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

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Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 14 I'm not even talking about the obvious words like arboreal or bureaucracy or water,

Speaker 16 but even just like cat.

Speaker 16 Cat.

Speaker 17 Cat. Why is that our word for our most self-possessed housepet?

Speaker 10 Sometimes a word doesn't need repetition or narcotics to get weird to you.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 10 Eric couldn't remember hearing or noticing someone drop ass into a phrase for emphasis before either.

Speaker 23 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,

Speaker 23 it is old news by decades elsewhere.

Speaker 26 Old news or otherwise, he took a shine to it.

Speaker 23 Somehow to my ears, it made complete sense immediately.

Speaker 27 After that, you couldn't stop hearing it.

Speaker 23 You know, he's a grown-ass man. You're, you know, get your stupid ass face away from me or whatever.

Speaker 4 I'm a grown-ass man.

Speaker 25 Campbell's soup.

Speaker 28 It's just wet-ass food.

Speaker 6 I think I wore this nice-ass shirt for her today.

Speaker 29 You know, you got a big-ass knife sticking out of you?

Speaker 30 Big ass, nice-ass, grown-ass, dead-ass, hard-ass, badass, stupid-ass, silly-ass, goofy-ass, loud-ass.

Speaker 17 There seems to be no adjective you can't make funnier or more forceful just by dropping an ass on it.

Speaker 23 It just seems like the word ass intensifies. It's like it's a slightly more risque way of saying very.

Speaker 10 Eric has even come to think of this linguistic quirk by a special name.

Speaker 23 The ass intensifier.

Speaker 31 He's now spent years wondering about the ass intensifier, and he's accumulated a number of questions about it.

Speaker 23 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?

Speaker 23 And then I'd be curious about similar phenomena in other languages. Do other languages have similar things?

Speaker 11 Luckily, he emailed exactly the right people to get him some answers.

Speaker 34 This is Decoder Ring.

Speaker 32 I'm Willa Paskin.

Speaker 27 We're very lucky to get a lot of fascinating fascinating questions from our listeners.

Speaker 35 And so, as we do from time to time, we're opening up our mailbag to try and answer some of them.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 37 That's all today on Decodering.

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Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 40 We actually do call it ass intensifier in the scholarly literature.

Speaker 10 Nicole Holiday is an acting linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Speaker 40 There is another like wonderful scholar who calls it the anal emphatic,

Speaker 40 which like, wow, chef's kiss.

Speaker 12 Nicole explained to me that linguistically, an intensifier is any word or phrase that emphasizes another word.

Speaker 40 Something that can basically replace anything where you're trying to use like very or extremely.

Speaker 10 So like she's a grown-ass woman.

Speaker 42 That's just saying like she's very grown.

Speaker 40 Yes, that is the intensifier.

Speaker 10 And like similarly, like I woke up at ass o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 13 That's just like I woke up very early in the morning.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 22 And why do we do this?

Speaker 40 Because we're creative and it's fun.

Speaker 31 A researcher named Wilson J.

Speaker 10 Miller traced the usage of the ass intensifier back to 1942 and Marines serving in the Second World War.

Speaker 28 Somewhere in the South Pacific, a powerful task force of United States Marines begins offensive action to retake the strategic Solomon Islands.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 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?

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 10 These are the oldest written examples we have of the ass intensifier, but it was almost surely used in spoken language earlier.

Speaker 31 And Nicole says there's a real possibility that it came out of one community in particular.

Speaker 40 It could be African American English that was introduced to white GIs during that time. It wouldn't be surprising.

Speaker 40 It's very widespread in African American English, but we don't exactly have recordings from pre-1940s to know that for sure.

Speaker 41 Whenever exactly it started, after the war, it began to spread.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 And it sort of seems to flow out from there into the culture and expand in use for the next 80 years.

Speaker 18 I mean, how many more times am I gonna have to listen to a sad-ass pity party?

Speaker 36 Shit, I can't afford this nice ass car.

Speaker 29 I swear, I don't know who is the worst between you and that lazy ass brother yours.

Speaker 10 Have we just been using it as much as we use it now for a long time?

Speaker 42 Or do you think we use it more now?

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 So there's some arguments that profanity has become more socially acceptable, especially in the last like 20 years.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 34 I also just noticed in sort of like

Speaker 42 big-assed marine, big ass bird, big ass nightstick, like

Speaker 43 a literalism almost in the early examples of it, where it's like, an ass can be big.

Speaker 10 right like the thing on our bodies yes can an ass be crazy it can't mom is a crazy ass

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 So like ass like that guy's like an ass like a fool or a jerk or something, right?

Speaker 40 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

Speaker 42 are there other things that behave like this in English?

Speaker 35 Yes.

Speaker 40 I was thinking a lot about dead.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 40 So in New York City, you get dead ass.

Speaker 4 Are you serious?

Speaker 4 Dead ass.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 10 Dead tired. Like it just never occurred to me until this moment that dead is working as an intensifier.

Speaker 40 Yeah. You can also be dead broke.
Right.

Speaker 4 Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 40 And like we do this with butt, right? So like butt ass ugly. Butt ass, butt ass ugly.

Speaker 40 You could also be butt ugly. Yeah, yeah.
Right? Just like ugly ass or ass ugly, I guess.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 41 Fantastic ass claim.

Speaker 40 Yeah, fantastic ass argument. Like, maybe, but it doesn't sound as good as ugly ass.

Speaker 10 It's like we just something about that sounds wrong to all of us.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 So that's why you shouldn't get something like articulate ass. Like he's an articulate ass guy.
Like

Speaker 40 is it because it's long or is it because it's a fancy word? Like we don't know.

Speaker 19 Do other languages have things like this or do you, I mean, yes.

Speaker 40 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

Speaker 19 That's amazing.

Speaker 10 It's crazy how much we all just know what everything means, even though we can't articulate it.

Speaker 40 Yeah. And so because we're all using language all the time, like we are creative, we make mistakes, we're accidentally hilarious, right?

Speaker 31 The language is changing.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 And they'll do it sometimes in really dramatic ways and sometimes in really subtle ways.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 But that is why we get so frustrated when the old people complain about language change. It's just like, you did too.

Speaker 40 And all of this tells us something about the cognitive ability of humans that is really awesome, right?

Speaker 40 Like, one day, some Marines were like, hmm, literally, one dude probably was like, big ass Marine.

Speaker 11 And everyone was like, that cooks.

Speaker 40 Like,

Speaker 40 we like it. This lap.

Speaker 35 When we come back, some cow-ass-loving aliens.

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Speaker 19 Our next listener question comes from Stason Goldman in Stowe, Massachusetts.

Speaker 10 It occurred to her a few months ago when she was watching her son play a video game called Scribble Knots.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 And I looked at the screen and it was a little green man in a UFO and I said, oh, he wants a cow.

Speaker 12 Stacy's son was baffled.

Speaker 46 He did not understand why the alien would want a cow. And I said, just trust me, that alien wants a cow.

Speaker 11 So he dutifully typed in the word cow.

Speaker 10 And then a cow appeared on screen.

Speaker 46 And the alien took the cow and flew off in peace.

Speaker 46 And my son was even more confused. He said, why did he want that? How did you know that he wanted that?

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 12 Stason's right.

Speaker 41 Aliens' particular interest in cows is all over the culture.

Speaker 4 Moo.

Speaker 4 Moo moo moo.

Speaker 10 It's there in the first episode of South Park when aliens determine that cows are the most intelligent beings on planet Earth.

Speaker 4 Moo, moo, moo, moo.

Speaker 4 What the hell are they talking about?

Speaker 31 It's in the opening scene of the movie Mars Attacks when the Martians set a herd of cattle on fire.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 31 And yes, cows and aliens also co-star in many, many video games.

Speaker 12 Which brings us to Stason's question.

Speaker 46 How do we all think this? Why do we all think this?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 31 Greg E.

Speaker 10 Gigian is a historian at Penn State University and the author of After the Flying Saucers Came, a global history of the UFO phenomenon.

Speaker 8 Alexander Hamilton gets awakened one night. It's about 10.30 p.m.

Speaker 8 His tenant and his son are also there because they hear this kind of unrest among their cattle.

Speaker 42 His cows are going crazy, making a racket.

Speaker 41 So he goes outside.

Speaker 8 And he says what he sees about 600 feet in the sky is this massive, massive, what he called airship.

Speaker 34 It's huge, 300 feet long and mostly red.

Speaker 12 And there's a carriage on the underside made of glass so that he can see six alien beings inside.

Speaker 10 And then he notices something that makes it all even stranger.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 8 I have found the hide, the legs, and the head of your heifer. Everything else is gone.

Speaker 8 And what's really, really strange is all of those remains were on my farm, but there were no footprints around it.

Speaker 8 And that's the story Alexander Hamilton told.

Speaker 31 And Hamilton wasn't the only one to report seeing mysterious airships in the sky.

Speaker 4 For a couple of years in the late 1890s, people around the world were sharing stories of similar sightings.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 It was kind of a competitive thing. And so all of this seems to have been part of that.

Speaker 12 Despite his confession, Hamilton's tall tale lived on for decades.

Speaker 31 It was relatively obscure, even among scholars of the supernatural.

Speaker 13 But then it came the atomic age, and with it, the golden era of the flying saucer.

Speaker 35 They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 8 You start to hear these stories of cattle mutilations.

Speaker 53 Thousands of cattle, horses, and other animals have been cut up in strange ways.

Speaker 51 Today, nearly 15,000 mutilation reports have been received.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 53 Usually an ear, an eye, the tongue, sex organs, udders, rectums.

Speaker 55 It's been a very, very precise surgical type incision.

Speaker 56 The body, more often than not, has been drained of blood, though no blood has been found on the ground.

Speaker 51 No tracks of any kind, human or otherwise, led to or from the animals.

Speaker 57 The fear was that they were being mutilated by by someone or something.

Speaker 10 Mike Goleman wrote about this wave of cattle mutilations while getting his PhD in history from Mississippi State.

Speaker 57 Initially, when these ranchers are reporting what they're seeing, they're reporting it to the local authorities.

Speaker 57 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.

Speaker 57 Then what starts to happen is reporters come out who really have never seen anything like this before.

Speaker 23 Ah, have you ever seen anything like this in your life?

Speaker 50 I don't know.

Speaker 10 The story gets picked up by national news outlets like Time Magazine, Newsweek, even Playboy.

Speaker 57 And it starts to kind of take a life of its own.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 57 No one could find any evidence that it was anything but natural scavenger activity and predation.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 12 But those are actually the soft tissues that scavengers like flies, skunks, and vultures go for first.

Speaker 31 And what looked like the draining of the animal's blood also had a mundane explanation.

Speaker 12 The blood most likely pooled and coagulated out of sight.

Speaker 11 In other words, what was happening with the cattle was in reality pretty ordinary.

Speaker 57 Unfortunately, yes.

Speaker 13 But for those cattle ranchers, ordinary wouldn't cut it.

Speaker 31 Every cow they found dead and mutilated was a huge financial hit.

Speaker 10 So they went looking for someone to blame.

Speaker 27 And at first, that was not aliens.

Speaker 57 Most of them believed that the federal government had something to do with it.

Speaker 14 Ranchers were already primed to fault the government for their troubles.

Speaker 27 The peak of these reported cattle mutilations almost exactly overlapped with an economic period so catastrophic for the cattle industry.

Speaker 31 It became known as the wreck.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 9 And the wreck was largely blamed on the federal government.

Speaker 52 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.

Speaker 57 We start to see their frustrations with the federal government manifest and how they respond to these mutilations that are being reported.

Speaker 57 Oftentimes what they reported seeing were helicopters that were hovering in the area either prior to or after a series of mutilations.

Speaker 57 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.

Speaker 10 But many cattle ranchers became convinced that these helicopters had a more nefarious purpose.

Speaker 57 There were several incidents where ranchers, when they would see a helicopter in the sky, they'd shoot at it.

Speaker 10 Conspiracy thinking was also in the zeitgeist, not just for cattle ranchers.

Speaker 13 Americans were learning just how much they didn't know about the war in Vietnam and the JFK assassination in Watergate.

Speaker 57 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.

Speaker 12 So, how did a conspiracy theory about the federal government turn into a conspiracy theory about aliens?

Speaker 10 Mike Goleman credits a Colorado TV reporter named Linda Moulton Howe.

Speaker 53 Who or what is killing and mutilating these animals?

Speaker 49 A Strange Harvest.

Speaker 10 Linda Moulton Howe's hour-long documentary was first broadcast in May 1980.

Speaker 53 Could it be cults, predators, helicopters, UFOs?

Speaker 57 She had an agenda beyond just reporting about the mutilations themselves. She was involved in the UFO community

Speaker 57 and very quickly tied these mutilations to extraterrestrial activity.

Speaker 58 If extraterrestrials are the ones mutilating animals, what do you think the implications are then for this planet?

Speaker 51 All of us involved have been concerned with the possibility of the mutilations going from animals to human beings. Understandable.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 59 I can see

Speaker 55 an animal squirming

Speaker 53 and trying to get free.

Speaker 53 And it's like it's being sucked up.

Speaker 16 Linda Moulton Howe won a Regional Emmy Award for a Strange Harvest.

Speaker 10 She wrote a book expanding on it, and she became a kind of celebrity in the UFO community.

Speaker 8 She really is the key person who bangs this drum of the idea that cattle mutilation represents some kind of escalation of alien contact.

Speaker 10 Again, historian Greg E.

Speaker 49 Gigian.

Speaker 8 That the aliens are invested in experimenting with trying to create human-alien hybrids, and somehow the cattle are involved.

Speaker 31 And this idea has been remarkably durable.

Speaker 10 Since the 1980s, cattle mutilations, as well as the more benign and less disgusting cattle abductions, have shown up regularly in pop culture.

Speaker 54 Maldo, why would alien beings travel light years to Earth in order to play doctor on cattle?

Speaker 51 For the same reason, we cut up frogs and monkeys, cattle mutilations, possible homicide.

Speaker 60 And here's the fun part. The perp, according to the rancher, is an alien life form.

Speaker 25 Another cow up another tree. This is, to my mind, some sort of extraterrestrial activity.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 Ironically, Greg says the belief in cattle abductions is pretty fringe, even among dedicated ufologists.

Speaker 12 So why is it so sticky for the rest of us?

Speaker 31 It's true that believers like Linda Moulton Howe are still out there spreading the gospel.

Speaker 59 It's now 2025 February, and nothing has changed. The government of the United States has still not told people the truth.

Speaker 31 And that every few years, there's a new crop of stories about mysterious cattle deaths.

Speaker 10 Someone is killing cows, 20 so far, the latest just on Monday.

Speaker 62 This ranch in northeastern Utah lost 14 expensive animals in less than two years, carved up with surgical precision.

Speaker 5 Their owner is out of rational explanations, and that has her looking to the sky.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 They're very large, they're very bulky. So to see them in the sky is already kind of goofy and silly.

Speaker 10 No, maybe not so silly if you happen to be a cow.

Speaker 4 You better pray to the Lord when you see those flying saucers. It may be the coming of the judgment day.

Speaker 4 It's a a sign there's no doubt of the trouble that's about.

Speaker 4 So I say, my friends, you'd better start to pray.

Speaker 10 When we come back, something nearly as strange sounding as cow abductions.

Speaker 16 Zavzoprat.

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Speaker 24 Novage is simple.

Speaker 21 Qtenza is different.

Speaker 20 Dear Vaya, it's not another drop.

Speaker 61 I will say at the start, naming pharmaceuticals is a pain in the ass.

Speaker 45 Laurel Sutton is a professional namer, and it turns out Amy's neighbor.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 31 And have you gotten to name any pharmaceuticals?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 That is not how it works. It's people sitting at their desks combing through thesauri

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 Well, sometimes pharmaceutical names aren't really spellable, but that's because of the availability part of it.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 20 Why not?

Speaker 42 So tell me, why is it such a pain in the butt?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 And that is far more difficult because the names need to be distinct from each other.

Speaker 61 As you can imagine, if a prescription is written and interpreted incorrectly, you could kill someone by giving them the wrong drug.

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 And finding names that have not already been used that are also available as trademarks is asking an awful lot from a creative firm.

Speaker 31 The names that Laurel's talking about, the ones a drug company hires a naming firm to generate, are called brand names.

Speaker 11 But every drug also has another name.

Speaker 45 It's generic name.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 31 And the generic name's most important quality is that unlike the brand name, it conveys concrete medical information.

Speaker 10 The part that does this is called the stem, which is usually the syllables at the end of the name.

Speaker 32 All drugs of the same class will have the same stem.

Speaker 13 So, for example, any name ending in tryptan will treat migraines.

Speaker 30 Any drug ending in statin tries to lower cholesterol.

Speaker 11 Generic names also typically include a couple syllables in front of the stem.

Speaker 31 These prefixes are meant to make each drug sound very different.

Speaker 30 So there's simvastatin, lowvastatin, fluvastatin, and atorvastatin, which you probably know by its brand name, lipitor.

Speaker 51 I've been eating healthier, exercising more, and now I'm also taking lipitor.

Speaker 42 All right, so there's the drug names which are mostly we don't know.

Speaker 48 Like Viagra is sildenophil. Like, honestly, no one's ever heard that.
Slunesta,

Speaker 12 azopisione.

Speaker 48 I'm like saying it like it's Italian.

Speaker 4 I don't know if that's correct or not.

Speaker 43 But just like really words we haven't heard. And then there's the brand names, which theoretically

Speaker 12 they should be more accessible, I assume.

Speaker 66 Like what are you thinking about when you're trying to name a drug? Like what's the ideal set of concerns?

Speaker 61 The ideal situation is when you have a drug and you are trying to name to its benefits.

Speaker 61 Lunesta is a really good example.

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 36 There's a land of restful sleep.

Speaker 16 We can help you go there on the wings of Lunesta.

Speaker 61 Viagra is sort of the opposite in tonality, right? Viagra sounds vigorous.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 It just sounds really tough and powerful and manly, and that's absolutely what they were going for.

Speaker 5 This is the age of taking action. Viagra, talk to your doctor.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 32 So it's kind of like doing the same thing.

Speaker 15 It's just not as explicit.

Speaker 42 Right.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 But the name that we came up with was Zostavax,

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 And SIL, SIL, is the medical name for that type of infection, right? It's squamous intraepithelial lesions. So it guards against SIL, Gardasil.

Speaker 16 Gardasil, Gardasil, Gardasil, Gardasil.

Speaker 59 With Gardasil, you could be one less.

Speaker 16 That's a great name.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 10 How does it actually work between a brand and the FDA when they're figuring out if something can be a brand name?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 The runway for pharmaceutical naming is years.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 43 There's sort of these names that I think sort of sound and look like real words.

Speaker 66 You know, Viagra, Lunesta, Welbutrin, an antidepressant that has the name Wel right in there.

Speaker 42 And then there is lately, not lately, I mean, for years, something that's happened where

Speaker 27 you have these

Speaker 43 drug names that look like Scrabble words.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 43 like like there's there's no vowels like viepti ze pretty it's gotten very elaborate and sort of strange

Speaker 61 like do you think that they have gotten stranger names oh definitely yeah

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 42 I mean, it sort of feels like the good names have been taken.

Speaker 61 Well...

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 I think the OZ at the beginning is definitely meant to connote a little bit of Oz, like land of Oz.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 And that's pretty successful for a brand name.

Speaker 43 So I actually realized, we got some specific, like some listeners specifically wrote in.

Speaker 66 Can I just ask you about your thoughts on them?

Speaker 43 Okay, so

Speaker 30 Zavpret?

Speaker 43 Like what does that make you hear? Like when do you hear Zavpret? Like what?

Speaker 20 Are you getting anything? What comes through?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 You know, it has endless possibilities to it. It's a really good drug name.

Speaker 43 Do you think that there's any danger in it just being like too hard to name things?

Speaker 66 And so the names just suck?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 31 This is Decodering.

Speaker 42 Thank you to everyone who sent us questions.

Speaker 31 If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can please email us at decodering at slate.com.

Speaker 12 You can also call us at 347-460-7281.

Speaker 14 We'd love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show.

Speaker 10 If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking try free at the top of the Decodering show page.

Speaker 10 Or visit slate.com/slash slash decoderplus to get access wherever you listen.

Speaker 22 Slate Plus members get access to our bonus episodes and to hear our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads.

Speaker 10 And there are so many great Slate podcasts that also take listener questions.

Speaker 10 Like Care and Feeding, our show for parenting advice, which recently devoted an episode to a listener's concern about screen time.

Speaker 10 Like, for example, does a podcast count as screen time?

Speaker 36 Will we rot your children's brains?

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Speaker 27 Don't forget, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking try free or visit slate.com slash decoder plus to sign up.

Speaker 10 We'd like to thank Hannah Pullman and Marilyn Ferdinand, who also wrote in asking about pharmaceutical names.

Speaker 41 I'm Willip Haskin.

Speaker 31 Decodering is produced by me, Max Friedman, and Katie Shepard.

Speaker 10 Evan Chung is our supervising producer.

Speaker 27 Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.

Speaker 45 We'll see you in two weeks.

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