In yesterday's New York Times business section, an article headlined included this sentence:
Under Mr. Isdell, Coke is now trying to be a more spritely buyer.That adjective should be spelled sprightly.
The word an odd example of English orthography becoming more complex rather than simpler over time: the noun form is indeed sprite, from Latin spiritus, a small supernatural being; an elf or pixie. Sprite has been around since 1303, according to . But the adjective (and it is an adjective, despite that -ly suffix) became the more Germanic-looking sprightly around 1596, and that's the only accepted spelling to this day.
And, yes, Coca-Cola does own , the lemon-lime beverage introduced in 1961 as a competitor to 7-Up, so I did wonder briefly whether there was a little in-joke going on at the Times. But the misspelling is so common that I think it just slipped past the copy desk.
As long as we're in the bottled-beverage aisle, did you notice that Coca-Cola has just acquired the makers of Vitamin Water?
It's a clever enough portmanteau of the French words for ice and water, but the totally superfluous acute accent is a dead giveaway that no one here parlay-voos. (In fact, glacéau is headquartered in Queens.) And the lower-case g is going to have copy editors gritting their teeth, and reaching for bottles of the hard stuff, for years to come.
As for Energy Brands, known as...
is that like My name is Theodore but call me Beaver ? No clue. (For more on hyperforeignism, read the ever-acute Mr.
Verb and .)
| There is only one (guess who owns the domain?), but there's a Springfield in most, if not all, of the 50 United States.
If that strikes you as irrational or confusing, you're not alone. More than 100 years ago, a British-born American social reformer named Stedman Whitwell proposed to give each locality a distinctive name by expressing in a compound word the latitude and longitude of the place, thus enabling one to locate any community geographically when the name was once known. (Source: .
)
The Athanasius Kircher Society, which evidently considers the lapse of more than a century merely a rounding error, , which would have renamed Washington as Feili Neivul, Philadelphia as Outeon Eveldo, and Pittsburgh as Otfu Veitoup. (Pronunciation be hanged!)
And, yes, I thought the whole thing was a hoax, too, especially after I discovered that the German polymath Athanasius Kircher, S.
J., is represented in , the sublimely nutty institution in Culver City, California, whose collections shimmer tantalizingly between truth and truthiness. (Lawrence Weschler wrote a book about the museum, .
) But no: both Whitwell (1784-1840) and Kircher (1602-1680) in fact lived, breathed, and did the things ascribed to them. There's even a at Stanford University.
And speaking of geographical arcana, here's
is nirvana for : lists of anagrams, palindromes, spoonerisms, oxymorons, redundancies, rhyming slang, and --not just the familiar homonyms and eponyms, but also (words that are their own opposites, like cleave), heteronyms (words with the same spelling and different pronunciations, like excuse), and tautonyms (words composed of two equal parts, such as tutu and bye-bye).
At Creative Bits, a .
will analyze your writing and tell you whether you're an XX or an XY. According to the algorithm mavens, words like if, with, we, and your are feminine; a, is, and, and to are masculine.
Works best, if at all, on passages of more than 500 words. Gender Genie went all fluttery over my own two-fisted, hairy-chested prose.
If I was born on May 18 (hold the flowers; I wasn't), I must be Erik: told me so.
Created by the Swedish Academy in 2001, the name day list instructs parents on correct nomenclature. No name is assigned to January 1; I guess that's the day the Swedes reserve for Madicynn or Kameron. (Via , which is worth a long post of its own.
Suffice it to say that Name of the Year, founded on an Ivy League campus in 1983, specializes in unearthing odd personal names from the wide world of sports--names like , Assumption Bulltron, and Nimrod Weiselfish.)
And speaking of sports names, how 'bout those roller derby gals? forwarded , which includes Bea Ligerent, Reba Smackentire, Takillya Sunrise, and Forniskate.
But it's not just an Atlanta thang: the gals of (Paris Troika, Bolshe Vixen, Knuckle Sandovitch, et al.) also rock (and roll) the names.
Let's end on an elevated note with the , the result of an ongoing project to collect and distribute the most obscure and rare words in the English language.
It also contains a few words which do not have equivalent words in English. Excellent preparation for the , coming to Washington, DC, May 30 and 31.
| It's reassuring to learn that North American cities, states, and provinces have filled all the potholes and housed all the homeless and are getting down to the real business of government: creating catchy tourism slogans.
(See recent efforts by , , and , for starters, and go deeper with and . It's hard to top Where Yee-Ha Meets Olé, although Experience Our Sense of Yuma comes close.)
Some of these civic units have paid bushels of money for dubious returns.
Sacramento, however, has modest goals and a budget to match: It's offering a $20 gift certificate to on 10th Street to anyone who can come up with one word that defines California's capital city. (For its part, Temple Coffee calls itself innovative, with a well knowledgeable staff --sic.) According to Bob Shallit at , submissions so far have included poised, real, and captivating.
My brother David, who forwarded me the Bee article, reports that someone else nominated cheap.
I lived in Sacramento for one scorching summer, in a third-floor walk-up with no air-conditioning, so I actually can think of several other words to describe the place. But that was then; perhaps some of you will have a fresher perspective.
; contest ends May 31.
Does the name of your street affect your property values? That's the question posed by Freakonomics blog co-author Steven D.
Levitt , with a follow-up post A couple of real estate agents in Austin, Texas, got the ball rolling last year with that asked whether a politically incorrect street name might have an impact; they cited Shoot Out, Gun Fight, and Ammunition --all actual street names in their fair city. (The real estate agents also referred to these street names as overtly western, which I find overly charitable.) Their answer: a tentative yes, although they also noted that the houses on un-PC streets were smaller, in square footage, than the control group.
Now the on a study performed by a Canadian professor, Murtaza Haider, who apparently teaches in the Department of Obvious Conclusions. People attach values (to addresses) and pay a premium, said Haider. When Ryerson [University, in Toronto] markets its business program, it says 'MBA on Bay.
' The reason is that they want to capture the prestige associated with finance on Bay Street in Canada. But there isn't even an entrance to the building on Bay Street. You enter from Dundas.
In the Toronto example, the street name itself doesn't confer prestige: Bay Street, like Wall Street in New York, has become synonymous with a certain activity, and anyone who wants the halo effect positions himself accordingly. The cachet associated with the street name is entirely dependent on context; a visitor from Mars might be disappointed that Wall Street has only tall buildings and no Great Wall of Manhattan.
A local case in point: Sand Hill Road, in Menlo Park, is synonomous with Silicon Valley enterprise and venture capital; during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, commercial property on that otherwise featureless street was more expensive than real estate anywhere else in the world.
And yet ...
Sand Hill hardly sounds solid or substantial, does it? (Of course, neither was the dot-com boom.)
My favorite story about street names comes from that astute cultural critic Chris Rock.
In the 1980s, many American cities chose to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., by renaming a major thoroughfare after him. Inevitably, that street ran through what used to be called the ghetto and is now (often erroneously) called the inner city.
In his standup routine, Rock used to tell it like this:
If a friend calls you on the telephone and says they're lost on Martin Luther King Boulevard and they want to know what they should do, the best response is Run!More fun with street names over at , where Michael Sheehan muses on Divorce Court (in Pittston, PA), Skunk's Misery Road (Long Island, NY), and a private street in Traverse City, MI, called Psycho Path.
The nonprofit, nonpartisan is sponsoring a .
The park was established in 1910 and has since lost most of its glaciers. If current climate trends continue, by 2030 it will have none at all.
If a glacier melts in the park, can the park still be called Glacier?
I think not. So ..
. Dry Ice Park? Little Trickle Park?
Park?
I believe Kalahari and Sahara are already taken.
Deadline is June 11.
Multiple entries encouraged. The winner gets a $250 gift certificate from outdoor gear retailer .
There's a fine line between silly names that evoke groans--for example, I recently learned of something called Zitgist (site under construction, and I'm supposing those i's are pronounced as long vowels)--and silly names that make you feel good about a product.
The line is subjective, of course, but I'm going to venture out on that line without a safety net to tell you about two good-silly names I've recently come across.
My first nomination is , a reinvention of the traditional piggy bank. Instead of a slot, this spherical porcelain porker has a round hole to accommodate coins and bills of all denominations.
Blended words often sound forced, but this one--from coin + oink, in case you didn't get it--is short, seamless, and satisfying. I especially like the way it doesn't use the words pig or bank but still conveys the message.
Tied for top honors is Kapoosh.
I first came across this name on ( culinary adventures of a southern girl in the city ), and even though the photo didn't do it justice, I was immediately won over. What's a Kapoosh? It's a knife block in which the customary slots are replaced by thousands of tightly compressed plastic freedom rods.
Perfect for those of us with poor eyesight, or aim, the Kapoosh maximizes the space in the block and--here's the really nifty part--sharpens as it stores. And the compressed-rod matrix slides out for washing in a dishwasher. (See and buy ; I found .
)
What about the name? Well, it's a play on ka-ching! and push, with that (thank you, Google) and a suggestion of both function (push in your utensils) and benefit (you're a winner!
). But what charmed me was a completely incidental association that the product engineers and namers probably weren't aware of. For generations, a fixture in many Jewish households has been the , a can or container for collecting money for charity--a quarter here, a nickel there.
As a kid, I thought the pushke got its name from the way in which money was pushed into it. Not so: it's from Polish puszka, a little box. When I read about Kapoosh, I loved the way the word inverted the syllables of pushke and summoned up similar feelings of doing the right thing.
It certainly doesn't hurt that the Kapoosh is a terrific product--a clear case of why didn't they think of that before? And the name elevates it beyond the strictly utilitarian into the realm of delight.
I've been working on a long-overdue update of .
In the meantime, for those of you who care, here are some of the projects I've recently completed:
- All new content for the . Fairyland is that rare thing: a relevant anachronism. It opened in 1950 on the shores of Oakland's Lake Merritt as a storybook theme park for young children, and for 57 years has successfully resisted the lure of thrill rides, arcade games, and corporate sponsorship.
(Walt Disney visited the park the year it opened and copied many of its features when he created Disneyland.) At Fairyland, admission is only $6 and everything is kid-scale and kid-friendly. It has no roller coasters, but it does have a little library hut and the oldest continuously operating puppet theater in the United States.
It has a children's theater program, a pair of rabbits, a llama, and an elderly pony. And it has lots of stuff that adults find corny and little kids absolutely adore--like Magic Keys that operate talking Storybook Boxes and a big elf statue that blows bubbles. Little kids love those bubbles.
Fairyland is a wonderful place to visit, but its web site wasn't. It was awkwardly written and confusing to navigate, and it didn't convey the spirit of the place. So I set about creating a new voice, stories, and site architecture.
I interviewed more than a dozen people involved with Fairyland, from 79-year-old puppetmaster Lewis Mahlmann, who's worked with the park for 40 years, to 9-year-old Anthony Sung, who played a flying monkey in Fairyland's 2005 production of The Wizard of Oz. And I spent lots and lots of time with , Fairyland's dedicated and inspirational executive director. Then I persuaded my friend , a gifted designer and illustrator, to create templates for the site design.
Susan used to teach preschool; she really got the spirit of Fairyland. But I'm biased.
- A new name for a Silicon Valley restart-up (formerly Connex Technology): .
The company makes the chip arrays that make high-definition TV look good across a range of international standards. The new name plays on the optical term gray scale, a black-to-white spectrum. This was my third naming project with CEO Dave Corbin--he gets around--and as usual, he was a dream client: clear, attentive, and decisive.
The BrightScale.com URL was taken but not developed; I helped negotiate a smooth domain transfer. My deep gratitude to genius graphic designer , who brought the identity and web site to life.
- Name development for , the first clinically proven laser hair-removal device for home use. Trademarked as both a medical device and a beauty product, the name had to suggest skin beauty, femininity, strength, freedom, modernity, elegance, and light. The coined word TRIA (pronunced TREE-ah) combines a crisp, efficient-sounding consonant blend with an open, feminine suffix; the word suggests trim and ray and also hints at the three-point contact area of the device.
I also consulted on the tagline, The Enlightened Solution, and on the URL, TriaBeauty.com.
- Web content for , a multifaceted new real estate development on the site of a historic West Oakland railroad terminal.
My client was , which has worked for years with community and government groups to move the development forward. I wrote all content, including descriptions of projects being developed by companies other than Holliday. Very nice site design by .
- Name development for , a nonprofit venture that creates multimedia programs to encourage new U.S. immigrants to improve their health status.
Among other constraints, the new name couldn't use the words immigrant, assimilation, or new American. I worked with a client team spread across three time zones and presented the names via conference call. The chosen name connects strongly to the team's previous successful project, Sound Partners for Community Health, while also suggesting the immigrant journey and--through homophonic association--the new roots immigrants are putting down in their adopted homeland.
| From the New York Times, April 22:
Kelsie B. Harder, Name Expert, Dies at 84Mr. Harder was a toponomist--a scholar of place names--whose interest in the subject began, as the Times's Douglas Martin notes, with baby steps, literally :
Kelsie B.Harder, whose ruminations about why his parents gave him what sounded like a girl’s name provoked such enthrallment with proper nouns that he became a leading onomastician — a student of names and their origins — died on April 12 at his home in Potsdam, N.Y. He was 84.
Dr. Harder learned that his parents had wanted to give him an unusual name and liked the sound of Elsie, his sister’s.Surely by now you've heard of , Microsoft's new cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web.They stuck a “K” in front of Elsie. Dr. Harder, like “A Boy Named Sue” in the song, spent a lifetime explaining that he was not a girl named Kelsie.
“We are at the mercy of our name givers,” he said in a 1987 interview with The Post-Standard of Syracuse. “These things influence us for the rest of our lives, and we have nothing to do with it.”
That's a direct quote from the official site; Steve at provides an MS-to-English translation: Flash re-branded and re-factored by the Big M.
If you're hard core, you know that Silverlight's code name was the euphonious and memorable WPF/E.
It was a tough choice; we know that WPF/E was much loved by the community and that acronyms can be both inspiring and evocative, but we really wanted to try something radical and different.
We had some really great alternative choices that we considered before settling on Silverlight, and I thought now would be a perfect time to share them. I hope that after you see the other brand names we considered, you'll be happy with our final choice. So here goes.
.. drum roll, please; here are the top 10 names we rejected before settling on Silverlight:
10.
GrayLuminosity (close, but there was just something not quite right about it)
9. AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript And XAML (turns out that acronym was already taken)
1. Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation Live Rich Client ActiveX Player R2 Ultimate Edition Service Pack 1 CTP (or WPFLRCAPR2UESP1CTP for short)
The is just as funny.
Hat tip to the indefatigable !
From the Bad, Bad Names file, via , comes this li'l stinker:
The 26-year-old Virginia Beach Symphony Orchestra, preparing for a November move to larger digs and tired of being confused with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, has changed its name to (drumroll, clash of cymbals, kazoo): Symphonicity.
That's as in symphony plus city.
With a over the i, so you absolutely get the musical association.
I wish we could blame this blenderized bizzarerie on do-it-yourselfers, but in fact the orchestra hired an agency, , to do the deed. It's a $50 word, that's for sure, HCD executive VP Dan Downing told the local paper, the .
(Oh, now I get it: the orchestra paid HCD only $50 for its services.) But [Downing continued] it's something that you see it, you don't forget it.
If you can figure out how to pronounce it.
I rather prefer Michael's list of alternative names, of which my current favorite is Philharmonicommunity.
Perhaps, Michael adds, the orchestra will now turn its attention to its discordant , where symphony is misspelled spmphony and the page is, shall we say, conceptual.
Big attaboy to my pal, fellow namer, and frequent commenter here , who landed on Page A2 of yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle ( by C.
W. Nevius).
It is hard to say what is more surprising: that there are people whose job it is to come up with names for computer systems, athletic shoes and startup companies; or that they can make a living at it.
Gunnion does both. Working out of his basement in his home on San Francisco's Potrero Hill, he has spent 11 years as a full-time, freelance namer,'' a rare breed of wordsmith who lives to find the perfect name.
Ideally,'' says Gunnion, you are looking for that 'Google zero' word, a word that only means your company.As I frequently remind readers (and clients), naming things only seems easy. (I love the quote in the story from another colleague of mine, : Everybody says, 'I named my pet and I named my child. How hard could it be?''
' '') Mark compares the work to shoveling coal.
I'm the of namers,'' Gunnion says. There's nothing automated -- just a pen and paper.And a thesaurus, Swahili and Esperanto and Romanian dictionaries, a Scrabble set, a near-infinite trove of sci-fi lore, and an amazingly associative imagination.''
Here's a Mark story. Several years back, I asked Mark to lend his giant brain to a super-rush naming job I'd landed.
Our team generated about a thousand names for that project, and the client ended up choosing one of Mark's spot-on contributions, Quiver. The company has since gone to the ash-heap of dot-com history, but the memory lingers on, as does my gratitude to Mark.
May he never lay that hammer down.
P.S. And speaking of John Henry, the site I link to here has one of the best punch lines in the virtual universe:
This site is best viewed while eating marshmallows around a campfire under a starry sky.I'll have more to say about the second point in tomorrow's post.
I learned about this month's New Name through , a monthly e-newsletter from the University of Pennsylvania's business school.
What it is: is a new natural-language search engine for business information; Knowledge @ Wharton is its first major partner. Natural language simply means that instead of typing keywords into the search field, you type sentences: or The service is free; results are presented in contextualized summaries from reputable business sources.From knuru.com's About page: Unlike traditional search engines, knuru [sic] is not concerned with endless indexing of web pages and a never-ending convoluting of page rankings, paid rankings or any other artificial juxtapositioning [sic] of search results based on who pays most. Nor will we serve misleading paid-for search result rankings, which is common with other search technologies.
Where it comes from: Knuru's parent company is London-based Xexco, which founder Dennis Oudejans told me is pronounced Exco. He added that he acquired Xexco when he acquired the company, and he's changing it to Knuru, and we're all thankful for that. (I believe Xexco is Klingon for What were they thinking?)
What they're saying: Not much--yet. Knuru is still in beta. Microsoft Office users can access it (via a downloadable application) via the Research button; according to 44 voters in a , Knuru earned five out of a possible five stars.
What it means: Dennis Oudejans told me in an email that the company had invited five or six naming agencies to bid on the naming project and eventually involved two--an unusual but not unprecedented decision. One agency had an analytical/scientific approach, whereas the other seemed more unstructured and creative, Oudejans said. The analytical/scientific agency helped the company define its core values: agility, authority, and accuracy.Then the company tossed out all the names developed by the two agencies in favor of its own coinage, a blend of knowledge and guru. Knuru has meaning in at least one South Indian language, Tamil, although I was unable to discern from context what that meaning is. Pavala Knuru means Coral Hill, a landmark near Arunachaleshwar Temple in Tiruvannamalai District, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
I also discovered a saying in the Tetun language of East Timor: “bikan ho knuru mak baku malu” (as fork and spoon that always touch each other).
What I like: Knuru is short and unusual, and the partnership with Knowledge @ Wharton helps reinforce the kn = knowledge connection. The company was smart to register the name with at least three domain extensions domain: .com, .net, and .org.
(Many startups fail to take this inexpensive precautionary step and leave themselves open to domain encroachment.)
What I'd worry about: Right off the bat I stumbled over Knuru's pronunciation. English has many words with silent k--know, knife, knock, knuckle.But the dropped k isn't intuitive, because at one time in the language's history (at least until the fourteenth century), the k was sounded in all those words, as it is in the German from which they came. English has also adopted a number of Yiddish words--knish, knaidlach, k'nocker--in which, as in German, the k is hard. (K'nocker is unrelated to the British slang term , in which the k is silent.
) And then there's (German) or Knute (Scandinavian), names pronounced with a hard k that are just familiar enough to English speakers to invite confusion. (The English form makes the pronunciation explicit: , which means white haired. )
All of which explains why I want to pronounce knuru like k'nuru.I'd have no such problem with a silent-g coinage: even though the gn- and kn- stems are equivalent--they both mean know --I'm not tempted to pronounce the g. Knuru confuses because it looks too foreign to send the message follow the common English-pronunciation rules.
Here's a separate problem: I'm not convinced that beginning this name with a silent letter tells the right story for this company, which should be positioning itself as an outspoken--not reticent--knowledge source.
But the biggest problem with Knuru is that, despite its odd look, it's a descriptive rather than a metaphorical name: it tells who we are (a knowledge guru) rather than how your life will be better. Compare, for example, the name of another new natural-language search engine, --a term borrowed from the language of mathematics and invigorated by an expanded new context (and a great logo). No ambiguous pronunciation or forced word-blend; just the promise of power and being set to do what you want.Very effective. (Thanks to for the Powerset update.)
The decision: On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being eh and 5 being yesss!, I'd give Knuru 3.1. This is a naming decision guided too much by strict etymology (remember: ), domain availability, and programmers' rules ( knowledge plus guru equals knuru ) and not enough by common sense ( Will everyone be able to pronounce this word and figure out what it means?
) and metaphor. Unfortunately, it's the sort of solution that emerges all too frequently when companies--especially technology companies--name themselves.
But: Knuru may be able to overcome the liabilities of its name with a strong branding message ( We're the knowledge gurus ) and some pronunciation guides ( Knuru ... as in know-how ).
As they themselves proclaim to their users, context is everything.
| Q: Why did President Bush call it Operation Iraqi Freedom ?
A: Because was taken.
(From 's daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle.)
The Name Inspector shares . It's excellent advice that should be committed to memory by anyone embarking on this adventure.In particular:
Often what makes a name good is the fact that it gives people a mental image that helps them understand how something works or what benefits it provides. Ideas are more interesting and easier to remember when they’re associated with sensory, especially visual, experience. That means when you’re coming up with name ideas, sometimes it’s best to start with a visual image and then think of the language that goes with it.Maybe it’s shocking for The Name Inspector to say this, but the etymologies of words or word parts that you use in your name don’t matter. What do matter are the associations people make. Sometimes there’s an overlap between the two, though.
For example, many people recognize that -lumin- relates to light, and it in fact comes from the Latin word for light. However, most people don’t make the association to light because of their knowledge of Latin or etymology. They make it because they know words like luminous and illuminate and recognize the word part.
In general, etymological meaning connections only come through when they’re also part of the living language.
Do the names Cello, Viola, and Slipknot ring any bells?
How about Gopher, Lynx, and Amaya?
They're all nomenclature ghosts from the Internet's monochromatic Stone Age, and the vanished worlds they represent are lovingly preserved at , dedicated to the web as we remember it.
Visit the browser emulator to experience virtual history via Internet Explorer 2.
0 (1996) or Netscape Navigator 1.0 (circa 1995). (A disclaimer warns, Sorry, due to heavy load on the , browsing is quite slow.
On the positive side, it makes the experience even more authentic. )
Or travel memory lane via a clever timeline ( In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was ascii encoded..
. ).
DejaVu.
org is the brainchild of Pär Lannerö of in Stockholm, who charmingly informs us that the Swedish equivalent of déjà vu ( already seen in French) translates to feel again you.
For more browser nostalgia, in a far geekier format, visit . It's a trove of defunct or moribund names, including 1X, Net-Tamer, AtomNet, Charlie, SurfMonkey, Minuet, Pythia, and the romantic and impoverished Bohemian Net Browser.
I supported myself in graduate school in part by working as a typesetter. The work was tedious but relatively lucrative (compared to writing for The Daily Californian for five cents per column inch); what kept me engaged were the typefaces themselves, and especially their names, each of which suggested a rich history: Futura Condensed, Broadway, Bookman, Canterbury, Times Roman, Helvetica. If I were setting type today I'd have hundreds more fonts to choose from, with far more inventive names.
I keep in touch by means of the e-newsletter, which each month delivers a fresh batch of funky, elegant, or mysterious typefaces along with well-written stories about type designers. Here are a few of the font names that have caught my eye lately:
, created by with the plan of emulating words written on a fluted-steel ‘warehouse’-type door in advanced state of rusting.By the way, the ubiquitous Helvetica typeface celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year. A new about Helvetica had its world premiere last week at , and in its honor the blog is sponsoring a contest for the best font-related haiku. Deadline is Friday, March 23.
, by , a rollicking, righteously retro romp.
, by , made from vintage typewriter samples and meticulously compiled into a complete character set.
, by , which includes symbols from alchemy, astrology, and demonology.
, from , spaced tight in order to copycat a real homeboy’s handwriting!
My favorite submission so far, from :
None of this comes as news to those of us in the naming trenches.That's a whole lot of word play in seventeen syllables! For the uninitiated, leading (rhymes with bedding ) is the space between lines of type; kerning refers to space adjustments between letters. There are excellent explanations of these terms and more and .What has changed, industry specialist [sic] say, is that companies and the distribution of their goods have become more global. Now names have to be registered in a company’s home country and secured in several others.
Update: Just looked at this post online. I have no idea why the haiku looks so squirrelly. It's only three lines here in Typepad.
Second update: Aha! Got it.
I mentioned , a search engine that makes ingenious use of the Austrian country-code suffix, .at, instead of using the far more common .com. I've been looking into this newish naming convention for a while now, thinking it could interest some of my clients who've been frustrated by the difficulties of securing a clean .
com domain. Here are some of my findings.
The current trend for making real-word domains that incorporate country codes may have begun with , the social bookmarking site that allows users to store bookmarked websites online, tag them with keywords, and access them from any computer.(At least I don't know of an earlier example. By the way, Del.icio.
us is free; I use it all the time and can't remember how I managed without it.) Del.icio.
us uses the United States country code to great effect, although personally I have trouble remembering where to put that second period--I want to spell it Deli.cio.us.
Del.icio.us went online in late 2003 and was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005.
Long may it wave.
Much more recently--just a few weeks ago--I discovered , the first instance I've found of the India country code being appropriated to create an English-language idiom. Outside.in, which is based in Brooklyn, aggregates hyperlocal journalism --stories about neighborhoods and communities around the U.S. (with plans for international expansion).
More than 3,000 neighborhoods are currently tracked. As daily newspaper readership declines, services like Outside.in may represent the future of journalism.
I'm keeping an eye on it.
But .at, .us, and .in are just the beginning. Here are some other overseas sites that are in fact all-American:
(Italy), still in pre-launch, seems to have something to do with VoIP or group messaging or .I also know of two bloggers, husband and wife and Canter (he's the CEO of ), who use the ... something
it domain very cleverly.
There's lots of room for creativity in this area. Consider these underused country domains:
ky (Cayman Islands). How about Quir.ky or Luc.
ky or Stic.ky?
ve (Venezuela). Lots of English words end in -ve: Substanti.ve, Illustrati.
ve, LiveAndLetLi.ve.
- But wait, you protest--isn't this a form of cyber-colonialism? Actually, it's more like cyber-tourism or specialty stamp collecting--it creates a nice revenue stream for smaller countries. The tiny Polynesian nation of Tuvalu--too remote for all but the most determined tourists--was among the first to cash in with the very popular .
.pa (Panama). A site for tuba aficionados called OomPa.pa?
tv domain, which it registered in 2000. Will Luxembourg (.lu) or Belarus (.
by) be next?
For a directory of country domains, .
Image: the .According to it, Malaysians (country code .my) are the happiest people in Asia and the seventeenth-happiest people in the world.
And that word is humbug.
The email I received from WordMaker asked: Do you need an additional tool in finding new names for PRODUCTS, SERVICES, DOMAINS, or COMPANIES? Well, sure. Who doesn't?But word and name creativity software ain't it.
If WordMaker were freeware, I'd consider it useless but harmless. But Wordmaker costs 99 $US [sic], which puts it in the same category as Nigerian bank-transfer scams.
- Connect any keywords related to your business, product or domain with a built-in powerful database. Example: Keyword life becomes biolife, proflilife [sic], lifeoption, extralifestal [huh?
].
- Combine any two words. Example: car, engine, motor, vehicle plus fast, safe, powerful become fastcar, powerfulmotor, safevehicle, etc.
Wow! Couldn't have done that on my own!
- Blend words in the amalgamator.
Example: rainbow, sky, moon, star become moonstar, starsky [what, no ?], skyrainbow, moonmoon.
- Insert vowels and consonants into words, which will make your name variants sound better and will add them new shades (my first tipoff that WordMaker's makers do not know the English as she is spoke; parent company Neomark, a trademark agency, is based in Montreal).
Example: beginning word cent and ending word rama become centerama, centegrama, centralorama.
- Mixer is thought-out to help you find unique names, related to your personal name or to any words you like. It's nothing more than an anagram creator: flower becomes felrow, worlef, erflow, etc.
Still inclined to give it a whirl?First look at the web site's Benefits page, where you'll see proof that this is not a company that understands how language works (all bullet points verbatim):
- Applicable not only the English, it may be used with many languages and adapted to any field of activity
Here's my tip for those of you seeking for a new name applicable not only the English: short cuts don't work. Take the time to learn authentic, proven brainstorming and name-development techniques, or save time and hassles and hire someone who already knows them.
P.S. My colleague Namer X reports the following email exchange with WordMaker:
I'm a freelance namer.Here's one of those adorable lifestyle ads, a two-pager for Saks Fifth Avenue in the men's spring fashion supplement to the New York Times.
Your product is trying to put me out of a job.
I hope your company goes out of business, soon.
Our software were designed to help you, not to put out of your job.On the left, a full-page photo of a cute, sandy-haired, unshaven, tie-loosened, crinkly-eyed, 30-ish guy; on the facing page, an album of awwwww family photos and a child's stick-figure drawing of Daddy, Mommy, etc. Meet the Darlingtons, says the subhed, and then:
Tyke, dad, sells ventricular assist devices, in other words, artificial hearts. He lives with his wife Laura, sons Baker and Sumner and daughter Ellie Grace in Tennessee.Okay, maybe it's short for Tycoon. Or Tae-Kwon-Do.The beach is just a 90-minute drive away.
But ...
you know what? He's a grown-up. Who sells ventricular assist devices.
And :
Origin: Middle English, mongrel, from Old Norse tīk, meaning bitch.
I admit I hadn't known about the mongrel/cur/bitch association until I looked it up just now, but I certainly knew about tyke = small child. And my question is: why would an adult person want to answer to a name like Tyke, which rhymes with trike, which stands for toddler?
And while we're speaking of children's wheeled conveyances, here's another puzzle. I can understand why may not always have wanted to be called by his given name, Irwin Lewis. For a Baby Boomer like Libby, it probably wasn't the best way to stand out amid a sea of Bobs and Brads and Jeffs.But the man is now 56 years old. And still called Scooter. Is there any context in which to scoot is a good thing?
Is it any wonder Mr. Libby ended up in such bad company?
Then there's the former governor of Massachusetts and current Republican presidential candidate, .The humorist Roy Blount Jr. says every time he hears Mitt Romney he thinks it's a German konditorei order, like mit schlag. Me, I can't help thinking Mitt is an abbreviation for Mittens.
Like . Mr. Romney's given name is Willard Milton--again, not a name likely to win points on playgrounds.
(For the record, the double name honors a relative, Milton Romney, and the hotel magnate and fellow Mormon J. Willard Marriott, Mitt's father's best friend.) So why not Will ?
Or even Milt ? Why the inevitable association with fingerless hand coverings? And why, oh why, are the sins of the grandfather visited on the grandson?
Why did Mitt name one of his five sons Tagg? Because he's It?
I could go on.In fact, I shall. I'm currently reading , an interesting, well-written book about what makes ideas unforgettable. The authors are the accomplished Heath brothers, Dan and Chip.
So I ask you: why did Dan get a one-carat emerald-cut while Chip had to settle for ...
a chip? Doesn't a Stanford professor--which is what Chip is--deserve a real name?
And how about all the graybeards who sign their letters Buzz, Buddy, Trip, Rusty, or (shudder) Junior?Aren't they just a tiny bit embarrassed?
Maybe not in the reign of the Nicknamer-in-Chief, who has assigned nicknames to Vladimir Pootie-Poot Putin, ex-FEMA honcho Michael heckuva job, Brownie Brown, and . Imagining a worst-case scenario, comedian Andy Borowitz nailed it in his recent Borowitz Report headlined ( President: 'I Hardly Knew the Man' ).
I have no problem with nicknames per se. (In case you hadn't figured it out, I'm talking here about true nicknames--from Middle English an eke name, or additional name--not shortened forms like Bill or Ed or Sam.) If you follow American letters you know that 's friends call him Bud and that those close to call him Skip.But neither of those gentlemen sees a pressing need to use his nickname professionally. It's like the difference, well known to parents of toddlers, between one's outdoor voice and one's indoor voice. It's about appropriateness.
It's about accepting that while certain names can be endearing at home, they're infantilizing and just silly out in the big wide world.
I'm compelled to point out that, on the whole, women don't fall into the nickname trap. Sure, you've got your occasional Sissy and Bitsy, but for the most part grown-up girls--at least outside the Southern U.S. and certain strata of British society--accept their given names with grace or at least resignation. When they introduce themselves, you understand that they've graduated from .
So what's up with the guys? An inability to let go of a perfect childhood? Or the linguistic equivalent of ?
| One of my favorite bloggers, the linguist known as The Name Inspector, has posted organized by linguistic category. His taxonomy is a bit fluid; under Real Words, for example, he includes some words whose reality is open to debate, like (not in most dictionaries; most likely an onomatopoeic coinage) and (from grok, to understand intuitively, coined by Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land). The Name Inspector's Foreign Words include an old English word, , to soften or make supple, according to the site's About page (old English is foreign?), but I'm guessing the idea of soup, and maybe people, had something to do with the coinage, and the supple thing was a back-definition. See, for example, a competitor site, , which defines itself as Yahoo! + Google Made by the People --and I don't doubt that you, , plays into it as well.
Not that any of this is bad; the more meaning you can pack into a short company name, the better.
One more note: The Name Inspector doesn't include my own favorite search engine, , a blend of and bingo --and probably Google, too, since that's what powers it. Blingo turns search into a game; every time you submit a search you're eligible for a prize.(This is by no means an endorsement, but I've won a couple of movie tickets this way. Yes, you have to surrender personal data to be eligible. As eight years ago, You have zero privacy anyway.
Get over it. )
But enough nitpicking. The lists are fascinating for their creativity and diversity--who knew there were so many search engines out there?--and The Name Inspector is to be congratulated for doing a on them. Some of the new-to-me names I found ingenious and appealing:
*Update: According to a comment from the company's chief operating officer on , Hakia isn't Finnish for anything; it's a pure coinage.
- (coined from adjacent keyboard letters)
- (that's .at as in the Austria country code.
I have a post in the works about creative uses of country codes; stay tuned.)
“Finding names today is a total headache,” said Bernard Fornas, the president and chief executive of Cartier.“Once you come up with a name that’s interesting, you’ll also discover that it’s already registered.”
And the Internet, with its vast reach, has complicated the process.
In addition, many products, particularly in the luxury and fashion categories, need a name that conveys a feeling or a sense of emotion — and do that across many cultures and languages.It's just as tough to find an available, credible, memorable name in, say, technology. Or hospitality. Or furnishings, for example: I've been working for weeks with a company that needs a name for a new office chair.
You'd be surprised (or not, if you're a name developer) at how many out-of-context words have already been trademarked by furniture companies.
Way down at the bottom of the story, Weisman reveals some success stories in beauty and fashion naming:In 1998, Cartier developed a unisex fragrance that it wanted to call Déclaration. Members of the development team proposed the name, then crossed their collective fingers.Obscure isn't the best term for this type of naming technique. Better to call it arbitrary --as far from descriptive as possible.
“For a perfume, it was actually available! We wondered: How on earth could that be available? Such luck,” Mr.Fornas recalled.
Success also occurs when managers come up with obscure or very hard-to-copy names.
When Cartier wanted to name a watch La Doña, for the late Mexican actress María Félix, once among Cartier’s most extravagant jewelry customers, it found that the name, not surprisingly [sic!], was available.Arbitrary names can be brilliant (think Apple for computers or Guess for fashion), but they're inevitably a tough sell, not so much to the buying public but rather to the executive teams that make the branding decisions. In my experience, these folks are schooled in literalism and resistant to metaphor, no matter how strongly it's supported by a story.
There are exceptions.Weisman cites the beauty-products company for its clever, hard-to-copy nail polish color names like Didgeridoo Your Nails, a mauve hue from the brand’s Australia collection for 2007. (Other names in include Tasmanian Devil Made Me Do It, Fit for a Queensland, and Kangarooby--the last described as a deep ruby red you'll jump for! )
And if you're thinking, That's fine for chick stuff, but I can't give a name like that to my molto serioso techno-gizmo, think again.Elsewhere in today's Times business section, I a new 20-gigabyte external hard drive from Seagate called . You read that right. Yes, it's an acronym (or more likely a backronym) for Digital Audio-Video Experience.
(A hard drive is a digital audio-video experience ? Yeah, right.) But it's also something wholly new: a technology name that sounds like your next-door neighbor or your kid brother rather than The Gadget from Planet ZYQ3WX.
I especially admire Seagate's Dave because I've been trying for years to persuade clients to take this particular leap. I once failed to name a condom Roger, which would have been right for . (The client eventually chose , a descriptive name we'd generated as a backup option.) More recently, I lobbied for Greg as the name of an online content aggregator; I even invented a backronym. Again, the client wasn't ready to veer so dramatically from straightforward description, no matter how patiently I explained that descriptive names are impossible to trademark. But I remain hopeful.
I like to think I was just a little ahead of the times, and that personal names represent a significant and largely untapped naming pool. After all, don't we know that ?
| Some magazine names say it all.My favorite new mag title, for example, is , which describes itself as being for Canadian men who want the world's finest luxury items. Granted, the Canadian part is a little unexpected, but otherwise: one hundred percent WYSIWYG.
Then there are the magazines that make you work to figure out what's between the covers.Here's a list of new or recent magazine names; see whether you can match the titles with their descriptions. All information courtesy of , an online resource for magazine news. Answers below, but no peeking.
1. Radar
2. Zamoof!
3. Deliver
4. Audrey
5.Relevant
6. Atomica
7. March
8.Baseline
9. MIXX
10. Beacon
a.A source for style, design, and cultural criticism
b. Stories that interest Asian-American women
c. Pop culture, politics, and scandal
d.About the Evangelical Free Church of America
e. A place where children can feel empowered by having their thoughts, creativity and imagination shared with each other
f. A custom-published magazine from the U.S. Postal Service for corporate marketing professionals
g. Provides marketers and agencies with interactive advertising primers
h.Covers religion, pop culture, careers, relationshps, and music for a young audience
i. Next generation IT solutions
j. A literary general interest magazine
In olden days they simply would have called it The Big Blow and been done with it.But now everyone wants to get in on the naming act, so the National Weather Service held a contest to name the storm that hit the Pacific Northwest last December 14.
The , chosen from 5,732 unique name suggestions: The Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm. Thirty-nine people nominated this particular name; the lucky chosen-at-random winner is one Clyde Hill of Burien, Washington.
There are several peculiarities about the winning name. Michael Weissenfluh at (a) says Sure, blame the Jews, and (b) finds it ironic...that a storm that knocked out power to 1.5 million people is named after .
Then there's wind storm, when the is windstorm.
And I can't help wondering about Mr. Clyde Hill's familiarity with Jewish holidays.Just a wild guess, but I suspect , WA, pop. 31,881, is not known for its rich Hebraic heritage.
Because what really irks me is this: there is no Hanukkah Eve.Hanukkah (or Chanukah) isn't Christmas. The holiday lasts eight days, and each of the eight eves is celebrated with candle lighting and, in the U.S.
at least, the bestowing of gifts on children. And because the Jewish calendar is lunar, in 2007 the first night of Hanukkah will fall not on December 14 but on December 4. Which is really going to screw up the big Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm First Anniversary celebrations.
To read about firestorm naming, .
Matt Elmore, who lives in Barcelona and blogs at , just posted a comment in a months-old post of mine that may have escaped your attention, but shouldn't. So I'm reproducing it here:That embarrassed feeling one has when uncertain if they have just spoken a thought out loud, usually while deep in thought in a public space.
I haven't yet had enough coffee to start generating names, but thought some of you clever readers might be able to lend a hand. Matt's attempts, listed in his post, have included:
- proloquor dubium
Thanks to the Manolo (who loves the shoes!), I now know about the definitive CFMQ shoe brand* (and also **): ., quaintly and plaintively, Is the Manolo the only person who remembers when being called the prostitute was not the good thing? Ah, Manolo, you Old World gentleman, you--if you could hear what the young girls call each other these days, in jest and sans malice, you would rejoice that they are at least reviving a term with a .
Next, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, of the widely read , has written an admiring post about , a community resource for Internet entrepreneurs.Great concept, but I couldn't stop giggling over the name, which I read as Star Tupping. (Tup, v. tr.
and intr.: to copulate with a sheep. In this case, evidently, a celebrity sheep.
) Even casual students of Shakespeare will recall--or at least won't forget, now that I'm reminding you--Iago inciting Brabantio by telling him (Othello, Act I, Scene 1), Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe. Well, I guess even Internet entrepreneurs have to sleep with someone, or something, to get ahead. (By the way, TUP is also the ticker symbol for , home of the burping seal.
) (And as far as I can tell, English tup is unrelated to Yiddish , etymologically anyway.)
Finally, it's just too darned easy to make fun of Japanese product names-- sour milk, refreshment water, chocolate bars. (See lots more at .) Still, I can't resist noting with mild alarm a relatively recent penchant for inappropriate portmanteaux of English words. I've already mentioned , the beer made from surplus milk. Now comes , a canned drink containing--you guessed it--deep-roasted espresso.
Jeff Shaw, an American living in Japan, comments: If I ever rent a clown for my kid's birthday party, I hope he too is named 'Deeppresso.' If not, he's fired. (Via .
)
* I was greatly surprised not to find the acronym CFMQ in any of my usually reliable sources, on- or offline. I've been hearing and using it for years, decades even, in reference to a particular type of shoe--high of heel, revealing of toe cleavage, and just this side of fetishwear. The initials stand, more or less, for Come Tup Me Quickly.
** I did, however, discover in the town of Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan, which calls itself the Moose Capital of the World. But if you were expecting a ribald remark about moosetupping, you are going to be disappointed.
The dairy farmers of Hokkaido, Japan, didn't waste time crying over spilled milk.Faced with a huge surplus, they sold the excess moo juice to local brewery Abashiri Beer, which containing one-third milk. It went on sale Feb. 1.
So far, so good.
The name of the product: not so good.
Perhaps the good folks at Abashiri had heard of the soy beverage , coined from soy and milk, and decided to follow the leader.
Or perhaps they just didn't have a clue.
Famed racehorse , euthanized last month amid near-universal sorrow, may have gone to the great derby in the sky, but his memory and lineage gallop on. One of his full brothers, a yearling, will probably race later this year, and his dam is carrying another full brother.According to , the owner of all this valuable horseflesh has decided to name Barbaro's siblings after some foxhounds she saw in a painting. Really, says Deford, can't she do a little better? He proposes a contest to come up with better names for the two foals;
For inspiration, you might take a look at .And you should know that a horse's name is often drawn from the names of its sire and dam. Deford: The great Native Dancer, for best example, was by Polynesian, out of Geisha. Get it?
He continues:
Here are some other favorites, suggested by Bob Curran at the Jockey Club and by Bill Nack, the magnificent racing writer. Listen carefully now:Names must be eighteen letters or shorter (no initials) and cannot be suggestive, vulgar, or offensive.
By Deputy Minister, out of Misconduct: Impeachment
By The Axe, out of Top o' The Morning: Splitting Headache
By Ambernash, out of Chorus Call: Forever Kicking
Let's give Barbaro's kin something just as memorable. His sire is Dynaformer, his dam La Ville Rouge.So we have a lot to play with. On the paternal side: Dyna — power, as in dynamite. And former — either a reference to the past or to somebody who makes something.
And on the maternal side, with La Ville Rouge, we have France, town and red. Nice if we could get some reference to the older brother's glory in there, too.
Read the complete .
I'll start the bidding with Barbarossa, Formidable, My Old Flame, Dynopolis, and Urban Renewal.
P.S. Wondering about the title of this post?
Another sign of the end of the world as we know it?
This lovely rose, originally named Comtesse de Provence, is now called Liv Tyler®.
Yes, , 29-year-old daughter of Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler, mildly talented actress in many forgettable films, minor player in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. (She's the one with the overbite.)
According to , the coral-pink, quarter-blossom rose with a strong, fruity fragrance was hybridized in 2000 by the French firm Meilland, which gave it the romantic, aristocratic name. When sales failed to meet expectations, Meilland stooped to conquer.
Rose people, however, are not to be trifled with.On , littlesmokie grumbled, Does that really help them sell roses? If so, isn't that sad? And catintheroses complained, I thought the came change made it sound cheap, and trashy.
...
I hope they do not think that us Am-ur-i-Kanz are that stupid we only can identify and pronounce Hollywood names!!!
Us Am-ur-i-Kanz? Well, maybe Meilland is pretty savvy after all.
I'm going back to my retail/fashion roots with this edition of New Name Beat, which examines a new store concept (no one simply opens a shop nowadays) with an enigmatic name.
What It Is: sells casual clothing in nice fabrics (cashmere, cotton-cashmere blend, tissueweight merino wool) to men and women age 25-40 who've graduated from the torn jeans and faded T-shirts of their college years but don't want to give up comfortable, familiar styles. The first store opened last September in Tysons Corner, a mall near Washington, DC; today there are five stores nationwide, including the one I visited in San Francisco's new Westfield Shopping Center on Market Street. Prices are generally comparable to , although the selection is much smaller-- more tightly edited, as they say in retail.
Where It Comes From: The parent company of Martin + Osa is , an 850-store chain that sells casual clothing to 15- to 25-year-olds when they aren't shopping at or . Most shoppers no longer remember American Eagle's history: the company was founded in 1904 as an outdoor-gear company similar to Eddie Bauer or Pendleton. Hence the outfitters.And hence a slim but significant link to Martin + Osa. Read on.
What They're Saying: The number of Americans ages 25 to 34 is expected to rise by 5.2 percent by 2010, according to the Census Bureau, the reported last September in an article about Martin + Osa. By contrast, those ages 12 to 18 are to fall by 3.3 percent.
'Retailers are salivating over that 30-year-old demographic,' said John D. Morris, an analyst at Wachovia Securities. About the store itself, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , Wood-walled dressing rooms offer room for strollers while the strategic use of mirrors and wall murals is meant to give the feel of trying on clothes in the great outdoors.
In the Refresh zone near the dressing rooms, staff offers bottled water, apples and the use of two restrooms. [Ed. note: No apples when I shopped in S.
F. I'm miffed.] Stone walls throughout the store intersperse with warm wood beams shaped rather like a pergola, while lighting subtly shifts and ebbs to mimic the effect of clouds passing overhead.
But the most distinctive aspect of the store design is the façade, which is all light-colored wood and blue-tinted glass, with nary a merchandise display to be seen. From the outside, it looks more like a trendy club than a store.
What It Means: Martin + Osa takes its name from two real people, a married couple from Kansas named Martin and Osa Johnson who between 1917 and 1936 traveled and photographed in Africa, the South Pacific, and Borneo.M + O company president Ken Pilot, Our store environment and merchandise assortments will embody Martin and Osa's classically American spirit of sport, outdoor and adventure for today's generation in constant motion.
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