But the name Kindle Fire doesn’t work the way the name Apple Macintosh did. The name Macintosh applied part of the taxonomy of apples, in a witty analogy, to the world of Apple products: just as a McIntosh is a type of apple, a Macintosh was a type of Apple. The name Kindle Fire is different. While the words are thematically related, there isn’t a taxonomic relation between them.

The relation that does exist between the words kindle and fire makes the name Kindle Fire unsatisfying.

First, it’s redundant. The concept of fire is implicit in the concept of kindling. The word fire, being so generic, doesn’t add any information.

Second, Kindle Fire is metaphorically incoherent. The metaphor behind the name Kindle suggests that the device is something that kindles, or starts, fire. The fire itself could be the flame of knowledge, or burning curiosity, or something else interesting like that. Successful branding of the device could reflect those interpretations and the broader emotional and cultural significance of fire.

But giving a Kindle device the name Fire short-circuits the coherent and appropriate metaphorical interpretations, forcing us to apply the word fire to the device itself, and that doesn’t make sense. It can’t kindle and be fire at the same time.

For those reasons, the name Kindle Fire doesn’t burn as brightly as it should.

(This post also appears on GeekWire.)

Language is the most efficient tool your business can use to get attention and build a brand. It gives your business a human voice, and costs almost nothing to reproduce and share. In fact, it costs nothing at all when other people spread your message for you, using only their voices or their fingers and keyboards.

Language is for expressing ideas. You can’t get the language right until you get the ideas right. When you’re pitching, naming, and selling, the ideas you start with have to go beyond just identifying the unique benefits you provide. They have to present a vision that will make those benefits clear and meaningful to others.

To develop a vision like that, you need to put your company, product, or service into a compelling human context. It’s a matter of what some people, such as linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff, call framing.

Metaphor is one of the most powerful tools for framing. Metaphor allows people to project their basic knowledge of the world imaginatively to understand unfamiliar and abstract things. It’s especially important if you offer a product or service that’s innovative or hard to explain.

Some metaphors are more useful than others. The success of a metaphor depends on how apt it is and on the richness of the conceptual world it opens up.

Here’s an example from ancient internet history showing two different attempts to make a new technology accessible through metaphor. The first popular web browser was called Mosaic, and its successor was called Netscape Navigator. Those names used two different metaphors to convey something about what a web browser–a new kind of software at the time–was all about.

Mosaic likened the web, and perhaps the individual web page, to a familiar kind of picture made out of little pieces.

Netscape Navigator treated the web as a vast physical space to explore.

While the metaphor behind Mosaic has already been forgotten, the one behind Netscape Navigator has proved indispensable. It is, of course, the metaphor we all use now to think and talk about the web. It gives meaning to the names of two other currently popular browsers, Internet Explorer and Safari.

The contrast between these metaphors illustrates two important things to keep in mind about metaphor in general.

First, a metaphor that invites you to imagine you’re participating in an activity is better than one that makes a static comparison. Mosaic treated the web experience as a still picture. All the name really conveyed was that you would look at a complex whole composed of numerous parts. It suggested no imagined activity, purpose, or emotional engagement. Netscape Navigator, on the other hand, hinted at all these things. It suggested that the user was moving, in control, possibly headed somewhere important, and definitely in for an adventure.

The second important lesson is that it’s hard to come up with a new metaphor that’s as powerful as one that already exists. The metaphor of the internet as a physical space was established before Netscape Navigator came on the scene. People already used William Gibson’s term cyberspace to refer to the internet, and used the phrase “surf the internet”. That way of thinking and talking about the internet was, in fact, based on a metaphor that’s deeply engrained in our culture and our minds, and that may be universal: one that treats any purposeful activity as movement through a landscape. Metaphors like this run deep because they’re rooted in experiences that begin in early childhood. (Incidentally, before The Name Inspector was The Name Inspector, he was something of an expert on this topic.)

When you’re coming up with a company or product name, or a tagline, or a pitch, or copy for your website, it pays to think hard about how your message will tap into the conceptual lives of the people you’re trying to reach. What’s important to them? And how will they use metaphor to think about you? That’s partly, but not entirely, up to you.

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 Internet Movie Database, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, recently acquired a film distribution company called Withoutabox. Amazon.com has a digital movie download service called Unbox. These names just make too cute a pair for The Name Inspector to ignore, and bring up some grammatical issues that he expects will delight and amuse you. OK, he hopes they won’t bore you to desperate tears. Please bear with him.

Let’s start with the basics. In The Name Inspector’s typology of names, Withoutabox is a phrase name. A prepositional phrase, more specifically. Without is the preposition, and a box is a noun phrase that serves as its object.

To think about the meanings of a phrase name, you need to consider not only the meanings of the words in the phrase and how they go together, but also the ways that the phrase as a whole might be used in a sentence. This is especially true of prepositional phrases, because the main function of a preposition is to make it clear how its noun phrase object fits into a larger context.

Semantically speaking, the function of without is to indicate absence–in this case, of a box. Grammatically, without can connect that absence-of-a-box meaning to a larger context in two main ways: as an adverbial (a modifier of a verb or verb phrase), or as a postnominal modifier (a modifier of a noun that occurs after the noun). An example of the adverbial use of without a box is “Distribute your movies without a box”, where it modifies the distributing. An example of the postnominal modifier use is “This is a movie without a box”, where it modifies the movie.

In this context the two interpretations amount to more or less the same thing. As the website states, “Withoutabox declares all members of the film community to be free from restrictive distribution channels”. One aspect of this freedom is the fact that members do not have to put a film or tape or disc into a box and load it on a truck in order to get it in front of viewers. So the name Withoutabox works mainly through metonymy: it focuses on a small, literally descriptive detail–the idea or image of a movie that’s not in a box–and uses it to stand for a much larger scenario–a distribution system that’s not constrained by physical distance and scarcity.

Withoutabox has a hint of metaphorical meaning, too. The name is reminiscent of the phrase outside the box, that tired cliché that many of us–especially business types–drag out when we want to encourage innovative thinking. (Nothing is deeper inside the box than the phrase outside the box.)

The Name Inspector doesn’t know for certain how this cliché got started. There’s the obvious use of a centrality metaphor for normalcy, with normal being in the middle, as in middle of the road, and abnormal being out there, marginal, edgy, on the fringes, etc. There’s also a related containment metaphor, in which being inside the container is conforming to group behavior, and being outside is being different. But The Name Inspector read somewhere that the phrase think outside the box actually relates to an old brain teaser involving a square made out of nine dots drawn on a piece of paper. The idea is that you’re supposed to draw lines through all the dots by making only four lines and not lifting your pen from the paper.

Remember, think outside the box!

Though Withoutabox is kind of a long name, it has a fast, familiar pronunciation, similar to that expression of confident certainty without a doubt, that’s encouraged by the spaceless orthography.

Unbox

The name Unbox is deceptively simple. It seems to be shorter version of Withoutabox, providing a straightforward description of one aspect of downloadable movies in order to highlight the benefits of digital distribution.

But wait a minute. The prefix un- usually attaches to a verb (undo, unwind, etc.) or an adjective (unkind, unacceptable, etc.) to make a syntactically similar word with the opposite meaning. The most natural way to interpret Unbox is as a verb meaning ‘to take out of a box’ (comparable to the verb uncage ‘to take or let out of a cage’).

A verb prefixed with un- usually denotes the reversal of the action denoted by the unprefixed verb. You can wrap something and unwrap it, tie something and untie it, and so forth. So the verbs that un- attaches to denote actions with results that can be reversed.

In this context, however, unbox is being used, at least on the most literal level, in reference to something that has never been in a box–namely, a downloadable digital movie. So the name Unbox is less direct than it first appears: it evokes an imaginary scenario of taking something out of a box in order to emphasize the absence of a box and all that implies. If the name were Unboxed, this wouldn’t be the case. The past participle unboxed can simply describe something that you might expect to be in a box but isn’t. With adjectives and past participles (that is, adjectives made out of verbs), un- basically means ‘not’ (uncool, undisclosed, unanticipated, etc.). Something can be unguarded even though you can’t unguard it. But Unbox requires us to imagine an act of unboxing. We might think of this name as more of a philosophical exhortation than a physical description. Free yourself from the tyranny of the box!

So even the meaning of an unassuming name like Unbox requires you to use your imagination a little bit.

Clearly The Name Inspector has not been participating in NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). He’s been working on a secret project. But now he plans to up the posting rate a bit.

Radar Networks recently introduced their first Semantic Web application: Twine. In a presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit, Radar Networks founder and CEO Nova Spivack said that Twine wants to organize your personal information the way Google wants to organize the world’s information.

If you’re a little fuzzy on what, exactly, the Semantic Web is, you’re not alone. The term has a narrow technical definition but is sometimes used more broadly for various cutting-edge ways to represent and manipulate knowledge on the web. In the narrow sense, the Semantic Web is a set of markup standards for representing the content, as opposed to the format, of data. These include XML (Extensible Markup Language), RDF (Resource Description Framework), and OWL (Web Ontology Language). The gist of all these things is to make markup do more of the work that we associate with databases–representing objects and the relations between them–rather then being focused on presentation the way HTML is.

Twine in still in closed beta, so it’s hard to know exactly what it does. According to the website, “Twine is a new service that intelligently helps you share, organize and find information with people you trust.” It uses natural language understanding, the Semantic Web, and machine learning. The natural language understanding seems to be focused on named entity recognition–analyzing text to identify names of people, places, organizations, and things like that. Semantic Web technologies provide metadata standards that allow data objects and relations to be extracted from emails and other documents. Machine learning, according to Spivack’s presentation, allows Twine to make inferences based on information in Wikipedia.

This is all rather heady and abstract stuff. To provide a vivid and down-to-earth metaphor for this new kind of “Web 3.0” application, Radar Networks has named its product after a very mundane thing. The name Twine is the handiwork of San Francisco-based naming company Igor.

It’s interesting to compare the name Twine to the name Apple, which The Name Inspector wrote about some time ago. Both names make technical, abstract things more accessible by associating them with everyday objects. But the name Apple gets a certain glamour from the beauty and the cultural and literary significance of apples. Twine, on the other hand, is decidedly unglamorous. Apples are things you polish and proudly display in a bowl, but twine is something you throw in a drawer or a car trunk and forget about, until you need to use it.

This, of course, is part of the point of the name Twine. Apple’s products are high-design fetish objects that command people’s attention and adoration. It makes sense to represent them with an aesthetically and sensuously appealing object. Semantic Web technologies are invisible and derive all their value from their utility. The name Twine helps to make the technologies more visible through metaphor, but still focuses entirely on their utility.

The twine image manages to evoke the idea of connectedness in a fresh way. Words like web, net, and link have been done to death. Twine is something you actually manipulate with your hands and use to do something, so there are good associations with sensory memory and purposeful action.

On the sound front, Twine is great. It’s a nice, pronounceable single syllable, and vaguely evokes other connection-related words like between and twin.

Twine succeeds in making an esoteric technology meaningful to non-techies. Good Igor!

Tags: twine, the name twine, semantic web, web 3.0, radar networks, nova spivack, web 2.0 summit

Of the name Utterz, with special reference in the final paragraph to movies of the late 1990s.

Sometimes The Name Inspector must respond swiftly to the cries of an innocent web surfer in distress. The listenerd has issued a plea for help with the name Utterz, for a mobile blogging platform. With Utterz you can dial a special number and speak a blog post into your mobile phone. It will appear as an audio file in a Twitter-like stream on the Utterz network, and special widgets can make it appear in other places too.

Utterz is one of those names that makes you think, “Haha, don’t they know what that sounds like?”. But when you check the website you find they know exactly what it sounds like. In fact, they play the cow connection to the hilt: “Be Herd!” is their tagline, and their phone number is 712-432-Mooo. Their mascot is a cute cow with very prominent teats talking on a cell phone.

So the name is an intentional pun that exploits the homophony of the words utter and udder, with a cheesy little z-for-s twist on the spelling. The word utter, basically a synonym of speak, makes a very literal and direct connection to audio blogging.

You have to have some respect for a name that knows it’s ridiculous and flies its freak flag high. And yet…

There’s something about the whole teat/cell phone/web connection that’s a little unsettling. A little Matrix-y. Everyone knows web use can be obsessive. Addictive even. This name plays right into that idea: our cell phones are our own personal connections to the great life-giving, milk-giving webcow in the sky. It’s enough to give a person, as Cher Horowitz from “Clueless” might say, “an overwhelming sense of ickiness”.

UPDATE, September 20, 2008. The listenerd has reported that Utterz has changed its name to Utterli. And the cow theme is gone from the site. The Name Inspector now sleeps more soundly.

Tags: utterz, utterli, the name utterz, the name utterli, utter, udder, cow, webcow, mobile blogging, name change

TrenchMice is was a site where people can share inside scoops about the companies where they work. Trenchmouse John has written a great post about how they came up with the name TrenchMice. This is one of the best, most thorough naming stories that The Name Inspector has come across.

John wrote the post in response to a comment he had received about why TrenchMice gets so much less traffic than Guy Kawasaki’s site Truemors. The commenter suggested that it might have to do with the branding: people don’t want to be associated with mice, because timid rodents do not represent professional aspiration well.

Now, The Name Inspector can see the commenter’s point, but has a hard time believing that the name TrenchMice is being unfavorably compared to Truemors–he’s already been in contact with Guy about how Truemors sounds way too much like tumors. Don’t you think Truemors might get a lot of traffic because Guy Kawasaki has one of the most popular blogs on the planet?

But on to John’s post. You should definitely read the whole thing, but here’s a passage about the list of names they first came up with that really struck a chord with The Name Inspector:

What’s interesting is how unsuitable all of these names were, even though we were trying very hard to come up with a deliberately on-target name. It’s as though the actions of trying to be on-target kept us locked in uncreative names. All of these name categories had names we didn’t like, but the “on target” names were uniformly uninteresting.

This is such an important point. Before John even brought it up, The Name Inspector had been working on an analogy to illustrate it. Here it is:

Naming a company is like taking a picture of a house. Being too descriptively “on-target” is like standing right next to the house, or even inside it. To get a good shot, you really need to step away, walk around, and find just the right angle. Ideally, you’ll get interesting details in the background and/or foreground that show something about the neighborhood.

All this does not mean that your name should have nothing to do with your company. Forget that “empty vessel” stuff–most good names are not empty vessels, they’re just indirect. TrenchMice works because it offers a vivid image that’s useful for thinking about anonymous sources of inside information about a competitive world. The Name Inspector doesn’t believe that people using the site would have so much invested in the metaphor that they’d feel like mice themselves. The name TrenchMice is funny, extremely apt, and very memorable. Maybe the World War I allusion is a touch grim, but that’s part of the point of the name. It’s tough out there in the trenches.

Thanks for your very illuminating post, John.

UPDATE 5/29/2010: TrenchMice, alas, ceased to be some time ago. The blog post link above takes you to an archived version of the post. Thanks to John Humphrey for providing the link in his comment below.

Tags: trenchmice, the name trenchmice, truemors, rumors, scoops, companies, company info, company scoops

To examine this issue it helps to have a long list of different names for the same thing. That makes it possible to see the range of meaning strategies used to deliver a message relevant to that thing. This post uses Charles Knight’s list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, and considers the different ways the names on the list relate to web search.

The direct approach

Of course, many names are based on words that already have strong conventional connections to the idea of web search and web use:

Searchbots
CrossEngine
FyberSearch
nnseek
Picsearch
Searchles
SearchTheWeb2
Srchr
TheFind
50matches

Some names evoke the more general idea of web surfing, which is getting hard to imagine doing without search technology. The idea of web surfing is of course based on a metaphor that treats web use as travel (discussed below). The word surf, however, is now the most basic verb we have for web use.

SurfWax
Serph

Other names focus less on the activity of web use and more on the informational need that it serves:

Answers
FactBites

Metaphor

Not surprisingly, many of the names on the Alt Search Engines list involve metaphor. That is, they evoke meanings that do not relate to search literally, but that give us a way to think about search using another concept as a sort of model or template.

There are two important things to keep in mind about metaphor. First, it is primarily a conceptual issue, and its linguistic significance follows from that. Second, most of the metaphors that people use in names are not made up, but are already a part of the way we all look at and talk about the world. There are existing metaphors that we can all draw upon and expand upon. A famous and accessible discussion of these ideas can be found in George Lakoff’s book “Metaphors We Live By”.

So what kinds of metaphors are we talking about here? One of the most common casts the search engine as a sentient being.

Search engine as sentient being

Agent 55
GenieKnows
Knuru (play on guru)
Ms. Freckles
Pixsy
Sidekiq
Swamii
Turboscout
guruji (based on the word guru)

This one is a little tricky because personification is common in names independently of any particular metaphor. However, many of the names above emphasize aspects of personhood that are especially relevant to search. Agents, genies, gurus, swamis, and scouts are all people who know or find out things that are useful to us.

Other names relate more generally to the idea of intelligence:

Intelligence

Cognitionsearch
Wisenut
Wize

Another important metaphor treats search and web use as motion. Of course, this metaphor has become a normal part of the way we think and talk about the web: we navigate it, we surf it, we go to or visit websites, etc.

Some names relate to the idea of motion in a general way:

General motion

Bookmach
GameSkoot
GoPubMed
Turboscout
Skreemr (relates to fast motion as well as sound)

Other names tie into the conventional navigation metaphor by evoking different kinds of travel:

Travel

Trexy
Icerocket

A little oddly, some names focus on dancing. These names may be motivated by the motion metaphor combined with the idea that dancing is fun.

Dancing

ChaCha
gogo
iBoogie

The flip side of the motion metaphors is the idea that the web is a world in which we can move.

Web as world

BlogDimension
Kosmix
Sphere
MP3Realm

A completely different metaphor that’s used in the context of web search is the one that treats becoming aware of new things as uncovering objects. A prominent website name that uses this metaphor is Digg (which The Name Inspector has written about).

Becoming aware of things as uncovering objects

BlogDigger
FeedMiner
Fisssh!

The last name on that list combines the uncovering metaphor with the nautical context implicit in the web navigation metaphor.

Related to the uncovering metaphor is the metaphor that treats learning and understanding as physical taking or holding. We use this metaphor when we talk about grasping a difficult subject. Only a one name on the list clearly uses this metaphor, which means that there’s an opportunity for you namers of new search engines!

Grabble

Even this brief examination of search engine names makes it clear that metaphor is an important naming tool that can be used in different ways. When naming anything, it’s important to understand the metaphors we already use to think about that thing.

Tags: metaphor, search, search engines, alt search engines

Phil Butler over at ReadWriteWeb has written a post about a new online music service called Fairtilizer. Oh dear. The Name Inspector doesn’t even know where to begin.

This name is presumably a pun: the first syllable of the word fertilizer has been changed to the similar-sounding word fair. Or maybe the word air has been used as the end of that syllable. Either way there are problems.

As The Name Inspector wrote in his post about different types of name, “Nothing sounds dumber than a bad pun” (or, if you translate that statement into Russian and then back into English with Google translate, “Nothing sounds glupee than bad pun“). Fairtilizer, unfortunately, is a bad pun.

So what makes a pun bad? That’s a really tough question to answer. But The Name Inspector is going to try to reverse-engineer this name to come up with some guidelines.

1. Base your pun on words that are semantically iffy on their own.

Fertilizer is not the greatest word to use in any name. Sure, it’s nice that fertilizer makes plants grow, and the metaphorical use of that idea in the context of listening to music makes a lot of sense. Your music collection and your musical awareness will be nurtured here. So far so good.

But fertilizer is also manure. People sometimes say fertilizer when they’re too delicate to say bullshit. And fair isn’t so great either. Sure, in a name like Fair Trade Coffee it sounds pretty good, because the familiar phrase fair trade makes it clear that the relevant meaning is related to fairness and justice. But fair also means ‘so-so’. Not great. Not good. Just OK. Fair.

2. Combine meanings without creating relevance.

It’s hard to see how the meanings of fertilizer and fair might relate to one another. That’s partly a result of using fertilizer metaphorically while also building a pun on it. What would make fertilizer more just and fair? Is there something unfair about most fertilizer that makes this fertilizer special, metaphorically speaking? Compare this pun name with a name like Farecast, made out of the words fare and forecast. It’s immediately apparent how those words relate to one another: the service forecasts what fares will be in the future.

Maybe they were going for air, not fair. Metaphorically fertilizing the “airwaves” (even though we’re talking about the web here) makes a little more sense. But the word fair stands out so much that air is not likely to be recognized in there.

3. Invite scatological humor.

More than one commenter on the web has claimed to mistake the name for Fartilizer. Childish, yes, but it’s important to avoid provoking the eleven-year-old inside all of us.

4. Use morphologically complex words.

The word fertilizer has three meaningful parts: fertile + ize + er. That kind of complexity competes with the intrinsic complexity of a pun.

5. Create a name with an unnatural pronunciation

At least in American English, the vowel sound of the word fair sounds strange followed by the second syllable of the name Fairtilizer. It’s hard to think of words that contain that sequence of sounds.

Now the folks who created Fairtilizer are from Geneva, Switzerland. That means they’re probably French speakers. It’s possible that the name works better in French. The French verb meaning ‘to fertilize’ is fertiliser, and the first syllable of that word is more similar to the first syllable of Fairtilizer than to the first syllable of English fertilizer. So the pronunciation might have seemed more natural to them because of their linguistic background. The word fair and the -izer ending are tip-offs, however, that this is supposed to be an English name. In English it just doesn’t work.

An online music service should have a musical name that strikes the right tone. Fairtilizer falls flat. Maybe you should sign up for alpha testing and give them feedback about the name.

Tags: fairtilizer, the name fairtilizer, puns, online music, online music service, farecast, fair trade coffee

Duncan Riley has posted on TechCrunch about Incuby, a social network where inventors can promote their inventions. The Name Inspector thinks this is a great idea for a web business.

But not a great name for one. Clearly it’s intended to be a fun tweak of incubator, which is what we call organizations that help delicate young technologies grow into robust businesses. But Incuby? As in incubi–the plural of incubus? Have we learned nothing from the Reebok Incubus fiasco?

In Medieval folklore, an incubus is a male demon who rapes women in their sleep. Its female counterpart is called a succubus. In the late 1990s, some marketing geniuses at Reebok, clearly unaware of the word’s provenance, thought Incubus would make a nifty name for a women’s athletic shoe. No doubt they just thought it sounded cool. Maybe they were fans of the alt-metal rock group of the same misogynistic name.

Of course, Reebok was publicly humiliated and had to change the name. The Name Inspector is stunned that such a thing can happen at a large corporation. Didn’t it occur to anyone to, say, check the name in a dictionary or something before having it printed on tens of thousands of shoe boxes?

Now, the name Incuby is not quite as bad as all that. First, it’s not for a women’s shoe. Second, it’s not actually the word incubus, or even the less commonly used plural incubi. But it does come awfully close.

And even if you overlook the unfortunate connection to supernatural molestation, this name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like a buttered marble. It’s hard to know whether to pronounce the final syllable to sound like be or like bye. Some people, missing the connection to incubator, might even try to put the main emphasis on the second syllable. If the second syllable isn’t emphasized, the first and second together sound all pinched and puckered, like that little whatever-it-is inside the egg in the company logo.

The Name Inspector hates to be so hard on a startup name, but he calls ‘em like he sees ‘em. Maybe it’s not too late for some rebranding before launch.

Tags: incuby, the name incuby, incubus, incubi, incubator