1431 Plum Good

Naming always interests me. Products or things that seek to align themselves with other products or things in order to be successful. I thought about that recently when I saw that Google had named its new search thing “Chrome.”
Really?
In the fifties, it was a pretty big deal to add chrome to your car. Doodads the big daddies loved to embellish their hot rods with. Strips of chrome flashily festooning the fenders and fins. So, in my tiny little mind, the word chrome always calls up useless decoration—lots of flash, not much else.
Also, my mind is naturally drawn to the use by other major companies of more precious metals. The American Express Gold or Platinum card perhaps. Chrome seemed like a bit of a metallurgical letdown.
But now American Express has gone the other way. Perhaps because of the success of the product called Blackberry. The newest fancy version of the American Express Card eschews metal altogether, in favor of, of all things, a fruit. It’s the new American Express Plum Card.
It’s supposedly for sophisticated business people but it sure calls up folksier imagery.
“Yeehaw, That’s a great card pardner—it’s plum good!”
Still, plums have a long and positive association with our cultural psyche. When someone gets a raise in status and income, it’s often because he or she has ascended to a plum position. Or a plum job.
Plum pudding was once widely regarded as well. Sticking in a thumb and pulling out a plum could lead a person to conclude what a good boy he was.
But I worry. American Express was dangerously close to going in the financial toilet not long ago.
And plums are, after all, often precursors to prunes.
America, ya gotta love it.