Fignature

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Cindy from Descanso, California.

Hey, Cindy, out there by Corte Madera.

I am way out in the mountains, east of San Diego.

What does that mean, cut wood?

Yes, it does.

And Descanso means…

Yeah, there’s a gorgeous trail.

Descanso is, what’s that mean?

It’s a resting place, right?

It’s a resting place.

What’s on your mind, Cindy?

Well, I heard a word when I was traveling in New York last week.

And I travel a lot on business and I hear different regional things, but I’d never heard this word before, and I think it’s a new word.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

And I was in a hotel in New York City having a drink at the bar, and the woman handed me a smartphone where she was doing the credit card receipt on the smartphone, as many taxis and bars and things seem to do these days.

And you sign it with your fingernail.

Instead of signing with a pen or getting a receipt, you actually sign on the screen of the smartphone.

Right. And she said she wanted my my finger chair like finger.

And I thought, wow, that is a great word.

You know, and I and I thought I’m going to use that word in the future.

And then I went out and she told me that she’d made the word up.

And then I went somewhere else in New York and was asked for my finger chair by someone else.

Oh, really? Yeah.

And I thought either it’s one of those things that just is so obvious once you think of it that a whole bunch of people are going to make up the same word or she didn’t realize that other people, she had maybe heard it somewhere else.

I don’t know.

And I thought, well, I’ll call A Way with Words.

I don’t know.

You’re on it.

It could be both.

It really could be.

Here’s what I do when I hear a new word just to see how widespread it is.

I go to Twitter and I do a search.

So if you type in finger-ture and finger-ture, and there’s a couple other spellings that don’t matter very much, you will find many, many people have used these words, even to the point where so many people have used them that other people are complaining about the words being overused.

Wow.

Yeah.

But the earliest use that I know of this for sure comes from 2011.

There was a company that trademarked finger-ture, but then they let the trademark application die, so they never actually made a product.

And I’m not 100% sure what they were selling.

But there’s another company called Fignature, F-I-G-N-A-T-U-R-E.

So all of these words are forms of finger plus signature.

And they register domain, and they’ve got some social media accounts.

But that company also appears to be defunct, so it’s hard to tell.

There was some kind of, like, online payment system.

I don’t really know much else about it.

Wow.

Now that’s going to be interesting.

I had never heard it before.

Yeah, I hadn’t heard it before either.

I’m wondering.

I mean, it could be Fingature.

It could be Fignature.

Yeah, I have four different spellings here.

Actually, three spellings of that and then another word that’s a synonym, finger sign.

People say finger sign this.

That one’s a little less fun in my ears.

Yeah, I’ve heard that.

Yeah.

But fingerature, fignature, and fingerature.

-huh.

Okay.

I think fingerature is the more natural sounding one.

It is.

Well, and I have to say that the people that I’ve spoken to that are friends of mine and I came back and said I heard this weird word all went, wow, what a great word.

How enthusiastic are you about the term?

I’m enthusiastic about it as thinking that it may be a short-term thing, that it might be a trend that goes through and might disappear in the future.

And because right now it feels so cute.

The question is whether it’ll go from cute to common usage will be really interesting to see.

Exactly.

Yeah, I’m not sure about that.

We’ll have to give it a 10 or 20 years to find out.

I think probably you just said something that made me, which is in line with what I was thinking, that we’ll leapfrog over this.

It’s just so weird that we require a signature that is so easily fake.

There is literally nobody checking those signatures.

I’ve never had.

I mean, I could put Donald Duck down 100% of the time and nobody would ever know, right?

But yet if you have a chip in your phone or a chip in your credit card, those things are much harder to replicate, and we tend to keep those very safe and secure.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I wonder how short-lived it’ll be, really.

Yeah, it might be short-lived, too.

Yeah, either way.

Well, and, you know, the other thing I thought is the technology may change, and then we may be signing with our thumbprint or our eye or whatever, and then maybe we’ll call it an eye-chir or a thumb-a-chir or something like that.

I don’t know.

But it is cute.

Cindy, thank you so much for sharing with us.

We’ll probably get emails about this, people who have either coined it or heard it, and then we’ll know more, all right?

I like it or don’t like it at all.

Thank you so much. I’ll be excited to hear.

All right. Cheers. Take care.

Thanks, Cindy. Bye-bye.

Bye.

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