One of the most popular blogs tracked by Technorati (currently #14) is PostSecret. It’s a “community art project” where people anonymously submit their secrets on postcards, and it’s quite compelling, in an emotionally voyeuristic kind of way. You find all the juicy stuff you’d expect to find: confessions and accusations of infidelity, descriptions of other real and imagined transgressions, proclamations of love, self-destructive and suicidal thoughts, blasphemy. There’s also funny and just plain weird stuff.

The name PostSecret is pretty straightforward, but also unsettling in a way that’s appropriate for this material. There’s just something a little strange about it. The issue is ambiguity, and the way it complicates the structure and pronunciation of the name.

The big culprit here is the word post. It has not one, not two, but three meanings that are pressed into duty in this name. First there’s the meaning that makes this word a synonym of mail, which we find in the expressions post office and, of course, postcard. Then there’s the meaning that we use when we talk about posting to our blogs. Finally, there’s the meaning that we find in expressions like postmodern.

These three meanings tug us in different directions when we’re trying to combine post with secret to make sense of the name. Matters are complicated further by the fact that secret is both a noun and an adjective. We might think of the name PostSecret as being analogous to postcard, in which case secret is a noun that replaces card. We might try to think of post as a verb, but then the name would be more natural if it were PostSecrets or PostASecret or PostYourSecrets–the bare noun secret just doesn’t fit. Finally, we can think of the name as being like postmodern, in which case secret is an adjective, and the post- prefix suggests that these things are no longer ordinary secrets once they appear on the site.

When we interpret this name as being analogous to postmodern, we are likely to want place the main emphasis on the first syllable of secret. But the prevalence of compound names creates a pressure to treat this name as a compound, like postcard, and put the main emphasis on post. An internal struggle ensues.

The postmodern-like interpretation of the name is the most complex and satisfying. Just as postmodern doesn’t simply mean ‘no longer modern’, but rather describes something after modernism that incorporates and/or reacts to a modernist perspective, PostSecret seems to indicate a new type of thing made possible by the web: freely shared “secrets” that are secret only in the sense that they can’t be connected to individual people. These deep dark “secrets” take on a new life when viewed in the aggregate–patterns emerge, people’s common preoccupations are revealed, and things start to seem a little less dark, if not less deep. As the Name Inspector’s spouse says, “Well, we live in a post-secret age, don’t we?”.

Tags: postsecret, the name postsecret, secrets, art, community art, postmodern

A couple months back The Name Inspector had lunch with Brian Dorsey. Brian talked about a kooky idea he had for a website: people would specify a date and a geographical area and get matched up with random strangers via email to meet for lunch.

Brian really likes to go out for lunch. He works in Seattle’s International District, which is full of East Asian restaurants, and knows where to get the best hand-shaved noodles and nigiri and whatnot. Brian also likes the idea of just talking to people that he wouldn’t normally run into during his day. He’s a pretty idealistic guy, and believes that we Americans would benefit from being more cooperative and connected. Brian has a vision. A lunch vision.

He produced a list of names that he was considering for his project/website, which wasn’t exactly conceived as a business yet, in the sense of being, you know, a way to make money. But of course it’s not hard to see how something like this could become “monetized”. Not surprisingly, many of the names contained the word lunch.

Luncheonator.

Lunchendipity.

Some of these names were pretty damned funny. But many of them didn’t really have the properties we normally associate with “good” business names. The two names above, actually blends involving the word luncheon, have a goofy charm but are too long and hard to spell.

Lunch Bastard.

(Really? Yes. Brian has a whole rationale for this name. The Name Inspector has not been entirely convinced by his arguments.)

Lunch is the obvious word to use here. After all, it’s a website that’s all about having lunch with people. But lunch is also a hard word to work with. That final consonant cluster really limits its combinatorial potential.

A ways down on the list there was a standout name: Noonhat. The Name Inspector pointed at that one and said, “This is interesting” (and meant it in a good way). Brian smiled because he especially liked that one. He said he imagined names being drawn from a hat. Out comes the noon hat, names are drawn, lunch plans are made. He also liked the graphic possibilities.

The Name Inspector also thought of the hat as representing a role or persona. Hats are commonly used as metonymies for roles–there are white hat and black hat hackers and search engine optimizers, people sometimes say “Now I’m wearing my _____ hat” (e.g. “my teacher hat”, “my boss hat”, etc.) to indicate that they’re acting in some particular capacity. The idea was that you’d take off your work hat and put on your lunchtime socializing hat–your noon hat–for an hour. People might even show up at the restaurant in real hats to identify each other.

While Noonhat doesn’t contain the word lunch, noon is an effective metonymic reference to lunch, because what else do we associate with that time of day? And this name is short and simple and graphically interesting, with the double o and the near-identical n and h and the curves in all those letters. It also looks like and rhymes with moonbat, which, while used as a political epithet, might be ironically embraced by anyone whose tendencies are at all liberal. And let’s face it, who else is going to want to have lunch with random strangers?

So Brian’s project became Noonhat. Why does The Name Inspector write about it now? Because the Noonhat website is live! It’s graphically pretty sparse, but it includes a really cool Google Maps mashup. If you live in the Seattle area, check it out and have a lunch adventure. Unfortunately for those who live elsewhere, Noonhat doesn’t cover any other areas…yet. But The Name Inspector is confident that the Noonhat craze will sweep the nation. Or at least it should.

Tags: noonhat, the name noonhat, lunch, luncheon, lunchendipity, luncheonator, dining, eating out, social networks, ID, international district, Seattle

Tinfinger is intended to be to the Who’s Who what Wikipedia was to the
Encyclopedia Britannica. Its main function is a search engine of
biographical information on famous and semi-famous public figures. It
also has news aggregation features similar to Techmeme, based around
people’s names instead of hyperlink hierarchies.

The name Tinfinger is a portmanteau, of course. Tin is the Vietnamese
word for news, and finger is the name of a Unix command
<http://kb.iu.edu/data/aasp.html> to find out information about a
person. (One of the founders is originally from Vietnam via England, the
other an Aussie.) Tin also has other meanings, especially when used as a
prefix to denote falseness, e.g. “tin god”, referencing the superficial
cult of celebrity. The site’s mascot is a little black robot called Ned
whose backstory is as a put-upon slave to his human masters, so the
site’s name also references the robotic nature of the news aggregation
features which work through the fingers of mythical robot employees.
Finally, the name also recalls the Bond film character Goldfinger,
giving an extra pop culture nuance.

Is it possible to have though too much about a name?

This is one of the geekiest and most thought-out startup names that The Name Inspector has come across. The elaborate backstory with the robot workers is pretty entertaining. It’s odd that a search engine focusing on people has a non-human mascot, but it makes a kind of twisted sense.

Something really interesting about this name is that it works on different levels for different audiences. The metonymic (or, more specifically, synechdochic) reference to robots and the allusion to the Bond movie/character are widely accessible to the English-speaking world. Then there are inside jokes for geeks and speakers of Vietnamese. They’re almost like verbal Easter eggs. On this level the name is enigmatic to many people, but they don’t know it. It’s crypto-enigmatic.

The name Tinfinger is self-deprecating almost to the point of being risky. This comes of course from the association the word tin has with cheapness and falseness. If you imagine singing the theme song to the James Bond film Goldfinger saying Tinfinger instead, you can’t help but notice how much self-mocking there is in this name. But if presented with the right humor, this kind of over-the-top modesty can be disarming. The design of the Tinfinger logo hits just the right note with its construction-paper-cutout-style letters and its little cartoon robot. Is it The Name Inspector’s imagination, or are those supposed to be robot and human skin tones in that logo?

In the typology of names, Tinfinger counts as a compound rather than a portmanteau (blend), because it consists of two whole words rather than word parts. The sound is natural and easy, and gets a little poetry from the near-rhyme of the first two syllables. In the orthography this is reflected in the repetition of in, and enhanced by the similarity of the letters T and f.

The name Tinfinger conjures up an entertaining vision that helps us imagine how the underlying search technology works. The Name Inspector can’t wait to see what those robots can do with their tinny little fingers.

Tags: Tinfinger, the name Tinfinger, search, people search, robots

Some of the Name Inspector’s readers have commented that the posts so far have all been pretty positive. While he has made a conscious decision to play nice until people get to know him, the Name Inspector is not all bunnies and butterflies. Here’s a story about a name that doesn’t work, bravely submitted by Michael J. Laine, President of LiftPort, a company “dedicated to building an Elevator to Space”. “I am quite interested in your opinion,” Michael wrote in his email, “and feel free to blog about it, if you like”. Here’s more from Michael:

For an interesting lesson in how an idea can get away from its founders, the next Google search should be ‘ “space elevator” LiftPort’. Results for our company are about 1:12 to that of the overall project. And that is fine, as it proves that the concept is taking on a life of its own. However, it tells me that we have not done a great job of branding ourselves to the idea. And that is a little frustrating…

… We named the company to be based on the English version of elevator, a “lift”, combined with a “port” of entry or departure. To me, this seems pretty obvious, and I have gotten feedback that it conveys the image we wanted.

Now the idea of an elevator to space is incredibly exciting, but the name LiftPort just doesn’t capture that excitement. When something is so intrinsically interesting, a descriptive name is often the best way to go. The simple phrase Space Elevator is more interesting than LiftPort, but it’s too descriptive to be a strong trademark.

So what’s the problem with LiftPort?

First, what’s exciting about the “Elevator to Space” idea is that it goes to outer space. There’s nothing about space in the name LiftPort. Lift gets at the idea of going up, but it’s a mundane word and does not evoke a vivid image. It makes The Name Inspector’s spouse think of those little things you put in your shoes to appear an inch or two taller. Doesn’t exactly send the imagination soaring beyond geosynchronous orbit, does it?

Then there’s the word port. It’s a perfectly good word to use in this context, evoking airports and shipping ports. But it’s a bit redundant in combination with lift. Like lift, port also suggests moving or carrying, as in transport and teleport (it is, in fact, derived from the Latin word meaning ‘to carry’). This kind of redundancy makes a compound name fall a bit flat, and squanders the opportunity that such names provide to combine words and their meanings in jarring and delightful ways.

Another problem with the combination of lift and port is that it just leads to too much ambiguity. Either word can be interpreted as a noun or a verb. That makes it especially hard to see how the meanings of the two words should be combined. Is this a port that lifts you up? A lift that ports you somewhere? Something that’s a combination of a lift and a port? A little artful ambiguity in a name is good, but too much is confusing.

Phonetically the name is okay, with balanced sonority and a little poetry from the repeated [t] sounds at the ends of both component words. The sequence of consonants in the middle–[ftp]–is a little hard to pronounce, though.

LiftPort isn’t one of those terrible, embarrassing names. The rationale for it makes perfect sense. It just doesn’t convey the excitement of this venture, and it doesn’t leave a strong impression on the mind. A better name would provide a more vivid image of an elevator going into space.

Tags: LiftPort, the name LiftPort, space, space elevator, elevator to space

PageFlakes shows how a quirky but vivid metaphor can make for a good name. In this case the name is for a customizable Ajax personal home page similar to Netvibes.

The quirky, one is almost tempted to say flaky, thing about this name is of course the word flakes. Flakes are insubstantial little things and not necessarily so desirable. Think of dandruff, or paint coming off your wall.

But these possible negative associations don’t matter so much, because it’s apparent that the flake metaphor is evoked in this context not for its emotional appeal, but for its cognitive utility. It gives people a tangible way to understand what the service is and does. Each little draggable box on your Ajax start page is like a miniature page–a flake of a page–that can be moved around.

There’s something interesting to notice here. PageFlakes is a vivid name, and that’s good, but it’s vivid in a particular way. There are different ways for a name to be vivid. Sometimes a name introduces sensory associations in all their minute detail to bathe something in a warm emotional glow, the way Apple does. Other times a name provides a sort of cognitive scaffolding to help people understand what something is all about. In that case the most important sensory associations are schematic ones relating to general size, shape, motion, and other properties that allow us to make inferences about how we might physically interact with something.

So it is with PageFlakes. Flakes are tiny, flat, highly mobile, and cling to things. These associations give us a strong sense of what we’ll be doing when we use PageFlakes, and make the name much more interesting than the name of the competing home page service Netvibes, which doesn’t really give us any inferential meat to sink our teeth into.

All this is not to say that PageFlakes is devoid of emotional appeal. It has a fun association with breakfast cereals like Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes. Think of something convenient and delicious that you sit down in front of first thing in the morning, and you’ll get the picture.

Phonetically, PageFlakes gets a bit of poetry from the assonance (repeated vowel sounds) and the similarity of the [p] and [f] sounds. The transition between consonants in the middle of the name is a little inelegant, but nothing to lose sleep over.

PageFlakes isn’t a perfect name, but it really gets its apt little metaphor stuck in your mind, and it works.

Tags: PageFlakes, the name PageFlakes, Netvibes, flakes, Ajax, start page, home page, personalization

TechCrunch is about as hardnosed as a name can be, both in sound and in meaning. Has this helped to establish Michael Arrington as a rainmaker of Web 2.0? Who can say?

What makes this name so badass? First, there’s the no-nonsense word tech, which tells you in no uncertain terms what Mr. Arrington will be writing about. Then there are the meanings of crunch. Perhaps the most relevant is the one found in the expressions crunch numbers and crunch data. In that context crunch means something like ’submit to rigourous, impersonal analysis’. That certainly helps to establish Arrington’s credibility as a critic of new web technologies. There’s also the expression crunch time, which implies furious hard work to meet an impending deadline, especially in the tech industry. Crunch also implies physical exertion, as in do crunches, and destruction, as in crunch, crush, smash, squash, etc. It’s all very macho. (Of course, crunch also suggests snack foods, but that’s hardly relevant here, is it?)

All this crunchiness is supported by the heavy, hard sound of this name. TechCrunch almost seems like it was invented to illustrate the principles of sound symbolism, so important to names, that are represented by the phonetic transcriptions included in these posts. It’s filled with low-sonority sounds (represented by the dark phonetic symbols) and closed syllables (shown by the way the dark symbols serve as “bookends” for each syllable). Then there’s that transition between syllables. The first syllable ends with a [k] sound and the second begins with a [k] sound. In the most natural pronunciation, the first [k] never gets released, so a person saying the name just goes reticent there for a while between syllables. Very brusque.

The name is even heavy orthographically, because there are lots of consonants, and two of them (the final sound of each syllable) are represented by the two letters “ch”. That makes the ratio of letters to syllables pretty high (5:1, in fact).

The name TechCrunch is big and heavy and not so pretty, but it’s serious and it gets the job done.

Tags: TechCrunch, the name TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, Mike Arrington, Arrington, MichaelArrington, MikeArrington

When YouTube was acquired by Google, there were jokes about how it might be renamed (GooTube? GoogTube?). There were some serious suggestions, too. One branding expert urged Google to change the name to GoogleTube.

In the Name Inspector’s not-so-humble opinion, Google was smart to let things stand. YouTube is a great name. A compound made of two common monosyllabic words, it feels easy and familiar. While it hints at the tired convention My ___ (e.g. My Yahoo, My eBay, MySpace, My.Netscape, My AOL, etc.), the second person pronoun makes it fresh and more honest (all those “my” names have big corporations speaking in “my” voice, which is kind of creepy). It’s nice that it can be either singular or plural, too.

Like many good names, YouTube evokes sound-alike phrases that activate appropriate associations in our minds. First, of course, it’s built on the pattern of boob tube, and sets up an implicit contrast with this comically derisive term (”This isn’t the boob tube, this is the YOU tube!”). The use of tube to refer to video is a little retro and ironic, which makes it kind of fun. YouTube also suggests the phrase you too, as in, for example, “You too can be a star!”. These expressions and their meanings resonate in the background, making this an excellent name for a video service featuring user-generated content.

YouTube is also strong phonetically. It has no consonant clusters, so it’s very easy and pleasant to say (unlike GoogleTube, which has that ugly knot of consonants in the middle). There’s poetry in the repeated vowel sound [u], but it avoids the cutesiness of perfect rhyming compounds like SmugMug and TagJag.

The Name Inspector’s conclusion: Chad and Steve found a good name in YouTube, and Google was smart to keep it.

Tags: YouTube, the name YouTube, GooTube, GoogTube, GoogleTube, Names, Company Names