and Southwest, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, ranchers reported coming across dead cows missing some unusual body parts.

Usually an ear, an eye, the tongue, sex organs, udders, rectums.

It's been a very, very precise surgical type incision.

The body, more often than not, has been drained of blood, though no blood has been found on the ground.

No tracks of any kind, human or otherwise, led to or from the animals.

The fear was that they were being mutilated by by someone or something.

Mike Goleman wrote about this wave of cattle mutilations while getting his PhD in history from Mississippi State.

Initially, when these ranchers are reporting what they're seeing, they're reporting it to the local authorities.

And the sheriff is coming there and looks at this dead animal and says, wow, I've never seen anything like this before, because they literally haven't.

Then what starts to happen is reporters come out who really have never seen anything like this before.

Ah, have you ever seen anything like this in your life?

I don't know.

The story gets picked up by national news outlets like Time Magazine, Newsweek, even Playboy.

And it starts to kind of take a life of its own.

With all this attention came a flurry of investigations from local and state law enforcement, university researchers, and more.

And they all came up empty.

No one could find any evidence that it was anything but natural scavenger activity and predation.

The idea of finding a dead cow with its eyes, tongue, genitals, and udders missing might seem strange to those of us who don't deal with cattle with any regularity.

But those are actually the soft tissues that scavengers like flies, skunks, and vultures go for first.

And what looked like the draining of the animal's blood also had a mundane explanation.

The blood most likely pooled and coagulated out of sight.

In other words, what was happening with the cattle was in reality pretty ordinary.

Unfortunately, yes.

But for those cattle ranchers, ordinary wouldn't cut it.

Every cow they found dead and mutilated was a huge financial hit.

So they went looking for someone to blame.

And at first, that was not aliens.

Most of them believed that the federal government had something to do with it.

Ranchers were already primed to fault the government for their troubles.

The peak of these reported cattle mutilations almost exactly overlapped with an economic period so catastrophic for the cattle industry.

It became known as the wreck.

These cattle are a liability to the men who own them.

At today's prices, the cost of raising and feeding them is more than the animals bring on the wholesale market.

And the wreck was largely blamed on the federal government.

Once you put the government in your cattle business, you're in trouble.

They just cannot regulate that business.

It just is unbelievable how they can mess it up.

We start to see their frustrations with the federal government manifest and how they respond to these mutilations that are being reported.

Oftentimes what they reported seeing were helicopters that were hovering in the area either prior to or after a series of mutilations.

Now these helicopters, they probably are federal government helicopters, but they're part of the Bureau of Land Management who frequently would fly in these areas.

But many cattle ranchers became convinced that these helicopters had a more nefarious purpose.

There were several incidents where ranchers, when they would see a helicopter in the sky, they'd shoot at it.

Conspiracy thinking was also in the zeitgeist, not just for cattle ranchers.

Americans were learning just how much they didn't know about the war in Vietnam and the JFK assassination in Watergate.

The institutions that Americans trusted were no longer being trusted.

There was a lot of reasons to not take what was being said at face value.

So, how did a conspiracy theory about the federal government turn into a conspiracy theory about aliens?

Mike Goleman credits a Colorado TV reporter named Linda Moulton Howe.

Who or what is killing and mutilating these animals?

A Strange Harvest.

Linda Moulton Howe's hour-long documentary was first broadcast in May 1980.

Could it be cults, predators, helicopters, UFOs?

She had an agenda beyond just reporting about the mutilations themselves.

She was involved in the UFO community

and very quickly tied these mutilations to extraterrestrial activity.

If extraterrestrials are the ones mutilating animals, what do you think the implications are then for this planet?

All of us involved have been concerned with the possibility of the mutilations going from animals to human beings.

Understandable.

The movie ends with a long, strange scene in which a woman under hypnosis describes having actually witnessed a cow being abducted and mutilated by aliens.

I can see

an animal squirming

and trying to get free.

And it's like it's being sucked up.

Linda Moulton Howe won a Regional Emmy Award for a Strange Harvest.

She wrote a book expanding on it, and she became a kind of celebrity in the UFO community.

She really is the key person who bangs this drum of the idea that cattle mutilation represents some kind of escalation of alien contact.

Again, historian Greg E.

Gigian.

That the aliens are invested in experimenting with trying to create human-alien hybrids, and somehow the cattle are involved.

And this idea has been remarkably durable.

Since the 1980s, cattle mutilations, as well as the more benign and less disgusting cattle abductions, have shown up regularly in pop culture.

Maldo, why would alien beings travel light years to Earth in order to play doctor on cattle?

For the same reason, we cut up frogs and monkeys, cattle mutilations, possible homicide.

And here's the fun part.

The perp, according to the rancher, is an alien life form.

Another cow up another tree.

This is, to my mind, some sort of extraterrestrial activity.

In New Mexico, you can find t-shirts and vinyl stickers with an image that looks like the yellow road sign for a cattle crossing, except above the black silhouette of a cow, there's a flying saucer.

The National Museum of the Air Force sells an alien abduction cow t-shirt, and there are socks, coffee mugs, toys, and even a table lamp shaped like a UFO beaming up a cow.

Ironically, Greg says the belief in cattle abductions is pretty fringe, even among dedicated ufologists.

So why is it so sticky for the rest of us?

It's true that believers like Linda Moulton Howe are still out there spreading the gospel.

It's now 2025 February, and nothing has changed.

The government of the United States has still not told people the truth.

And that every few years, there's a new crop of stories about mysterious cattle deaths.

Someone is killing cows, 20 so far, the latest just on Monday.

This ranch in northeastern Utah lost 14 expensive animals in less than two years, carved up with surgical precision.

Their owner is out of rational explanations, and that has her looking to the sky.

But for those of us who fret neither about alien visitation nor the health of our herd, the appeal of the alien-cow connection may be pretty straightforward.

The likeliest explanation is because it's kind of funny.

This image of a cow being sucked up by a beam of light.

Cows, you know, have this kind of non-plussed facial expression they have.

They're very large, they're very bulky.

So to see them in the sky is already kind of goofy and silly.

No, maybe not so silly if you happen to be a cow.

You better pray to the Lord when you see those flying saucers.

It may be the coming of the judgment day.

It's a a sign there's no doubt of the trouble that's about.

So I say, my friends, you'd better start to pray.

When we come back, something nearly as strange sounding as cow abductions.

Zavzoprat.

Hey, I'm Candace Lem, and I'm Kate Lindsay.

And and we're the hosts of ICYMI, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

On a recent episode, we had to talk about a certain somebody's tweets, and that somebody happens to be my governor, Gavin Newsome.

If you haven't seen them recently, they've kind of gone, let's say, off the rails.

There was some Fox News host he just called a ding-dong.

And as Slate's Luke Winky tells us, this isn't the first time the California governor tried to capitalize on the country's mood of the moment.

I'm in a group chat with some men from California.

Okay.

A male journalist who used to cover California politics.

And I just like, you give me a rundown of all the Gavin Newsome stuff.

And like, one of the first three things he said was like, our typical performative male.

So does that mean his shift to Trumpian tweets is actually working?

Find out by listening to the whole episode on ICYMI.

And be sure to follow ICYMI now wherever you get your podcasts.

Our listener, Amy Goldfeine, lives in Marin County, California, and she called in to ask about something that's been bugging her every time she goes to the pharmacy.

Why are prescription drug names so bonkers?

I get migraines, and some of the new meds have names that look like someone's cat just walked all over the keyboard.

You've got Culipta, Viepti, Eubrelvi, and my favorite name, Zabzpret.

Am I saying that right?

Honestly, not sure.

I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason behind these weird names, but I can't figure it out.

Those migraine meds are just the tip of the iceberg.

Pharmaceutical names in general have been getting pretty esoteric.

What you may need is exGiva.

Discover Jem Tessa.

Novage is simple.

Qtenza is different.

Dear Vaya, it's not another drop.

I will say at the start, naming pharmaceuticals is a pain in the ass.

Laurel Sutton is a professional namer, and it turns out Amy's neighbor.

I co-founded Catchword, a naming firm here in the Bay Area of California, and I've been doing professional naming for more than 25 years.

And have you gotten to name any pharmaceuticals?

Yes.

People tend to think of naming sometimes as a madman effort where you're sitting around in a bar after work and you're writing stuff down on napkins as you're quaffing your beer.

That is not how it works.

It's people sitting at their desks combing through thesauri

all sorts of reference books and online resources to just come up with different ways of finding a word, any word that's pronounceable and spellable.

Well, sometimes pharmaceutical names aren't really spellable, but that's because of the availability part of it.

It is so much work and the return that you get on the amount of work you put into it is sort of not worth it.

So while I've done it, I don't like doing it.

Why not?

So tell me, why is it such a pain in the butt?

When you're coming up with a name for anything, whether it's a product or a service or a company, you need to come up with names that are appropriate for the thing that you're naming, but also available.

They have to be legally available as trademarks and sometimes also as domain names.

So, finding a name that is the intersection of those two things is very difficult for anything.

When you start naming pharmaceuticals, they need to pass an additional level of scrutiny that's imposed by the FDA here in the United States and the EU's medical approval board.

And that is far more difficult because the names need to be distinct from each other.

As you can imagine, if a prescription is written and interpreted incorrectly, you could kill someone by giving them the wrong drug.

Part of the testing that they do is things like having people say drug names over the phone.

So can you hear it clearly over the phone?

Can you read it if it's written in a doctor's terrible handwriting?

So the name has to be unique enough that it will not be confused for anything else.

And finding names that have not already been used that are also available as trademarks is asking an awful lot from a creative firm.

The names that Laurel's talking about, the ones a drug company hires a naming firm to generate, are called brand names.

But every drug also has another name.

It's generic name.

Those names are rarely seen by the public.

Sometimes, you know, when drugs have been around long enough, like Tylenol, for example, the generic name for that is acetaminophen.

And people know that now, but when Tylenol was first introduced, nobody knew that it was called acetaminophen.

That came later as people learned a little bit more about it.

A generic name like acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or fluoextein, the generic name for Prozac, is assigned by a consortium of medical and pharmaceutical bodies following strict guidelines.

And the generic name's most important quality is that unlike the brand name, it conveys concrete medical information.

The part that does this is called the stem, which is usually the syllables at the end of the name.

All drugs of the same class will have the same stem.

So, for example, any name ending in tryptan will treat migraines.

Any drug ending in statin tries to lower cholesterol.

Generic names also typically include a couple syllables in front of the stem.

These prefixes are meant to make each drug sound very different.

So there's simvastatin, lowvastatin, fluvastatin, and atorvastatin, which you probably know by its brand name, lipitor.

I've been eating healthier, exercising more, and now I'm also taking lipitor.

All right, so there's the drug names which are mostly we don't know.

Like Viagra is sildenophil.

Like, honestly, no one's ever heard that.

Slunesta,

azopisione.

I'm like saying it like it's Italian.

I don't know if that's correct or not.

But just like really words we haven't heard.

And then there's the brand names, which theoretically

they should be more accessible, I assume.

Like what are you thinking about when you're trying to name a drug?

Like what's the ideal set of concerns?

The ideal situation is when you have a drug and you are trying to name to its benefits.

Lunesta is a really good example.

In my opinion, as a namer, Lunesta is a great name for that drug because it implies something about what the drug does, which is that it puts you to sleep and it has a, you get a good night's rest, right?

And it's got the Lune word part in it, which is moon.

And it has this beautiful soft ending, Lunesta, right?

It sounds peaceful.

So it's a really good brand name in that regard.

There's a land of restful sleep.

We can help you go there on the wings of Lunesta.

Viagra is sort of the opposite in tonality, right?

Viagra sounds vigorous.

It sounds like Niagara Falls, which brings to mind all sorts of imagery, which, you know, I'm not going to talk about that, but you can imagine.

It just sounds really tough and powerful and manly, and that's absolutely what they were going for.

This is the age of taking action.

Viagra, talk to your doctor.

So both of those names are quite memorable, and they imply something about the drug.

One of the restrictions about drug names in the United States, anyway, is that a drug name cannot over-promise.

So you can't ever say that a drug cures a disease if in fact it doesn't cure a disease.

So if you can't guarantee the result of it, you can't say that in the name.

And one of the funnest, I will say, stories about drug naming in that regard is the drug Rogain.

In other parts of the world, it's called regain.

And they couldn't name it regain in the United States because they could not guarantee that it would help you regain your hair.

So they had to change one letter and they made it Rogain instead.

But even if you're not calling it regain as an English speaker, that association is sort of there in the way that it is for Lunesta or Viagra.

So it's kind of like doing the same thing.

It's just not as explicit.

Right.

You just can't be explicit about it.

It is incredible, but sometimes there are drug names that actually kind of say what they do.

And I can give you a few examples.

Yeah, yeah, please.

One of the names that we came up with long, long ago was for Merck, and that was the name for the first Shingles vaccine, which they don't do anymore because Shingrix is the new one.

But the name that we came up with was Zostavax,

which is a vaccine for herpes Zelster.

Zostavax.

Pretty obvious.

It's good.

Like says what it does on the tin, and I like that name.

Gardasil, another name.

So the guard part is like it guards.

And SIL, SIL, is the medical name for that type of infection, right?

It's squamous intraepithelial lesions.

So it guards against SIL, Gardasil.

Gardasil, Gardasil, Gardasil, Gardasil.

With Gardasil, you could be one less.

That's a great name.

You know, like could not be more obvious.

And they managed to get it and it was available and the FDA approved it.

That's fantastic.

What a success story.

How does it actually work between a brand and the FDA when they're figuring out if something can be a brand name?

It's a collaborative process from the drug company and the FDA.

So typically in a naming effort to name a pharmaceutical, thousands and thousands thousands of names are developed.

And then the people at the company, like at Pfizer, for example, will go through those thousands and whittle it down to a couple hundred and then the legal screenings start and then they will send names to the FDA one by one, their favorite names.

And the FDA will either say yes or no.

And if they say no, then they've got to go back and submit another name.

And that process can go on for months and years sometimes.

The runway for pharmaceutical naming is years.

It can be eight years between when you develop a a name and when the drug actually launches, because often the drug is still in development and testing while you're doing the naming for it.

There's sort of these names that I think sort of sound and look like real words.

You know, Viagra, Lunesta, Welbutrin, an antidepressant that has the name Wel right in there.

And then there is lately, not lately, I mean, for years, something that's happened where

you have these

drug names that look like Scrabble words.

Yes.

like like there's there's no vowels like viepti ze pretty it's gotten very elaborate and sort of strange

like do you think that they have gotten stranger names oh definitely yeah

just because of the availability thing because um you gotta go for little used letters you know English doesn't use the letter X very much it didn't used to anyway and it does now there's that one drug that's called Zelljance right the sequence of X E L J is very unusual.

Like that does not occur in any English word and probably in very few words in any language, but it's available.

So therefore, it's a good name, even if you got to teach people how to pronounce it.

I mean, it sort of feels like the good names have been taken.

Well...

You know, good.

What does good mean, right?

Let's take a new name that's on the market, which is very popular right now, Ozempic.

Is that a good name?

I don't know.

It's all over the place.

People say it all the time.

It's become almost the generic name for weight loss drugs.

People will just say Ozempic when they mean one of the other drugs like Wagovi, but it's out there.

People know it.

that might qualify as a good name.

It's pronounceable.

I think the OZ at the beginning is definitely meant to connote a little bit of Oz, like land of Oz.

You're going into into this new place and everybody thinks of the movie where you go from black and white to color.

Like it's it's sort of opening things up in this very beautiful way.

But then the the name itself has become what we would call productive in that other phrases have been coined off of it.

So people will say ozempic face, right?

And there are terms like phozempic as a name for drugs that aren't ozempic but are trying to mimic it.

So it's become a word that has produced other words and phrases built on top of it.

And that's pretty successful for a brand name.

So I actually realized, we got some specific, like some listeners specifically wrote in.

Can I just ask you about your thoughts on them?

Okay, so

Zavpret?

Like what does that make you hear?

Like when do you hear Zavpret?

Like what?

Are you getting anything?

What comes through?

I mean, okay, so it starts with a Z, Zav, makes it sound a little fast.

So in English, the S and Z, the sibilance, convey speed.

It's just the way English works.

The word pret in French means ready.

So I don't know if that's what they were trying to go for.

Sound-wise, it ends with a T, so it's a plosive that sounds kind of strong.

So to me, just from the sound of it, it's like, hmm, works fast, gets it done.

Sounds kind of strong.

Yeah.

I don't know where the name came from, but that would be my impression.

One of my favorites is skyrizzy i have moderate to severe placeriasis now they're skyrizzi things are getting clearer yeah i feel free oh that's a great name i love that name

why why because the sky part is amazing that they were actually able to incorporate that and you know uh for us in the western world sky you know blue sky opens things up makes you feel like it's a beautiful day and then it's got riz in it which i'm not sure if they were trying to do riz but it's there And then again, it has those S's and Z sounds, so it sounds like it does something really fast, like it lifts you up into the sky.

You know, it has endless possibilities to it.

It's a really good drug name.

Do you think that there's any danger in it just being like too hard to name things?

And so the names just suck?

Yeah, you know, I worry about this a lot, having done this for so long.

I don't know where we're headed.

I don't know if we're going to run out of names.

I don't think we will, but it has gotten exponentially harder to come up with appropriate and available names since I started doing this.

It really, really has.

The addition of requirements like, you know, we need to have the exact.com.

Well, they're all registered.

So it is getting harder, and I don't know where we're going to end up.

This is Decodering.

Thank you to everyone who sent us questions.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can please email us at decodering at slate.com.

You can also call us at 347-460-7281.

We'd love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show.

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We'd like to thank Hannah Pullman and Marilyn Ferdinand, who also wrote in asking about pharmaceutical names.

I'm Willip Haskin.

Decodering is produced by me, Max Friedman, and Katie Shepard.

Evan Chung is our supervising producer.

Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.

We'll see you in two weeks.

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