A fun way to spend a rainy hour in Seattle is to browse in Uwajimaya, a huge Asian supermarket in the International District (which locals call “the ID”). There you can see products that, from a mainland American point of view (at least this mainland American point of view), are pretty exotic. Things like durian-flavored pudding cups, little dried sesame-crusted baby crabs sold in plastic bags like potato chips, and gadgets designed specifically for making Spam sushi (it’s Hawaiian Food Week).

And if you’re interested in names, you can enjoy some English-based Asian brand names that are equally exotic. They’re mostly, but not exclusively, for Japanese products. The way English is used in these names is often shocking and amusing, so much so that there are websites, such as Engrish.com, devoted to showcasing Asian product names for laughs. Some of the names, like Pocari Sweat (for an “Ion Supply Drink”), you’ve probably come across before–they’ve been mentioned often enough in the media to have achieved a degree of notoriety. (Uwajimaya did indeed have big displays of Pocari Sweat right up near the cash registers.) There are other Asian-English names, though, that don’t have quite the same shock value, but that present English from a subtly different perspective. For a namer, these can be inspiring as well as funny.

Some of the names, like Watering KissMint chewing gum, are kind of poetic. No native speaker of American English would come up with this name. While KissMint alone is pretty normal, that present participle Watering makes the name special–it’s not an idiomatic use of the word water, and it suggests really sloppy kisses. The result is very evocative, though, and the unusual language is partly responsible. The Name Inspector gets the sense that watering is being used as a near-synonym for refreshing, but it evokes a more specific image of plants being watered, giving us a metaphorical way to see and feel our refreshment.

The gum with the charmingly literal name No Time apparently brushes your teeth while you chew it. Then there’s Walky Walky candy. Not shocking, not mind-blowing–just a little askew. It sounds  a bit like walkie talkie, or an ironic baby-talk command: “Come one now, everyone, walky-walky!”. And there’s a cold coffee drink called Let’s Be. You could imagine an American product going for a kind of Zen effect with a name like Just Be, but Let’s Be sounds a bit bizarre. Maybe the inclusive invitation of Let’s Be sounds more polite than the straightforward imperative form that’s ubiquitous in American branding and advertising. Come to think of it, the brand name of the little snack crabs mentioned above was Let’s Party! (Because nothing says “party” like a bag of little dried crabs!).

Other unusual beverage names included Sac Sac, a fruit juice drink, and amino supli, an apparent Pocari Sweat competitor.

In the Uwajimaya food court there’s a cream puff vendor called Beard Papa’s. Their logo includes a cartoon man-face with a fluffy white beard that looks liked whipped cream. Both the language of the name and the concept behind it are surprising. First, it’s just strange to modify papa with beard like that. Bearded papa would be the idiomatic way to say it. But more to the point, The Name Inspector is hard-pressed to think of a Western food product that’s touted, however subtly, for its resemblance to human hair. There’s angel hair pasta, of course, but that’s from angels, which, if they actually existed, would no doubt be quite delicious.

It’s hard not to have at least one laugh about an inappropriate name, and The Name Inspector got his from Chippy corn chips, which manages to be both unimaginative and way off the mark.

Browsing at Uwajimaya is like being a tourist without leaving the city center. Being in a foreign setting tends to heighten your sensitivity to all stimuli–even the familiar ones that are suddenly thrown into relief by an unfamiliar background. And so it was with The Name Inspector at Uwajimaya. One of the exotic Asian names he wrote down was Sport Beans candy. But then he looked more closely and realized this was a thoroughly American product, made by Ronald Reagan’s favorite jelly bean company Jelly Belly, headquartered in California, USA. Thank you, Uwajimaya, for helping The Name Inspector see the strangeness of American brand names through new eyes.

The Name Inspector has created a new page to round up press mentions of this blog. If you check it out, you’ll find that The Name Inspector is quoted in an article about domain names in the latest issue of Inc. magazine. Who else is quoted in the same paragraph? Bob Parsons, founder of GoDaddy. Big time, baby!

Speaking of the big time, The Name Inspector is pleased to announce that Lexiophiles has included this blog among the world’s Top 100 Language Blogs for 2009 (#28, to be specific). Thanks to those of you who voted! What’s more, The Name Inspector ranked #3 among blogs by language professionals. #1 and #2 are Separated by a Common Language and The Shifted Librarian, respectively. Fritinancy, a fellow namer’s blog and one of The Name Inspector’s faves, is #4. Given the arbitrary nature of such rankings, let’s call that a satisfying dead heat. The Top 100 list is heavily skewed toward blogs about language learning (which isn’t surprising, since that’s a focus of the Lexiophiles site), and doesn’t include such heavy hitters as Language Log, so it isn’t comprehensive. But The Name Inspector is honored nonetheless.

Watch out! There’s a new electric motorcycle in town. It’s the Enertia, from Brammo. Yes, like the word inertia, but with an E, which The Name Inspector supposes stands for electric. So, electric + inertia.

Inertia. Kind of an unusual word choice for a motorcycle, don’t you think? Inertia, as we all remember from physics class, is the tendency of a physical object to stay at rest or, if it’s in motion, to maintain direction and velocity until it’s acted upon by an external force. If you imagine a motorcycle in motion, you can think of inertia as a synonym for momentum: this thing will keep on going–just try to stop it! That seems to be what Brammo is going for. On the Enertia website they use the slogan “Enertia is Momentum for Change”.

The Name Inspector is willing to wager, however, that this is not the first idea that will pop into most people’s minds. They’ll think of the word inertia as it’s used in the everyday world, where it means, as the Merriam-Webster online dictionary puts it, “indisposition to motion, exertion, or change: INERTNESS”.

Inertia. Inertness. Stillness. Just sitting there. Not going anywhere. No energy or motivation. Lying on the couch, not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

It’s actually hard to think of another name that so clearly communicates exactly the wrong message. Let’s face it, people are going to be skeptical about an electric motorcycle. They’re going to be concerned that it just won’t have enough oomph. Putting the word inertia in their minds isn’t going to help with that. The Name Inspector loves this quote from an otherwise rather positive review of the Enertia: “I cannot think of a more stupid name for a motorbike. I mean my bike cannot get over 35mph but because it is called the Ruckus I always feel something exciting might happen.”

Maybe the name Enertia is part of a daring, counterintuitive marketing concept. This is the motorcycle for people who don’t really like motorcycles! Or any form of transportation, or movement, really. Don’t worry, it’s electric. It only goes 51 mph, for Pete’s sake–just hop on! No, actually, get on carefully, holding on tight to the handlebars–but first make sure your helmet straps are properly adjusted. Now are you ready for the ride of your life? No? Good–don’t get too excited. This is really just a moped without the pedals–a noped. OK, ride carefully, and you’ll get there eventually if your battery doesn’t run out.

There. The Name Inspector just had to get that sarcastic little tirade out of his system. But it may not be far from the truth. In a 2007 interview for the Portland Tribune, Brammo design director Brian Wismann said the Enertia “was designed to appeal to somebody like me who has always loved motorcycles but perhaps was too intimidated to go out and buy one”. He also said it was made to be “really inviting to sit on”. Like a cool, zippy armchair!

The Name Inspector has been nominated for the “Top 100 Language Blogs 2009″ contest run by the blog LexioPhiles. Please consider giving him your vote.

The experiment continues. The Name Inspector is once again having “office hours” consultations at greatly reduced prices. In-person meetings are best (for you Seattle folks), but phone/chat works too. Contact him today or tomorrow for details.

Not so long ago, The Name Inspector’s younger son got his first pair of shoes at Nordstrom. As a little lagniappe, he also got a plush toy named Nordy, whose head is shown on the right above. This is definitely The Name Inspector’s favorite plush toy inspired by a sketch by a famous philosopher of language.

Nordy is an ambiguous toy. Aside from the dot for an eye and the protuberances vaguely suggesting snouts and/or head-tops, it has no facial features. If you look at it one way, it seems like the bigger protuberance represents ears, and the smaller one a little bunny-ish nose. If you look at it another way, the bigger protuberance looks like a proboscis, and the littler one suggests the top of a head.

In other words, Nordy looks like a stylized version of Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, pictured in the middle. Wittgenstein was interested in ambiguity and in the phenomenon of “seeing as”–what we experience when we first see the drawing “as a duck” and then see it “as a rabbit” (or vice-versa). What did he conclude from the duck-rabbit? Well, that’s not entirely clear. But the duck-rabbit is cute, right? Apparently some plush toy designer, perhaps a frustrated (or happy?) philosophy PhD unable to land an academic job, thought so.

Wittgenstein got the idea for his duck-rabbit from an American psychologist named Joseph Jastrow, who probably saw the picture at the left, which appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1892. Harper’s, in turn, seems to have swiped it from a German publication called Fliegende Blätter. To learn more about the provenance of the duck-rabbit, take a look at John F. Kihlstrom’s page on the topic.

On Wednesday the Global Language Monitor “announced” that English got its one-millionth word at precisely 10:22 am GMT that day. And the word was Web 2.0, so naturally, blogs such as  Mashable, John Battelle’s Searchblog,  and TechCrunch took notice.

Now, The Name Inspector realizes that the “millionth word” story is a ridiculous play for attention that’s not to be taken seriously, and that the folks at the Global Language Monitor know it. But the story has gotten people talking about what a word is, and that’s a topic that The Name Inspector can warm to.

The easiest criticism of the millionth-word story is that Web 2.0 isn’t a word, but a phrase. That’s the main thing that linguist Geoffrey Pullum had to say about the matter on Language Log. And that’s pretty disappointing, actually, because it ignores the fact that the whole enterprise of counting words that precisely is linguistically suspect.

Why would The Name Inspector object to counting words? Believe it or not, it’s not due to a perverse academic refusal to give simple answers to simple questions. The innocent word, which seems to be the very simplest little bit of language to understand, is remarkably hard to pin down. There are very clear examples of words, like dog, but around the edges the word category is fuzzy. That makes it hard to count words with any precision, let alone announce the exact time of day when a word enters the language.

Let’s start with the very dumbest definition of word, the one used by the “word count” function on your word processor: A word is a string of characters (lets say letters) with no spaces. Well, that would mean the following string consists of five words: jjj akjsdhfjkh auygfh tg drqwds.

We can do better than that: A word is a string of letters with no spaces that has a meaning and can be used in a sentence. By this definition, Web 2.0 doesn’t cut it. And many people who’ve weighed in on the issue in blog comments have raised just that objection. Some object to the space, some to the digits, some to the punctuation. Sorry, sorry, and sorry. If inclusion in a dictionary is the ultimate proof of wordhood, then consider this: Even the abridged online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary includes entries for deep six, 12-step, 20/20, 24-7, 3 D, and even 86ing (a slang term for refusing to serve a customer). All these include numbers, all but one include digits, some have punctuation, and one has a space.

Now about spaces. It’s commonly accepted that English has complex prepositions that consist of parts. In some cases the parts are separated by spaces, and in others they’re not. We write in lieu of as three chunks, and instead of as two, even though their structures are parallel, etymologically speaking. Then there’s notwithstanding.

There are many compound words in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (and others) that are written with spaces. A space is a purely orthographic entity, and it’s silly to define a linguistic unit based on orthography alone. Spoken language is primary. Written language is, ultimately, a representation of spoken language. There are compounds that some people write as “one word” and some people write as “two words”, though the pronunciation remains constant. Website/web site is one example. If you use the no-space criterion, you end up saying that such expressions are sometimes words and sometimes not words, based on orthographic variation. And that just doesn’t make good sense.

Of course, you might appeal to The Language Boss to tell you which version is “correct”. But people, it’s time to wake up and realize that The Language Boss is a fiction, like the Wizard of Oz. There are just different people, sometimes with different opinions, bumbling around behind their curtains. Pay no attention to that language maven behind the curtain!

Lurking behind the orthographic issue, of course, is a deeper linguistic one: If some words are made of pieces that are themselves words, how do we know when a group of words adds up to a complex word as opposed to a phrase or a random stretch of language? Here linguists begin to rely on criteria that distance the definition of word from the pragmatic, what-you-list-in-the-dictionary understanding of what a word is. The linguists might, for example, think about how an expression interacts with the rules of English stress assignment, or about it’s syntactic behavior. In any event, for a group of words to add up to a complex word, it has to be a conventional, cohesive unit.

And here there are no hard and fast rules. Idioms make things especially complicated. Merriam-Webster lists kick ass and kick the bucket under its entry for kick. So these idioms get a sort of honorary word treatment. But notice that idioms don’t always occur in exactly the same form: we can kick a little ass or kick some ass or even kick some Raider ass. In idioms, words begin to blend into grammar, and that’s where things get really tricky.

Some idioms, like kick the bucket and kick ass, are identified mostly by the presence of certain component  words. Others, however, are more like grammatical templates. Consider sentences like There’s only so far a car can go with a flat tire, There’s only so long you can sit before you have to get up and walk around, and There’s only so often you can talk or sneak your way out of a fight. There’s a pattern here that’s something like There’s only so X Y can Z, where X is a scalar measure or property of some kind,  Y is a noun phrase, and Z is a verb phrase. Most people wouldn’t call this pattern a word, but it’s hard to find the exact barrier between this pattern and something like kick ass. (To see lots of patterns like this, you might take a look at the Snowclone Database).

Even when you’re talking about words with simple forms, it can be hard to decide how to count them. That’s because words aren’t just forms–they also have meanings, and it’s often the case that the same form has more than one meaning. If the meanings are very different, we usually think of there being more than one word. For example, bank used in connection with a river is one word, and bank used in reference to a financial institution is another.

But what if the meanings are only a little different? How many “words” are represented by these different uses of the verb see?

Can you see the car?
I see that it’s raining.
I don’t see why you’re so angry.
Let’s go see grandma.
Are you seeing anyone?
I’ll see your twenty and raise you ten.
Let me see you to your door.
See to it that this doesn’t get out.

All these complexities don’t mean it’s impossible in principle to count the number of words in the English language. They do, however, mean that it’s very, very hard, and that you have to know what you mean by word before you start.

The Name Inspector knew it. He just knew that Microsoft went with the name Bing because it makes a better verb than, say, Kumo, which sounds like a radio or TV station (like Seattle’s KOMO). Or that crazy killer dog dreamt up by Stephen King.

When people write about the name Google, they almost invariably mention that it has become a verb. Some entrepreneurs, including some of The Name Inspector’s own clients, think that a “verbable” name is highly desirable. Now here’s Miguel Helft reporting in yesterday’s New York Times that none other than Steve Ballmer thinks the name Bing has great potential to “verb up”. And the Bing home page actually conjoins Bing with another verb (”Bing & Decide”), just to nudge things in that direction, real subtle-like.

It’s kind of sad, really. The thing is, if Bing the name is going to become a verb, Bing the web app is going to have to offer a great experience that’s markedly different from the one Google gives us. People already have a verb for searching on the web. It’s google. They don’t need a new one.

Trademark sticklers will say that a company shouldn’t even want its name to become a verb, because that puts a company in danger of losing its trademark. Verbhood is a sure sign that a name has become a regular old word. When an originally trademarked name becomes widely used as a generic word, the name enters the public domain and can no longer be protected. That means anyone can legally use it. Some people call this “genericide”. Aspirin, cellophane, escalator, kerosene, laundromat, trampoline, and yo-yo are all the ghosts of once living trademarks.

In fact, from the perspective of trademark law, trademarks are always supposed to be used as “adjectives” modifying generic nouns. It’s not “a Band-Aid”, it’s “a Band-Aid brand adhesive bandage”. It’s not “a Kleenex”, it’s “a Kleenex facial tissue”. But The Name Inspector is afraid this rule fights the tide of common usage. People always use trademarks as nouns.  You drive a Toyota. You drink a Coke. You use a Mac.

And let’s be realistic: becoming the paragon of a product category, with a name that’s a household word, is a nice kind of trademark problem to have. Many companies whose names are unofficially used as generic words have mounted campaigns to protect their trademarks and are doing quite nicely, thank you. For a while we were all xeroxing, but now we mostly photocopy, thanks largely to an aggressive Xerox PR campaign.

So, what to make of the name Bing? Some bloggers have had a negative reaction to it that seems mostly like a kick-Microsoft reflex. Some say it sounds “silly”. But Google sounded pretty silly back in the day, too. Bing actually has a lot going for it. It’s short, easy to pronounce, and easy to spell and type. It has a kind of friendly “ring” to it. In fact, according to Helft, the marketing people at Microsoft say the name is meant to represent a bell going off, to evoke that eureka moment we have when we find something. It’s “the sound of found”.

Bing, of course, is also a kind of cherry. Sort of reminds The Name Inspector of the name Macintosh, come to think of it. Helft says the marketing people at Microsoft weren’t going for that association, but it’s not a bad one for a search engine (or a “discovery engine”, as Bing is being called). Think “cherry picking”–cherries represent things that are carefully selected and highly valued. Like great search results.

So, while Bing isn’t a bad name,  it may not be destined to be a verb, for reasons that have nothing to do with its linguistic merits. But just in case, The Name Inspector wants to know: Would the past tense of bing be bang? Would the past participle be bung? That would be unfortunate.

A few days ago John Cook reported that lawyers from job site Jobdango want the folks at Zoodango, a site that has nothing to do with jobs, to stop using the name Zoodango because the -dango ending infringes on Jobdango’s trademark. Zoodango CEO James Sun said they’d fight the trademark issue even though they’re changing their name to GeoPage.

For The Name Inspector, this news conjures an image of two pigeons fighting over a moldy piece of hot dog bun.

For starters, Jobdango is just a silly name. Besides being phonologically inelegant after Job-, that dang -dango is either one of the most bizarrely gratuitous endings The Name Inspector has ever seen on a name, or it’s a cranberry morpheme that’s probably derived from the name Fandango, in which case it’s embarrassingly unoriginal. The -dango ending makes sense in the name Fandango, because fandango is a word for a Spanish dance that also happens to contain the word fan, which is kind of fitting for a site that sells movie tickets. The name Handango is clearly a play on the word fandango.

But what’s -dango doing in the name Jobdango, which bears no other resemblance to the word fandango? Well, what it’s probably doing is reminding us vaguely of successful commercial websites like Fandango, known to many through its TV commercials featuring hand puppets made out of brown paper lunch bags.

So Jobdango, you should be a tad embarrassed trying to protect -dango as if it’s some kind of special mark that’s uniquely associated with you. It’s not. You didn’t make it up, you weren’t the first to use it, and you might even benefit from people’s familiarity with -dango companies that have gone before you. So just drop it. Drop that moldy hot dog bun.

The Name Inspector would like to apologize to those of you who’ve recently contacted him about office hours. He’s been overwhelmed with requests, too busy to schedule times for consultation, and falling behind in his email. So he’s done what any sane person would do under the circumstances: slipped out of his office in disguise and hidden. Office hours are, he’s sorry to say, over until things calm down a little. The Name Inspector will try to get in touch with each of you who has contacted him, but asks that you please be patient.