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.

Entrepreneur and longtime reader Rich Skrenta has a search start-up called Blekko (click on that link and say hi!). It was covered on TechCrunch, and then Rich wrote a follow-up blog post telling the story of the name Blekko and asking for The Name Inspector’s input.

OK, here goes. Obviously Blekko is a ridiculous name and Rich knows it. He says in his post that it was chosen as the funniest of a number of options. He claims that one vendor told him the name was fantastic and must not be changed, but admits that those comments might have been intended ironically. He also hints that part of the reason he even got written up on TechCrunch was because of the silly name.

Comments on the TechCrunch post, when they address the name at all, are uniformly negative. Someone says the name sounds like retching. Another asks if they went with Blekko because blechbarf.com wasn’t available.

Rich writes that he spoke to some naming firms and they told him that, despite some negative phonetic associations, the name Blekko is essentially an empty vessel.

Oh, how The Name Inspector hates the expression empty vessel. The implication of calling a name an “empty vessel” is that you can fill it up with whatever meaning you want. That’s such a silly branding cliche.

Of course, the way a company name is ultimately perceived will depend on what people know, believe and feel about the company it’s attached to, and that’s going to depend on lots of other things. A good name for a company that fails will come to seem not so good. A silly name for a wildly successful company–Google comes to mind–will start to seem like pure naming genius.

Some people conclude from this that names don’t matter. That’s faulty reasoning. If a company made bad hiring decisions, but prevailed anyway due to its kick-ass technology, you wouldn’t say that hiring doesn’t matter. All companies do some things right and some things wrong, and their ultimate success depends on the complex interaction of all those little successes and failures.

The point of a name is that it’s there from the beginning, and can influence the way people feel about your company before they know anything else about it. Even when names are not obviously meaningful, they remind people of words, and invite them to make relevant connections, perhaps only subconsciously, between the meanings of those words and the company in question.

So, do you want those associations to make things easier or harder?

There are, of course, different ways a name can help you. If you want to blend into the background, it can help you do that. If you want to be provocative to get some attention, a name can help with that, too.

But after the attention dies down, you still have the name. Then it should be able to help you in other ways. If you’re lucky enough to do everything else right, your silly name may not be a hindrance. But if you make some missteps along the way, a silly name will make people less forgiving. What did you expect, they’ll say, from a company named Blekko?

So what, exactly, is wrong with the name Blekko? It’s not a mystery. It sounds like an exclamation of disgust, usually written as blech, that may represent vomiting onomatopoetically. As The Name Inspector likes to pronounce it, blech ends with a voiceless uvular or velar fricative, but the k sound in Blekko is a close approximation.

If you search for blech on Google, you’ll mostly find pages where it’s used as a surname or as a German or Yiddish word. If you search on Technorati, however, you’ll find lots of examples like this:

Blech. Sucks gettin’ old, I tell ya.

I also used fat free cheese, which I wouldn’t recommend using. Blech!

I absolutely abhorred mopping the floor. It was futile. There was so much grease and gunk and nasty on the floor, you just schmeared it everywhere. blech!

Rich, if you’re not comfortable naming your company Yukko, it’s safe to say you shouldn’t call it Blekko, either.

But you’re in stealth mode. The Name Inspector believes you have no intention of launching as Blekko. Though he hopes he’s wrong.

Tags: blekko, the name blekko, blech, blech! exclamations

The Name Inspector just learned about Incesoft, which claims on its website to be “the world’s leading provider of web robot technology”. Now, this is a Chinese company (which was selected for inclusion on the 2007 Red Herring 100 Asia list), so that’s a bit of an excuse, but…Incesoft? Is that the very best name they could come up with? Did they consider alternatives that evoked no primal human taboos in English and just find them too humdrum?

Even leaving aside the association with inappropriate intrafamilial contact, this is a terrible name. How are you supposed to pronounce it? If the first part is supposed to rhyme with the word wince, then the two syllables of this name are separated by an impossibly long hissing sound. It hardly helps to insert a little schwa sound for the e. But maybe there’s another pronunciation that makes more sense.

If there are Mandarin speakers reading this, please help The Name Inspector understand how this monstrosity might have come into existence. Is the Ince- part based on a transliteration of something nice? A family name perhaps?

Some naming companies offer a service that allows you to screen names in different languages. (The Name Inspector helped to develop just such a service at one of the companies where he worked). Incesoft perfectly demonstrates the need for this service. This name should have been vetted in English before being unleashed on the world. It’s for a global technology company, after all.

All this shows the downside of marketing on the web. It’s never been easier to create a global brand, and it’s never been easier to saddle yourself with a horrible name.

Tags: incesoft, the name incesoft, robots, web robots

The Seattle-based mobile platform company ZenZui recently changed its name to Zumobi, in preparation for a beta release in December. The name ZenZui was based on the word zen plus the acronym zui, which stands for ‘Zooming User Interface’. That’s the technology, developed at Microsoft Research, that Zumobi claims will take the pain out of surfing the web on your mobile phone.

While mingling at a Seattle tech event, The Name Inspector met a fellow from the company who gave a little demo, and it was pretty cool. The Zumobi interface divides the screen of your phone into four quadrants, and each of those contains four quadrants, so there are sixteen little boxes altogether. Each box contains a rectangular icon, called a tile, that represents a website, a feed, or some other little piece of web content. As you might guess from the term Zooming User Interface, you use Zumobi by zooming in and out on the quadrants and selecting tiles. If you know what you’re doing, like this guy did, you can do it really fast–zooming in the speedy sense.

The name ZenZui probably made the zen connection to evoke the sense of calm mastery that the interface provides. The -Zui ending came from the generic descriptive term for the interface, but made the whole name seem like an exotic foreign word. Maybe a little too exotic. In a BlogTalkRadio interview at Mobile Internet World, Senior Marketing Manager Beth Goza said that “zui, meaning ‘Zooming User Interface’, hasn’t really taken off for the average joe”. She also said that “zen is a pretty crowded space”. So the name change was spurred by a need for both clarity and distinctiveness.

Cindy Spodek Dickey, VP of Marketing for Zumobi, says that the idea for the name change came from several sources, including partners and end users. “Everyone agreed that ZenZui was a ‘cool’ name,” she wrote in an email, “but that a name with zen was an ambiguous product space (restaurants, spas, liquor, electronics to name a few) and didn’t fully communicate what our unique product was truly about…our zooming user interface and mobility focus. (Zoom + mobile = Zumobi)”. The new name was the result of brainstorming among management and employees.

Since the introduction of the .mobi internet domain, mobi has perhaps become generally recognized as a shortened form of mobile, so Zumobi might be thought of as essentially two words stuck together, with a spelling tweak. It’s a blend rather than a compound, because it’s pronounced with the stress pattern of a single word, and the m serves a double function as the last sound of zoom and the first sound of mobi.

The Name Inspector believes that Zumobi is a definite improvement over ZenZui, though without the double Zs it’s not as visually distinctive. Zumobi does indeed evoke the product’s special qualities more effectively. It’s more descriptive than suggestive, but that’s OK for a new, unusual product that’s so clearly characterized by a single salient feature. Zumobi is easy and fun to say. And it has that most important and elusive of qualities–the domain was available.

Tags: zumobi, the name zumobi, zenzui, the name zenzui, zooming user interface, zui, zooming, mobile, mobile platform, mobile phone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This isn’t the first time someone has tried to own a letter. According to MediaLife Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, which goes by the nickname of O Magazine, was sued for trademark infringement in 2001 by a German publication called O Magazine. Judge John Koeltl, who dismissed the lawsuit, reportedly said that O, The Oprah Magazine, which features stories about women’s health and well-being, and O Magazine, which features photographs of women in fetish attire, are “devoted to different aspects of women’s lives”. Indeed.

Now the folks at QVC may have had a purely metaphorical, fun, marketing use of the word own in mind. But companies often do get all hot and bothered about trying to own our cultural commons more literally. When The Name Inspector worked at a language technology company in the late 1990s, one of the executives thought we should seek a patent on our code because it would be “like having a patent on the English language”. Such hubris, such naivete.

Ah, now The Name Inspector is taking a trip down memory lane, and is reminded of another story from the late 1990s, which Geoffrey Pullum wrote about in 2004. James Pustejovsky, a famous computational lexical semanticist (at least, about as famous as a computational lexical semanticist can be), started a natural language processing company in 1997. First he called it Lexeme. This is a perfectly nice real-word name. Lexeme is a technical term in linguistics that means, basically, ‘word’. But a large company threatened to sue for infringement upon their trademark. Any guesses about which trademark it was? Lexus. Yep, for the luxury division of Toyota. Somehow they believed they owned the sequence of letters lex, despite the fact that this is an ancient Greek root found in English words like lexicon, lexical, and dyslexia.

As Pullum wrote, “Aren’t the owners of the English language ever going to rise up against greedy corporations like Lexus and Microsoft and Starbucks who lay claim to whole regions of the phonetosphere…?”. The prospect of huge legal fees forced Pustejovsky to change the name of his company, but he found his own way to fight back: he called his company LingoMotors, no doubt intending a dig at Lexus. But The Name Inspector fears that fighting linguistic land grabs with little witticisms is a bit like the idea, lampooned in Woody Allen’s movie “Manhattan”, of countering a Nazi rally with a devastating editorial.

Tags: q, the letter q, qvc, abbreviations, lexeme, the name lexeme, lingomotors, lexus, o magazine, oprah magazine, oprah

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

Last week John Cook at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked:

What is it with the word ‘dango’ and internet companies?.

Of course, there’s the online movie site Fandango. And then there’s Portland’s Jobdango and Seattle’s Zoodango.

Now, a former Microsoft project manager is rolling out a new site called GodDango, which he hopes will become a central gathering spot for the “spiritually curious.”

This is a good question. Though duty compels The Name Inspector to pick one nit: dango is not a word. It seems to have become what linguists sometimes call a cranberry morpheme.

So what in tarnation is a cranberry morpheme? Basically, it’s what you get if you chop a meaningful part off a word and there’s a meaningless part left. If you take the word cranberry and chop off berry, you’re left with cran. That’s a cranberry morpheme. That cran chunk seems like it should mean something, because it’s kind of like the blue in blueberry, the goose in gooseberry, or the cloud in cloudberry. But it doesn’t. It just distinguishes cranberries from other types of berry. Cranberry morphemes can often be traced back to meaningful elements etymologically, but are not meaningful for contemporary speakers. Or at least, not at first.

What makes -dango a cranberry morpheme? As WordzGuy observed back in January 2006, with Benjamin Zimmer following up in Language Log, the recent use of -dango seems to have started with the name Fandango, for the internet movie ticket service. Fandango is a type of punning company name based on a real word that bears little relation to the company in question, but that happens to contain a smaller word that is related. Fandango is the name of a dance, but it contains the word fan, as in movie fan. When you chop off fan, you’re left with dango.

If people are able to agree on a meaning to assign to a cranberry morpheme, it can be used to form new words. We now have cran-apple and cran-grape juices as well as cranberry juice, so cran by itself has come to stand for the flavor of cranberry.

Now something similar is happening with dango. WordzGuy identified flame-dango and Jobdango as examples of novel uses of the -dango ending of the word fandango. Benjamin Zimmer added to those fundango and blogdango. Now we have Zoodango and, heaven help us, GodDango to add to the list. It’s not clear that -dango has a consistent meaning in all these. In the company names Jobdango, Zoodango, and GodDango, The Name Inspector assumes that -dango simply means ‘innovative commercial website’.

Tags: fandango, the name fandango, dango, jobdango, zoodango, goddango

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