A frequently experienced tv commercial in recent days, encountered at first only through the audio, which I heard to be for a local carpet company called, apparently, effing gee or effing G, involving the verb F or eff /ɛf/, an initialistic euphemism for fuck. Given my nature and my professional interest in taboo vocabulary, it would be fair to think of my perception as Freudian mishearing, of who knows what original. But, surely, a carpet company wouldn’t choose a name with fucking encoded in it, maybe playfully conveying that it was fucking good (though that would be a bold commercial move).
The next time I heard the ad, I understood the company name to be effigy, which is at least an English word (and not a swear), but baffling as a company name. Significantly, having heard the name originally as beginning with /ɛf/, that perception persisted.
Next time around, I shifted my perception to something more likely, in which /ɛf/ is in fact a letter name: FnG, that is F&G. This would be a common pattern in company names; a sampling of F&R companies:
F&R Auto Repair (Woodland CA), F&R Auto Sales (Hialeah FL), F&R Towing (San Jose CA), F&R Engineering (Roanoke VA), F&R American Fine Fragrance (Winston Salem NC)
Finally, I looked at the screen, and saw that the company’s name was indeed initialistic, but was S&R, not F&R. /f/ and /s/ are minimally distinct acoustically, so are often confused in perception. My initial perception was skewed towards /f/ because of my bias towards fucking — and so towards fucking and effing — and once established that perception persisted, despite repetitions of /s/.
The actual company. S & G Carpet “Your flooring store of choice for northern California” (showroom locations in Rancho Cordova, Rocklin, Elk Grove, Pleasant Hill, Dublin, Santa Clara, San Jose, and Cupertino), and a very persistent advertiser.
Now, the natural question is what the initialistic abbreviation S&G stands for. The F&R in F&R American Fine Fragrance (above) is Fulton & Roark, referring to specific people whose family names begin with an F and an R. What about the S&G in S&G Carpet?
I have read an assortment of descriptions and histories of the company, without finding any reference anywhere to an S or a G. Presumably there were such people, but their role on the company has been suppressed, leaving only their initials. So S&G is now an orphan initialism, which has figuratively lost its parents — by literally losing its source words:
orphan initialism ‘a sequence of letter names that is no longer an abbreviation for some full name, but is (legally) just a name composed of a sequence of letter names’
(They’ve come up many times in my postings, on Language Log and this blog. And here they are again, unexpectedly.)