Bodkin Van Horn

Has a solid Dutch feel, lightened by the cute sound of Bodkin. But is it too similar to the Wibbits’s son’s name, Popkin von Pickle? And what exactly is a bodkin?

Hoos-Foos

Like the rhyme and all those Os. Double Google magic! But it just sounds like something you’d shout when you’re playing foosball. I think Dave might still be the name to beat.

Snimm

Short and distinctive. I like it. But the final m get’s blended with the M in McCave. Dave McCave works better (and has the rhyme).

Hot-Shot

Another rhyming name, but more meaningful than Hoos-Foos. Problem: A little braggy, and might make people think of body shots–kind of inappropriate for a child. Dave definitely safer.

Sunny Jim

Simple and optimistic. Problem: Isn’t it a brand of beef jerky? Check this, stick with Dave if necessary.

Shadrack

Has a badass urban feel that I like, but it’s actually an ancient name! And it goes well with McCave. I kind of want to, but  do I have the guts?

Blinkey

When he came out he was just all blinky! I think it’s cute, and the e in there makes it more subtle. Will only work if he stays blinky, though.

Stuffy

When this little guy cried for the first time, it sounded like he had a cold! But I don’t want people to think stuffy as in uptight.

Stinkey

Kind of an inside joke about the whole meconium incident. I’m beginning to see now that the “seven dwarves” naming strategy isn’t really working. Leaning toward more traditional names like Dave.

Putt-Putt

Drove past a miniature golf course and got the idea that this might make a good baby name! Ask the girlfriends what they think.

Moon Face

Even though this is descriptive like Blinkey, Stuffy, and Stinkey, it’s way more poetic. Does it suggest mooning around, though? I DON’T want a sad name.

Marvin O’Gravel Balloon Face

Kind of crazy, I know, but it has great rhythm, and it honors Grandpa Balloon Face. Might be too long (and too Irish, if that’s possible!) with McCave.

Ziggy

Heard this name and thought it was cute. Saw the comic strip, though, and got a little creeped out by the man-baby.

Soggy Muff

Dave Sr. and I think it will be funny to tell everyone we’re seriously considering this name, just to see their reactions. We tried to come up with the worst name we could without actually using dirty words. (We’ve already decided to go with Dave.)

Buffalo Bill

We like the idea of naming him after a historical figure. Presidents’ names are too cliched, though. Buffalo Bill was a famous cowboy, I think, but I don’t know anything else about him–check Wikipedia.

Biffalo Buff

We really liked the sound of Buffalo Bill last time around, but don’t want the “buffalo killer” association, so we’ve played around with it a little. Might still be too close.

Sneepy

I was thinking about the seven dwarves again and started playing around with their names, changing letters and stuff. I kind of like this–distinctive but still vaguely familiar sounding. Could be taken as a blend of “sneaky” and “creepy,” though.

Weepy Weed

The alliteration and the image seemed sort of emo and poetic at first, but seeing this in print makes me realize it’s just way too sad.

Paris Garters

Kind of edgy, especially for a boy. Maybe too edgy.

Harris Tweed

Sounds really classic, especially with McCave. Not sure who Harris Tweed was, though.

Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt

We were bummed when we found out Harris Tweed is actually a kind of cloth. Trying again for a classic sound. I like just Sir Michael Carmichael, but Dave Sr. thinks we should “jazz it up” with Zutt, the name of his first startup. I think that makes it too long with McCave, though. And the Sir part might be a little pretentious.

Oliver Boliver Butt

I asked Dave Sr. to be in charge of names this time, and this is what he came up with. You can’t give a kid a name with “butt” in it! I’m beginning to think he just wants to go with Dave again.

Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate

This is definitely that last time we’re doing this, because Dave Sr. has promised to get the vasectomy, but we’re all named out. So we decided to crowdsource. We asked for suggestions, had people vote, and combined the top three. I just don’t see having McFate right before McCave, though. At this point I think we’ll just stick with Dave.

Some names, however, succeed with a more…maximalist approach. Two extreme examples are the well-known full-sentence product names Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. GYHST was popular in the 1970s, and its name might be regarded as a late, faint echo of 1960s psychedelic maximalism, best exemplified, perhaps, by Screaming Yellow Zonkers, a sort of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band of the snack food aisle. The Name Inspector’s father was a food package designer (now retired), so the black SYZ box with Peter Max-esque illustrations was an object of great interest in our house. Dad, in fact, went on to design the first black breakfast cereal box for Circus Fun cereal from General Mills. (No doubt this early experience with product packaging and logos and names was formative for The Name Inspector.)

This little walk down memory lane has been inspired not by premature nostalgia but by the question of who has the longest, craziest company name in Seattle. If we interpret “company name” loosely to allow web properties, then it would have to be lolcat capital of the world I Can Has Cheezburger, from Cheezburger Network. This name commits sins besides cumbersome length: it’s also grammatically anomalous and misspelled. Yet in its own way it’s perfect for what it is.

Runner-up might be one of the first dozen or so names The Name Inspector wrote about: Jackson Fish Market. While this would be the most mundane name in the world for a fish market on Jackson St., it’s strikingly bizarre for a software company name, which is what it is. And that’s cool.

Other contenders would be Peppers and Pollywogs, Obey the Decider (another sentence name!), No Longer Need It (as a verb phrase that’s not an imperative, it’s a grammatical oddity for a name), and newcomer Baldy Beanbag (not that long, but strange enough to make up for that). And the good old Robot Co-op deserves a mention, if only for the wonderfully counterintuitive idea it expresses (Do we want a company to be run by robots? And can robots form co-ops?).

How about it, readers? What are some other long, crazy company names from Seattle? Or from anywhere?

What on earth would make someone think it’s a good idea to name their business BackFire? Especially a chiropractic practice (a chiropractice?)?

Here’s what the word backfire makes The Name Inspector think of:

1. A plan going terribly wrong
2. A loud noise coming from a vehicle’s tailpipe
3. A back that is on fire

The least objectionable association is (2), and with a bit of imagination, that one is pretty bad (picture an especially elaborate chiropractic version of the “pull my finger” gag). (1) is just terrible in an obvious way (and chiropractic, with all that yanking and twisting, just seems like it’s bound to go wrong). (3) seems uncomfortable under any circumstances, but potentially especially acute in a chiropractic setting. If your chiropractic treatment backfires, you might find yourself saying, “Doc, it feels like my back is on fire!” And here’s the kicker: in the window of this chiropractor’s office there is a neon spine.

Just to be generous, let’s enumerate the appropriate things about the name BackFire:

1. It contains the word back

That’s about it. Maybe that feeling of one’s back being on fire can be interpreted as the reason for seeing a chiropractor in the first place. Or maybe (this is really a stretch) a back on fire can be understood as a good thing–a metaphor for vitality. On second thought, maybe not.

A tip to business owners: don’t pick a name just because it contains a word related to your business. Context is everything.

Thuuz is a startup that assigns an “excitement score” in real time to sporting events, notifies fans when things get especially thrilling, and even tells them how they can tune in to share the excitement. Pretty great idea, right? (If it really works. But let’s face it, the users of this are going to be big sports fans. They’re just looking for more excuses to watch sporting events.)

But then we have the name Thuuz. The Name Inspector is not a fan. Clearly it’s built on the bones of the words enthused, enthusiasm, and enthusiastic. So far so good–apt, if a bit pedestrian. But that syllable is pretty weird sounding. It’s really the first consonant and the vowel together that sound odd. The Name Inspector talked about this in connection with the name Thoof a while back. He quite reasonably declared that the “Thoo-” part was a bit counterintuitive in English, and then this smartypants named John commented that it was an accident of history that there is no word thoof, and The Name Inspector held his ground, and John was all “what about enthusiasm“, and The Name Inspector was like “good point but what about at the beginning of a word”, and John was all “historical linguistics blah blah”. So clearly The Name Inspector won that round.

The real problem with Thuuz is the spelling, which uses not one but two cheesy alterations: the double vowel and the z at the end. Thuze would be more straightforward–the founders were probably unable to acquire the domain thuze.com. In Thuuz the “uu” performs an odd function of sorts, because if the name were spelled Thuz people might think it rhymes with fuzz. But the “uu” is just weird. (And now John is going to say “What about the word vacuum“, and The Name Inspector will be all “It’s still unusual”, and the disagreement will escalate until there’s a fistfight followed by an exhausted moment of bonding, just like in a bromance movie, and an unbeatable linguistic duo is formed.)

This is one of those names that will have to be spelled for anyone who hears it without seeing it.

Fans are really great about jumping and shouting and being noticed and painting their chests purple. The Name Inspector thinks that non-fans need to stand up and get noticed sometimes, too. So here he is. He wishes the founders of Thuuz the best of luck with their startup, but he’s got to say, “Let’s not hear it for the name Thuuz!”

In fact, some people love the name Zulily in ways The Name Inspector never expected. It recently came to his attention that a new mother announced last summer on the Baby Name Genie forum that she was naming her daughter Zulily Charlotte. The Baby Name Genie site displays lots of banner ads for Zulily, so most contributors to the forum knew exactly what inspired the name Zulily Charlotte, and the post triggered a bit of a diaperstorm. Some people expressed incredulity and derision: It’s just weird…Can you imagine being a grown woman with that name? Ridiculous…If I got introduced to an infant named Zulily I think I’d die laughing…I think Zulily is silly sounding, but it’s your baby…

Others, however, defended the name (though some were a bit…defensive about it): I know lots of people will hate it, but every time the ad pops up on the site, I think it’s cute…In my preggo hormones, I thought it was cute, too…This name is no worse than some of the crazy celebrity names out there that people choose to name their children, and I think it’s pretty…Zulily, hmmm–I like it actually! I like that you’re bein’ bold!…

Now, The Name Inspector never imagined Zulily as a name for a girl, and if he had a daughter of his own, he probably wouldn’t be as bold as this new mother. But oh, how he hopes the story of Zulily Charlotte is true! What better validation could a namer receive than to have a creation be chosen, from all the possibilities in the world, to name a new human being?

If you’re out there, Zulily Charlotte, The Name Inspector wishes you all the happiness in the world.

And if you’re interested in names, you can enjoy some English-based Asian brand names that are equally exotic. They’re mostly, but not exclusively, for Japanese products. The way English is used in these names is often shocking and amusing, so much so that there are websites, such as Engrish.com, devoted to showcasing Asian product names for laughs. Some of the names, like Pocari Sweat (for an “Ion Supply Drink”), you’ve probably come across before–they’ve been mentioned often enough in the media to have achieved a degree of notoriety. (Uwajimaya did indeed have big displays of Pocari Sweat right up near the cash registers.) There are other Asian-English names, though, that don’t have quite the same shock value, but that present English from a subtly different perspective. For a namer, these can be inspiring as well as funny.

Some of the names, like Watering KissMint chewing gum, are kind of poetic. No native speaker of American English would come up with this name. While KissMint alone is pretty normal, that present participle Watering makes the name special–it’s not an idiomatic use of the word water, and it suggests really sloppy kisses. The result is very evocative, though, and the unusual language is partly responsible. The Name Inspector gets the sense that watering is being used as a near-synonym for refreshing, but it evokes a more specific image of plants being watered, giving us a metaphorical way to see and feel our refreshment.

The gum with the charmingly literal name No Time apparently brushes your teeth while you chew it. Then there’s Walky Walky candy. Not shocking, not mind-blowing–just a little askew. It sounds  a bit like walkie talkie, or an ironic baby-talk command: “Come one now, everyone, walky-walky!”. And there’s a cold coffee drink called Let’s Be. You could imagine an American product going for a kind of Zen effect with a name like Just Be, but Let’s Be sounds a bit bizarre. Maybe the inclusive invitation of Let’s Be sounds more polite than the straightforward imperative form that’s ubiquitous in American branding and advertising. Come to think of it, the brand name of the little snack crabs mentioned above was Let’s Party! (Because nothing says “party” like a bag of little dried crabs!).

Other unusual beverage names included Sac Sac, a fruit juice drink, and amino supli, an apparent Pocari Sweat competitor.

In the Uwajimaya food court there’s a cream puff vendor called Beard Papa’s. Their logo includes a cartoon man-face with a fluffy white beard that looks liked whipped cream. Both the language of the name and the concept behind it are surprising. First, it’s just strange to modify papa with beard like that. Bearded papa would be the idiomatic way to say it. But more to the point, The Name Inspector is hard-pressed to think of a Western food product that’s touted, however subtly, for its resemblance to human hair. There’s angel hair pasta, of course, but that’s from angels, which, if they actually existed, would no doubt be quite delicious.

It’s hard not to have at least one laugh about an inappropriate name, and The Name Inspector got his from Chippy corn chips, which manages to be both unimaginative and way off the mark.

Browsing at Uwajimaya is like being a tourist without leaving the city center. Being in a foreign setting tends to heighten your sensitivity to all stimuli–even the familiar ones that are suddenly thrown into relief by an unfamiliar background. And so it was with The Name Inspector at Uwajimaya. One of the exotic Asian names he wrote down was Sport Beans candy. But then he looked more closely and realized this was a thoroughly American product, made by Ronald Reagan’s favorite jelly bean company Jelly Belly, headquartered in California, USA. Thank you, Uwajimaya, for helping The Name Inspector see the strangeness of American brand names through new eyes.

Not so long ago, The Name Inspector’s younger son got his first pair of shoes at Nordstrom. As a little lagniappe, he also got a plush toy named Nordy, whose head is shown on the right above. This is definitely The Name Inspector’s favorite plush toy inspired by a sketch by a famous philosopher of language.

Nordy is an ambiguous toy. Aside from the dot for an eye and the protuberances vaguely suggesting snouts and/or head-tops, it has no facial features. If you look at it one way, it seems like the bigger protuberance represents ears, and the smaller one a little bunny-ish nose. If you look at it another way, the bigger protuberance looks like a proboscis, and the littler one suggests the top of a head.

In other words, Nordy looks like a stylized version of Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, pictured in the middle. Wittgenstein was interested in ambiguity and in the phenomenon of “seeing as”–what we experience when we first see the drawing “as a duck” and then see it “as a rabbit” (or vice-versa). What did he conclude from the duck-rabbit? Well, that’s not entirely clear. But the duck-rabbit is cute, right? Apparently some plush toy designer, perhaps a frustrated (or happy?) philosophy PhD unable to land an academic job, thought so.

Wittgenstein got the idea for his duck-rabbit from an American psychologist named Joseph Jastrow, who probably saw the picture at the left, which appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1892. Harper’s, in turn, seems to have swiped it from a German publication called Fliegende Blätter. To learn more about the provenance of the duck-rabbit, take a look at John F. Kihlstrom’s page on the topic.