Sometimes it takes a crazy kind of name to snap a name inspector out of a long dry spell. Verb for Shoe is just that kind of name. It belongs to a computerized, interactive shoe created by MIT-spinoff VectraSense Technologies. Apparently this shoe detects different activities of its wearer and inflates and deflates cushions in its insole to provide custom comfort and support. Part of The Name Inspector thinks “Wow!” and the other, larger, more sensible part is reminded of the old Onion headline: “U.S. Dentists Can’t Make Nation’s Teeth Any Damn Whiter“. Just exactly how comfortable can our feet get? $700 comfortable?

As he writes this, The Name Inspector is wearing a $90 pair of Keens, and his feet are just about as happy as they ever have been. But, to be fair, there’s more to the Verb for Shoe experience, apparently. According to talk2myShirt, these shoes are networked. Just why is a little unclear. Something about interacting with people in virtual and real space at the same time. But why through your shoes? So many questions, which at the time of this writing are not answered on the Verb for Shoe website.

But technology aside, the name Verb for Shoe is not only linguistically and conceptually bizarre, but it makes reference to grammatical categories as well. What could be better than that?

Verb for Shoe is a noun (verb) modified by a prepositional phrase (for shoe). But that prepositional phrase ain’t right. Normally a noun like shoe would be preceded by some kind of determiner: a shoe, the shoe, your shoe, etc. Determiners can be left out only in certain situations, like when the noun is plural (for shoes) or when it refers, concretely or abstractly, to an undifferentiated mass of stuff (for mud, for fun). The word shoe is neither a plural noun nor a mass noun. So what’s going on? When do you encounter a prepositional phrase like for shoe? Well, when you’re talking about words and their meanings, as in “What’s the word for shoe in French?”. In that sentence, shoe doesn’t refer to a shoe–it refers to the idea of a shoe.

So the name Verb for Shoe is about the idea of a shoe, or more specifically, changing our collective idea of a shoe. Why Verb for Shoe rather than Word for Shoe? Because we think of shoes as objects, but VectraSense wants us to think of this shoe as an occurrence. Verbs name actions and processes–hence, Verb for Shoe. You can imagine someone in a namestorming session saying, “What’s a verb for shoe? Whatever the verb for shoe is, that should be the name”. And then everyone realizes there is no verb for shoe, and they just go with the phrase that describes the mythical word they’re looking for. This is a very “meta” name.

A great thing about Verb for Shoe is that it gives The Name Inspector a reason to talk about notional (or conceptual) versus grammatical categories. The popular understanding of grammatical categories is that they express the notional ones. When you first learned about nouns and verbs, you probably learned that nouns are for people, places, and things and verbs are for actions. While the correlation between the two types of category is strong, linguists are always quick to point out that it’s imperfect, and that grammatical categories are best understood in morphosyntactic terms–that is, in terms of the kinds of suffixes that attach to words and the positions that words occupy in sentences.

How is the correlation between notional and grammatical categories imperfect? Well, while many nouns do refer to people, places, and things, there are also nouns, like fun, kiss, game, and trial, that name action- and event-like phenomena. And while many verbs name actions and processes, there are verbs like resemble, remain, and cost that name things less dynamic and/or more abstract.

The situation is actually kind of complicated, because different grammatical categories have different degrees of freedom to name different things. Nouns can name just about anything, because people have conceptual reasons to reify all kinds of phenomena that are not very thing-like. Verbs are more restricted than nouns–they never name people, places, and things, for example.

So how do you define nouns and verbs? You can’t do it right without mentioning things like this: Nouns are preceded by determiners and head noun phrases, which can be subjects of clauses. Verbs are marked for tense and aspect and head verb phrases, which join with noun phrases to make clauses. If this all seems a little circular, it is, in a way. Grammatical description is all about how systems hang together. And if it all seems a little a bit dry, well, it probably is. The strange and lucky subculture of language geeks, of which The Name Inspector is a proud member, is able to delight in this kind of grammatical detail. Others find it hard to stand, even if they’re standing in $700 networked shoes.

Tags: verb for shoe, the name verb for shoe, shoes, wearable computers, wearable computing, wearable electronics, grammatical categories, syntactic categories, verbs, nouns, grammar

Web publishing platform builders Six Apart sort of recently released Movable Type 4. This is as good an excuse as The Name Inspector is likely to get to write about the name Six Apart, so…

Like Jackson Fish Market or 37signals, Six Apart is an enigmatic name. You have to visit the website or learn from someone else what it’s about. The two co-founders, Ben and Mena Trott, have birthdays that are six days apart. Such a personal reference might seem inappropriate for a company name, but for Six Apart it’s very fitting. This is a company that’s all about people’s stories. It helped pioneer the blogging movement, and the spirit of personal narrative pervades its website. Their “About” page prominently features relaxed, non-corporate looking photos of the founders, with Mena Trott’s face smiling adorably to welcome you to “Mena’s Corner“, and with the link text “Mena tells the story” leading to the company history.

What makes this name interesting to The Name Inspector, however, is syntax. Let’s talk about syntax, shall we?

What, that doesn’t get your pulse going? Are you under the sway of these lines from E. E. Cummings?

who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you

That’s got to be the biggest slander against language geeks since Samuel Johnson called lexicographers “harmless drudges”. Don’t take it too seriously. Cummings himself had to have quite an eye for syntax in order to mess with it so creatively. And some syntacticians will in fact kiss the hell out of you. Word is that Mr. Noam Chomsky himself is quite the smoocher. And while we’re on the topic, lexicographers can be subversive lie-abouts.

But back to the name Six Apart. Like any company name, it’s a noun phrase. It gets used where other noun phrases get used: I work at Six Apart, Six Apart bakes my muffins, etc. But we have to distinguish its internal structure from its distribution. An interesting thing about company names is that, though they always end up being used as noun phrases, they can start life with just about any syntactic category:

• Noun/Noun Phrase: Apple, 37 Signals
• Verb (infinitive or imperative): StumbleUpon (with preposition!), LicketyShip
• Verb (past participle): LinkedIn (with particle!), Scribd
• Verb (gerund): Consumating, Gifttagging
• Adjective: Dapper, Vast
• Adverb: Indeed, Writely
• Prepositional Phrase: IntheChair
• Interjection: Yahoo!
• Sentence: AreYouWatchingThis
• etc.

Six Apart doesn’t really fall into any of these categories. The word apart is sometimes described as an adverb, but that just reflects the fact that the adverb category is a hodgepodge in English. Things we call adverbs, and the phrases we build around them, can modify all kinds of things, such as verbs (try hard), whole sentences (Frankly, I don’t like it), adjectives (extremely interesting), and, when they’re locative adverbs, nouns (our birthdays are six days apart).

Apart can be thought of as preposition that doesn’t take a prepositional object: an intransitive preposition. It’s typically preceded by some kind of scalar measure expression, like six days or ten feet. Apart‘s best friend is probably away:

Keep it away from the rest.

Keep it apart from the rest.

Like all locative prepositions, apart and away express a locative (or temporal or other scalar) relation between two places or things. With most prepositions, there’s a grammatical asymmetry between the places or things: one is a kind of reference point or landmark, and the other is what you’re really interested in. In the sentences above, it refers to the thing of interest, and the rest is the landmark.

What makes apart really special is the fact that it can also express these things symmetrically. That’s what’s going on in our birthdays are six days apart. You’ve got two birthdays, but they’re given equal treatment in the sentence. In fact, they’re expressed together in the same noun phrase. It’s as if the meaning of from each other is implicit: Our birthdays are six days apart (from each other). If you say Our birthdays are six days away, the meaning of from each other is not implied. This sentence means ‘Our birthdays, which are on the same day, are six days from now’. So apart is a pretty unusual word.

What’s more, the name Six Apart leaves out the unit of scalar measure. Two things have to be six somethings apart, but the something is left out here. You can leave the unit out only in a context in which it’s understood. So this name acts as if it’s on very familiar terms with you, even if it’s not.

Now wasn’t that exciting?

Tags: six apart, the name six apart, movable type, syntax, syntactician, ee cummings, noam chomsky, samuel johnson, dr. johnson, preposition, intransitive preposition

If you’ve bought an artsy-crafty item on the web lately, or if you read Fred Wilson’s blog A VC, then you’ve probably run into Etsy. Since launching in June 2005, this Brooklyn-based company has managed to build an extremely enthusiastic fan base and become the eBay of handmade goods.

Etsy is all about community. There’s a blog (of course) and a forum and a wiki and something called Etsy Labs, an actual physical space in Brooklyn where they give classes about how to make things. Pretty brilliant–building community and training their own suppliers!

And what about the name Etsy? Where does it come from? Ah, that is the mystery. There’s been a thread about that question for more than a year and a half on the Etsy forum. Etsy developer Rokali/Rob has done nothing to clear the mystery up, and has even cranked up his own fog machine. First he hinted that the name is somehow related to Federico Fellini’s film 8½. In a brief television spot on the company, he suggested that the name is from Latin et si ‘and if’. Another Etsy developer, RevolvingDork, cryptically mentioned the sentence “IT’S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY!” on the forum, and pointed to a screen capture from a video game (which has since been removed). Someone picked up on the clue and conjectured that Etsy is based on that sentence: ignore the article a, make an acronym, reverse the letters, and replace the i with a y. Simple.

Contributors to the forum have also come up with their own theories. One is that Etsy is based on the Unix directory /etc, pronounced “et-C”. The Name Inspector came up with his own crazy theory: if you write eBay as Ebay, the orthographic similarity to Etsy is striking, because the t in Etsy looks like a b missing part of its curve, and the s looks like a backwards a missing a line. Simple. Turns out someone on the forum already thought of that.

Does it really matter where Etsy comes from or what it means? What’s really interesting is the strength of the community’s conviction that Etsy must mean something. People crave meaning, and will look for it if it doesn’t walk up and say “hey”. The desire to figure out the “secret” of the name Etsy might matter more than any true story about its origin.

Of course, whatever the founders may have had in mind when they came up with it, the name Etsy has its own special character. It rhymes with the name Betsy, which makes it vaguely personified and friendly. Mostly it’s tiny. It evokes the phrase itsy-bitsy, and has all the right sound symbolism to match. The -y ending is unmistakeably diminutive sounding. The short and high-ish first vowel and the voiceless alveolar consonants in the middle all add to the smallness evoked by the sound. Also, when you say this name, you make tiny little gestures with the tip of your tongue.

So, why would a company want its name to seem small? Well, it’s cute, and a lot of the stuff sold on Etsy is cute (plush toys that are “shy” and need “lots of hugs”, crocheted anthropomorphic ice cream cones, Big Eye kitty patches, etc.). The cuteness also contributes to the friendly vibe on the website and in the forum.

Cuteness aside, the concept of smallness fits the company. It conveys the idea that the merchandise on the site is made in small quantities on a small scale (usually by individuals rather than companies), and Etsy itself is a small company. Also, smallness suggests precision and attention to minute detail, which is perfect for handmade goods.

The name Etsy projects the image of a small grass-roots start-up. If the company continues to live up to this image, it could be really big.

Tags: Etsy, the name Etsy, handmade, hand-crafted, crafts, artisans, eBay

The name Skype combines the familiar and the peculiar. Though there’s that unmistakable word sky in there, the end of the name is a bit of a mystery. On the Skype forum, an employee reveals that the name was derived from the expression sky peer-to-peer, which was shortened to Skyper and then to Skype. So this is a kind of a blend, but a rather unusual one.

What makes Skype unusual? First, while sky peer-to-peer is an extremely descriptive name for a peer-to-peer telephony service that works worldwide, the -pe portion of Skype is almost impossible to associate with peer-to-peer unless you’re told to. So Skype is really more like a tweak of the word sky. When looked at that way, the name is still unusual because the addition of a single consonant to the end of a word (The Name Inspector is talking about the pronunciation here, not the spelling) is a very uncommon naming strategy. No tweaked word names on the TechCrunch index list or the alternative search engine list are derived that way.

For that reason, some people might interpret Skype as a more conventional blend of sky with something that rhymes with Skype, like hype–or pipe, ripe, type, wipe. etc. Of these, pipe is the most positive association that’s at all relevant. But why the word sky? Well, aside from the general positive associations (sunshine, heaven, height=excellence/goodness, etc.), it seems to be a metonymic reference to communication signals as they exist in the popular imagination–flying around in the air. Since this is internet telephony we’re talking about, however, it seems just as likely that the signals would be flying around in cables of various kinds.

Another notable thing about Skype is its historical origin. Like many common English words that begin with sk- (e.g. skill, skin, skirt), sky has its roots in Old Norse. Maybe that’s one reason the Scandinavian founders chose this word for their company name. This distinctly Germanic provenance actually makes Skype stand out a little in the crowd of tech names, which tend, like scientific terms, to be derived at least partly from Latin or Greek. It gives Skype a basic and old quality, which is enhanced by the fact that the name is a single strong syllable.

The simplicity of the name Skype is its greatest asset. It makes the technology seem like a basic necessity that no one should do without, like a desk, a plate, a sink, or some other everyday item with a one-syllable name. It’s almost as if someone discovered a short and useful but long-forgotten English word and reclaimed it. That’s really quite a naming achievement.

Tags: skype, the name skype, skyper, sky peer-to-peer, sky, telephony, internet telephony, VoIP, etymology, Germanic, Old Norse

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

Hillel Cooperman of Jackson Fish Market sent a pointer to his naming story, which appears in the first post of his company blog. Head on over and take a look. But please do come back.

Back? Good.

The name Jackson Fish Market belongs to a small software company. That could be outright confusing, couldn’t it? But The Name Inspector guesses it’s really not a problem. Why? It has to do with the contexts in which people first encounter this name. They’re not hearing it on the radio while driving down the interstate. Most likely they’re seeing it as a link on some tech-related web page. In this context they’ll be pretty certain it’s not a name for an actual fish market. They may be curious, as The Name Inspector was when he first encountered it. They may just want to check it out. If they do, chances are that name is going to stick in their minds like, mmm, some kind of sticky fishy thing. It evokes very vivid sensory images.

This is another example of an enigmatic name, one that works largely by playing on people’s curiosity, like the name 37signals. Unlike 37signals, though, it’s not the intrinsic meaning of the name that’s a mystery. We know that Jackson Fish Market “should” refer to a place that sells fish and that’s either on Jackson St. or owned and operated by someone named Jackson. The mystery comes from how this could possibly relate to software development. Is the company located in a building that used to be occupied by a fishmonger? (That was The Name Inspector’s first guess).

Hillel uses this mystery as an opportunity to tell a story about his family history and his attitudes about life and business. Jackson Fish Market was the name of a market owned by his grandfather, Harry Jackson. Hillel wants to associate his software company with a tradition of small family businesses. This is an interesting twist on the classic immigrant success story. In the classic story, the children of artisans and merchants become doctors and lawyers. In Hillel’s story, that shift has already taken place, and he’s looking to recapture something that was sacrificed in the process.

It’s not just personal history that’s relevant to this name. There’s also an interesting social and economic shift at work. Until fairly recently, commerical software has been created almost exclusively by large corporations with marketing departments. The people who work in those departments usually don’t know or care how software is actually made. They simply sell an image that they think will appeal to the general public. It’s usually a bland image focusing on productivity and efficiency.

Behind the marketing facade, though, are people who think of themselves as builders and artisans. They get their hands dirty every day creating the virtual world that we all spend so much time in. For them, software is something real. Small software companies like Jackson Fish Market, which are becoming more common largely because it’s getting much easier and cheaper to start such companies, give the geeks a chance to sell the goods themselves. When they do, they let their own perspective shine through. They present their product as something real. Like slimy fish.

This is a pretty long name, but that goes with the folksy old-fashioned image it presents. It’s nice that it can be shortened to Jackson Fish, though.

Tags: Jackson Fish Market, Jackson Fish, software companies

The striking thing about the name 37signals is that almost no one will have any idea where it comes from or what it means. It’s an enigma, and if you want to get to the bottom of it, you have to do some investigating. Curiosity is rewarded in the company manifesto:

Mankind constantly analyzes radio waves from outer space in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Since this analysis started, almost all of the signal sources have been identified. 37 signals, however, remain unexplained.

So the name is a reference to those radio signals that might, just possibly, be from intelligent extraterrestrial life forms.

The enigmatic name is an interesting way to engage potential customers in a conversation. It can drive them to a website to find out more and provide an excuse to tell them a good story. For 37signals this is an effective strategy, because their marketing materials are well written and full of ideas (they have a manifesto, after all), and their blog, Signal vs. Noise, is one of the most consistently interesting company blogs on the web.

Despite its mysterious nature, this name belongs to a recent trend of web names containing numbers. 43 Things, 43 Folders, 30 Boxes, and 9 Rules are some other examples. What accounts for this trend? First, the scarcity of good single-word domain names. Putting a number in front of a word is an easy way to create a short, available variant. Second, techies are a number-lovin’ crowd, and the use of a specific number in a name implies a kind of quasi-scientific precision.

Though the name 37signals is fun and intriguing, it’s a bit hard to square with the philosophy of this company, which is known for its down-to-earth realism and its lean, easy-to-use web applications (Basecamp, Backpack, etc.) and web development framework (Ruby on Rails), all of which the Name Inspector is a great fan of. While 37signals is reasonably short in its written form, it’s very long in its spoken form (six syllables–compare that to the average of 2.25 syllables for the other names that have been analyzed here so far), and there’s not really any way to shorten it. It’s hard to understand why a lean, agile company would opt for such a name. What’s more, the relevance of this completely opaque name to a clean-and-simple design philosophy is a bit puzzling. Finally, setting aside the we-have-a-clue implications of intelligent signals, why does a realistic, down-to-earth company want to be associated with extraterrestrial life?

These are mysteries that may remain unsolved.

Tags: 37signals, the name 37signals, 37 signals, basecamp, backpack, ruby on rails, rails, 43 things, 43 folders, 30 boxes, 9 rules, signal vs. noise