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.

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.

Naming is one challenge that many people find baffling, and naming rules abound in blogs, books, and magazine articles. The rules are often stated in uncompromising terms that make them easy to follow with minimal thought. Today The Name Inspector wants to talk about some of those rules and why they’re dumb.

1. Your domain name should have no more than six letters

Some rules are bad because they continue to be passed around after they become obsolete. The myth of the six-letter domain name is one of those rules. The Name Inspector doesn’t know how it got started, but he  found something like it in writing. A Microsoft publication called Managing Your E-Commerce Business, Second Edition has the following guideline:

The perfect domain name is less than six letters long, followed by .com or some other suffix. Short domain names are easier to remember and type. However, let’s be realistic: Fewer and fewer one-word domain names are left with each passing hour.

That was written in 2001, but you’ll still find people talking about how domain names are ideally no more than six letters long. Sometimes they point to a bunch of prominent names like eBay, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, etc. as “proof” of this idea. But anyone who has tried to find a good domain name in the last five years or so knows that the six-letter limit is unrealistic. The five-letter limit urged in the passage above is now laughable. Some companies, like Biznik, do manage to find great six-letter domains, but they’re the lucky exceptions.

There’s some truth to the idea that short domain names are more memorable than long ones, but it’s not a matter of counting letters. The name ICanHasCheezBurger.com is far more memorable than the name jfhpnx.com, even though the former has eighteen letters and the latter has only six. Memorability depends on the units being remembered. Meaningful phrases are more memorable than random sequences of letters, for example.

While it’s true that there are several big names on the web that have six or fewer letters, there are plenty of popular sites that have longer domain names. The following sites are all in the Alexa Top 100:  YouTube (7 letters), FaceBook (8 letters), Wikipedia (9 letters), Craigslist (10 letters), Photobucket (11 letters), and even Adultfriendfinder (17 letters). What these names have in common is that they consist of familiar parts put together (except Wikipedia, which was named before anyone knew what wiki meant).

So when you’re trying to come up with a domain name, you want to keep reasonably short, but you might also want to make it meaningful. If that’s your goal, don’t worry about arbitrary letter limits.

2. A name should be an empty vessel

You’ll hear a lot of marketing people say that a name should be an “empty vessel”. Hardly anyone gives a coherent explanation of the term, though. Here’s a statement taken from the website of Heckler Associates, the esteemed Seattle branding agency that came up with the name Starbucks:

Unique brand names serve as relevant ‘empty vessels,’ their meaning filled entirely by brand equity. Brand names that embrace market trends and conventions or associate too closely to common words signal a follower’s position. They reduce the opportunity for distinction, limit assimilation of your brand values, and make legal protection difficult.

The phrase “their meaning filled entirely by brand equity” implies that an empy vessel has no meaning. But what counts as meaning? Heckler came up with the name Cinnabon, which clearly resembles the phrase cinnamon bun. That’s not meaning? Do they mean the name doesn’t appear verbatim in the dictionary? If so, they should say that. The image of an empty vessel is a terrible way to get that point across. Cinnabon does not get all its meaning from brand equity. It gets most of its meaning from its resemblance to the phrase cinnamon bun. The first time The Name Inspector saw one of these places in an airport, he thought to himself, “Huh, I guess they sell cinnamon buns”. Cinnabon is about as descriptive as a name can be.

So it’s really unclear what marketing people are getting at when they talk about this empty vessel stuff. One thing they mean is that a name shouldn’t limit a company too strictly to one area of business, lest it make future diversification difficult. That’s a legitimate concern. But it has nothing to do with a name being devoid of meaning.

When  you talk about the “meanings” of a name, you really have to consider two things. First there are meanings of the word(s) that the name is based on. Then there’s the way those meanings relate to the company, product, or service the name stands for. Some names based on real words, like Internation Business Machines, are essentially literal descriptions and can indeed be limiting. Other names based on real words, like Apple, evoke concepts that relate only imaginatively to what the names stand for. Two very different kinds of name, neither devoid of meaning.

So, there are three problems with the “empty vessel” idea: (1) no one explains clearly what it means, (2) actual naming practice doesn’t seem to follow the dictate of the empty vessel, and (3) this way of talking about meaning completely misses the crucial role of context.

Meaning is good. Meaning is your friend. You just have to use it imaginatively. Forget the empty vessel.

3. Your name should yield almost no results in Google

This rule is proposed by Seth Godin in his post The New Rules of Naming. It’s based entirely on the idea that customers will find a company’s website by typing the company’s name into a search engine. It is important to be findable in that way. But to be found on Google, what you really need is to be the first search result. The rest don’t matter for findability purposes. If you own yourcompanyname.com, then you’re already halfway there.

There’s another important way potential customers use web searches: to learn about the credibility and reputation of a company before becoming actual customers. If you search on a company’s name and their site doesn’t turn up as the first result, you might think the company lacks legitimacy. If the first several results aren’t web pages that mention the company, you might think the company is small potatoes. Godin’s rule will help a company avoid these situations. But it’s overkill to say a name  should only yield a few results in Google before you start using it. What’s really important is that you be able to dominate the top ten or so results for a search on your name. Results after that will probably be ignored by web searchers. So what matters is not so much the number of results you get for a search on a potential name, but how much “Google juice” those results have to compete with you, should you decide to use the name.

Let’s amend Seth’s rule: It’s a good idea to choose a name that will allow you to dominate the first page of search results on Google (and other search engines, of course). That means not having too much competition from popular websites.

4. Your name should start with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet

Guy Kawasaki promotes this rule in his book The Art of the Start. It’s a pretty old-school rule, based on the idea that you want to appear early in alphabetical listings like the phone book or a list of conference vendors. Again, the validity of this rule really depends on the situation. How much of your business do you expect to get from the phone book or from conference attendees? How much do you expect to get from web search, word-of-mouth, and advertising? If you’re relying more on the latter, message and memorability are way more important than what letter your name starts with.

5. Your name should begin with/contain the letter(s) __.

Experts often tell you that your name should ideally start with or contain a certain letter.

From the website of KaZaK Composites:

While visiting Sony in Japan, Dr. Fanucci [that's the founder] attended a presentation on the principles of choosing a good corporate name. There he learned what makes a good company name, including that it should include the letters k, z and x.

Who was that mysterious “expert” giving bogus naming advice in Japan?

The branding professionals at Shift Partners suggest that a company name should begin with the letter V.

Now, The Name Inspector is obviously in favor of being sensitive to the nuances of words, sounds, and even letters. But people, there are no magic letters. Worry about things that matter first, like whether your name evokes ideas that help your brand.

6. Names of such-and-such a type are bad

The company Brains on Fire sometimes advertises itself this way in Google search ads:

No Latin roots. No mashed together words. Names that mean something.

The Name Inspector has already made it pretty clear that he loves meaning, so he doesn’t object to that last sentence. It’s the first two that are puzzling. Surely the folks at Brains on Fire don’t actually avoid using any words based on Latin in their names. They’re probably talking about avoiding a certain naming style that was popular in the 1990s–the one that gave us names like Acura Integra. Fair enough. But no mashed together words? Does that mean no blends, like Viralmentalist or Fiskateers? Wait, those names came out of Brains On Fire projects. Do they mean no compounds, like IndieBound? Oh, that’s a name they came up with. So what does their ad mean, exactly?

Linguistically speaking, there are only so many ways to create a name. The Name Inspector can’t understand why anyone would want to take perfectly serviceable types of name off the table. It’s already hard enough to come up with a good, meaningful name.

The bottom line: when naming, you can follow simple rules that will get you nowhere, or you can do the hard work of using language creatively to help people see your company, product, or service in the best and most interesting way.

The column appeared in the New York Times Magazine on April 13, and was titled “Revanche is Sweet”. It had a section about Senator Barack Obama’s use of the word perfect in his big speech about race. Safire concerned himself with the use of the word as a verb and as a noun.

Wait, did The Name Inspector just say “noun”? Yes, he did, because that’s what Safire called the form of the word perfect that’s pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable:

The primary meaning of the noun, pronounced PERfect, is “complete, whole, finished,” and the verb taking that action, pronounced perFECT, means “to complete, make whole, finish.”

Dear reader, that’s not a noun. It’s an adjective. Of course you knew that. (If you didn’t, you might be feeling a little insecure right now. But do you write a column for the paper of record that’s billed as being, you know, On Language? Are you “the most widely read writer on the English language”? No? Then you won’t bear the full brunt of The Name Inspector’s scorn. Though you might get a funny look and a disbelieving but sympathetic shake of the head.)

This was no fluke. The article referred to perfect as a noun no fewer than four times.

Now, sometimes perfect is in fact used as a noun. For example, when it’s the name of a grammatical category indicating completed action and related notions, as in present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect. An editor or teacher might say “You should use the perfect here”. That’s a noun (though even in this context people might think of it as shorthand for “the perfect form” or something like that). Perfect might also be used as a noun when people are discussing philosophical abstractions, as in “The perfect is the enemy of the good”, the common English translation of Voltaire’s “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”.

But perfect meaning ‘complete, whole, finished’ in a more general sense is an adjective. As are the words complete, whole, and, sometimes, finished.

There are two issues of concern here. One, what was Safire thinking? And two, how did this get past the editorial staff of the New York Times Magazine? The Name Inspector can’t resist observing that the self-appointed guardians of correct usage are often among those who are most susceptible to the occasional cluelessness about grammatical facts.

It’s possible that Safire was just kicking it old school with his grammatical terminology. Really old school. One definition of noun in the Oxford English Dictionary is simply ‘An adjective’. This is described as an obsolete and rare variant of the term noun adjective, and the most recent citation given is from 1669. If that’s what Safire and the NYTM had in mind, it’s time for them to invest in a new English reference grammar. The Name Inspector recommends Huddleston and Pullum’s The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, though A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Quirk et al. is also quite nice.

It’s seems more likely that this was just a dumb mistake. In that case, print a correction! Everyone makes mistakes. Nobody’s a perfect. (Now that’s a noun!) Own up to this and help your younger readers avoid the grammatical confusions of their elders.

And New York Times Magazine? If you should ever need a savvy observer of language who knows his way around the web and can tell a noun from an adjective, The Name Inspector can recommend someone.

Tags: safire, william safire, on language, grammar, parts of speech, noun, adjective, new york times, nytimes