making negatives positive

Making Negatives Positive: Naming Goalie Sticks

By Lacrosse Playground | September 7, 2010 |
In a couple of professional incarnations, I worked in marketing departments as a writer, including at Starbucks. I had the experience there — sometimes exhilerating, most times frustrating — of working on product names. One of the bits of lingual jui-jitsu that often needed to be performed was making the negative positive. You know, “it’s not a flaw, it’s a feature”. As I shopped for a goalie stick head, I had a moment of empathy for my erstwhile colleagues whose job it is to name goalie sticks and heads.