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

Microsoft recently unveiled Surface, a tabletop computer with an amazing multi-touch interface. There’s no keyboard or mouse–you interact with Surface through its display, which is touch-sensitive and can respond to simultaneous touches from multiple fingers or people. That means you can “grab” objects and move them around, re-size photos by stretching them out with your fingers, and do other things that seem kind of like magic.

These multi-touch interfaces are really exciting. Jeff Han, a consulting research scientist in NYU’s Department of Computer Science, gave a jaw-dropping demo of his multi-touch technology that The Name Inspector caught at ETech 2006. Here’s a video for a similar demo at TED 2006. Judging from the videos on Microsoft’s website, Surface is a simpler, consumer-oriented implementation of the same idea, with the added capability of interacting with devices, like cellphones and digital music players, that are placed on top of it.

The name Surface is about as generic as you can get without actually naming a product category. The other Microsoft brand name that it most resembles is Word. Each of these names is based on a noun that literally refers to something associated with the product in question–both names use metonymy. However, while Word is a relatively concrete reference to an aspect of language (about as concrete as you can get where language is concerned), Surface has a very abstract, schematic meaning.

The word surface is an intrinsically relational noun–we seldom talk about a surface unless we specify what it is a surface of (a planet, the cerebral cortex, etc.). One of the interesting things about the name Surface is that it takes this relational meaning and makes it stand on its own–now we can talk about owning a Surface, without specifying what it is the surface of. Because the name is a reification of an abstract spatial concept, it suggests the gray area between the real and the virtual. This is perfect for the product, which allows people to interact with virtual objects on the screen as if they were physically present: touching them, moving them, spreading them out, etc.

Of course, it would be a mistake to link this technology directly to the idea of a tabletop computer. Microsoft envisions a future of surface computing in which the technology will be found on lots of things besides tabletops–including even “the hallway mirror”. So this name is an attempt to define a new category and to own it.

The word surface has a some other positive features. It contains the word surf, making a pretty explicit connection to the web (something Microsoft has been especially interested in doing lately). It also has appropriate sound symbolism for a multi-touch interface. All its consonants are voiceless fricatives, which have a hissing sound that suggests movement with light friction.

The word surface is not an unalloyed asset, however. Its big downside is its conventional metaphorical connection to the ideas of superficiality and potentially deceptive appearances. When we scratch the surface of a topic, we investigate or discuss it in the sketchiest of terms, without engaging with most of what there is to know about it. When we say that something seems one way on the surface, there’s a strong implication that it’s different deep inside.

Metaphorically speaking, however, a system’s user interface is its surface. The suitability of the word in this context trumps the possible negative associations. The Name Inspector would be happy to delve into the world of surface computing, and can’t wait until Surface–or some other competing product–is available at a consumer-friendly price.

Tags: surface, the name surface, microsoft surface, the name microsoft surface, microsoft word, multi-touch, touch-sensitive, tabletop computer

Shelly Farnham and Peter Brown are the co-founders of Waggle Labs, a Seattle software and consulting company that specializes in social technology. Their new product, Pathable, lets participants in social events tag themselves with their interests and personal connections to find other similar participants. Shelly and Peter were kind enough to share a story about how they came up with these names. Here’s what they wrote (in the third person) about Waggle Labs:

Their goal was to have a name that reflected on the one side their creativity and sense of fun, and on the other side their extensive advanced prototyping and social science backgrounds. They brainstormed through a number of names with their friend Leo sitting in front of a whiteboard that had words like “social, innovative, fun, creative, smart, technology, internet, web” written on it.

Shelly and Peter had both been through the process of naming projects a number of times before, and had each developed a trust in their instinctive response to names (that “blink” reaction as described by Malcom Gladwell — he argues that through rapid cognitions we often reach instant conclusions that are “really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good”). [link http://www.gladwell.com/blink/] The goal was to brainstorm through and develop a name they both instinctively liked. They both read a lot of science fiction, so one of the final contenders was General Galactic. Peter loved it, Shelly less so.

“It sounds like General Electric.” She recalls saying.

“But that’s great!” said Peter. “We can leverage residual name recognition.”

“Mmmm. But, General Electric! It is a very masculine name, brings to mind heavy machinery.”

Shelly was a part of an informal art group called Hive-Mind, referring to the emergent intelligence of collective organisms. [Link to Jordan's bee blog: http://hive-mind.com/bee/blog/ ] For her, bees and hives had a strong association with the power of the collective intelligence of the Internet. “What about something to with the Waggle Dance?” She thought the word waggle evoked a sense of lighthearted fun and the Waggle dance is a really amazing phenomenon:

From wikipedia:

Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honeybee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar or pollen, or both, and to water sources.

Through innovative social technology they hoped to enhance people’s social experiences, providing direction to the online honey, so to speak. So Waggle Labs seemed like a great fit. After their brainstorming session they took a day to run both names by their friends: “What do you think, General Galactic or Waggle Labs?”. After twenty four hours of mulling over the issue, they decided to go with Waggle Labs. Much later, a few people pointed out the similarity between Waggle Labs and Google Labs — to which Shelly would shrug and smile and say “well I guess we can leverage residual name recognition.”

Despite the similarity to Google Labs, The Name Inspector is happy that Shelly and Peter decided to go with Waggle Labs. The great thing about this name is that it sounds really playful but has a serious and deeply interesting scientific association. The bee waggle dance is a fascinating case of animal communication that’s gotten a good deal of academic attention. The Name Inspector even had reason to learn about it during his linguistic training. Linguists like the waggle dance both because it shows how complex animal communication can be, and because it’s quite unlike human language, so it helps to show what makes the latter special. Among other things, human language has what Charles Hockett called duality of patterning–one system that defines discrete building blocks of sound (phonology), and a separate one that uses those building blocks to define meaningful units (lexicon) and their combinations (morphosyntax). That’s what allows us humans to have a such a big vocabulary and a limitless repertoire of messages. But The Name Inspector digresses.

Here’s what Shelly and Peter wrote about Pathable:

One of their projects is Pathable (still under development), an event-based social networking tool that explores the use of lightweight profiles with social tagging for matchmaking. They agreed upon the name with that same mutual, instinctive response. Shelly originally wanted to go with SpiderTap. The spider in the web is another metaphor for online social interactions that Shelly always liked. “You tap the strands you’ve spread through the web, see where there’s a wiggle, and move in that direction.” Peter did not like spiders however. They then thought through a few more names around the metaphor of finding the shortest path between two points. “Pathable!” simply leapt into Peter’s brain. He immediately went online, saw that it was available as a domain name, and said “that’s the one”. It seems like an expensive domain name and yet cost them only $8. Shelly agreed it was a good name, recognizing most people disliked spiders, and that their instinctive, negative reactions were not easily overcome. She also thought Pathable had somehow a more business-y ring to it, which fit the target group of the project.

Pathable sounds like a real word but is not, so they got to create their own definition:

pathable (păthə-bəl, päthə-bəl) adj.

To supply with the means, knowledge, or opportunity to discover the hidden courses upon which things move.

The Name Inspector also likes the name Pathable. It’s a strange but lovable beast. While it does have an oddly natural ring to it, it has a notable peculiarity. Do you see it?

Pathable is strange because the suffix -able normally attaches to verbs (readable, useable, believable, etc.), and path is a noun. In the name Pathable we interpret path as a verb because the suffix forces us to. This is a type of what linguists call coercion, which of course is just a fancy scientific way of saying the same thing. The coercion of path into a verbal interpretation gives this name a unique dynamic quality and a hook that really makes it hang on in memory.

What accounts for the natural feel of Pathable, considering that it’s grammatically anomalous? Partly it’s the fact that there are so many words in English that are both verbs and nouns, and many of them regularly occur with the suffix -able (e.g. lovable, notable, debatable, etc.). This might make people subconsciously get used to seeing nouns followed by -able, even though they know these words are supposed to be functioning as verbs in this context.

The Name Inspector would like to congratulate Shelly and Peter, wish them luck with their venture, and thank them for giving him an excuse to talk about geeky linguistic stuff.

Tags: waggle labs, the name waggle labs, waggle, waggle dance, bee waggle dance, pathable, the name pathable, coercion, suffix, suffixation, affix, affixation, social technology