As a touch point for this post, The Name Inspector will look back on his old “10 company name types on TechCrunch” post, the most-visited page on this blog. That post broke down the names in the TechCrunch index at that time, which was much smaller than it is now, into a number of different categories. We can use those categories to help make sense of what’s going on here now, naming-wise.

Are there any surprises? Yes! Seattle is crazy about phrase names! Phrazy! Phrase names were only the third most numerous type in the TechCrunch post (making up about 25% of the names), but they’re numero uno here (about 34%). To be scientific, we have to acknowledge there are many possible explanations for this. Maybe the Seattle Startup Index includes a different range of types of companies than those found in TechCrunch in 2007. Maybe there’s been a nationwide change. Maybe it’s somehow related to all the coffee here. Maybe…

But that’s all speculation. Let’s get down to it.

First, what exactly counts as a phrase name? Put two words together and you’ve got a phrase, right? It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Sometimes 1 + 1 = 1 where words are concerned. Certain word combinations are pronounced as a single word, and we call these compounds. Think of the different emphasis in the expressions The president lives in the White House and Pat lives in a white house. White House is a compound, and is emphasized on the first word, while white house in the second sentence is a phrase, and is emphasized on the word house, which is the “head” or main word of the phrase. Compounds are typically made by putting two nouns together, but other types of words can be used as well.

The Name Inspector counted names as phrases when they (1) followed the normal rules for putting together non-compound phrases (such as adjective + noun), or (2) broke those rules and had compound pronunciation. Things got tricky because some names that are syntactically phrases get pronounced as compounds. They’re kind of all run together. An example is Postacrime.com. “Post a crime” is actually a whole imperative sentence, and would normally be pronounced with emphasis on the word crime. But The Name Inspector assumes the name Postacrime is emphasized on the first syllable. Names like these went into the phrase category for syntactic reasons, but they might have been counted as compounds. (They were also counted as phrases in the TechCrunch post.)

Topping off the Seattle Startup index is Cheezburger Network, which is responsible for another website with a whole-sentence name, I Can Has Cheezburger. Then there’s Survey Analytics, BuddyTV, Robot Co-Op, ActiveRain, BigOven, the syntactically unusual HasOffers, and many others.

Seattle doesn’t favor phrase names at the expense of compounds, though. The old TechCrunch index was about 23% compounds, while the Seattle Startup Index is about 25%.There’s Wetpaint, Redfin, Smilebox, FlowPlay, Popshops, Walk Score, and many others. Seattle also makes a pretty good showing with blends, or names that seem like blends, which make up about 8% of the Seattle startup names versus 9% of the TechCrunch names: Zillow (zillions + pillow, though that analysis of the name might have been created after the name was), Feedjit (feed + widget, with a spelling twist), Sporcle (supposedly based on the word oracle–it’s got to be a blend with sparkle, right?), Mercent (merchant + percent?), and some others.

So what type of name does the Seattle Startup Index have fewer of? Real word names. Here’s what’s going on: TechCrunch covers mostly funded startups, which can afford to buy real-word domain names. About 25% of the names in the old TechCrunch index were real words, some with creative spelling. Real-word names make up only 12% of the names in the Seattle Startup Index. The Name Inspector doesn’t know how many companies in the Seattle index are bootstrapped, but he’s willing to guess it’s a lot. So our scrappy little bootstrapped startup scene has a different linguistic landscape than the one on TechCrunch. The need for economy forces us to be ingenious with all our resources, including our verbal ones. Go Seattle!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep it away from the rest.

Keep it apart from the rest.

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

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

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

Now wasn’t that exciting?

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

Tags: area 51, area51, furniture, home furnishings, capitol hill, seattle

So crowded is the space of names, however, that people have been forced into three-meaningful-part territory. The first example that springs to mind is MyBlogLog, the source of that widget at the bottom of The Name Inspector’s sidebar. (By the way, if you’re a MyBlogLog user, you’re hereby invited to join The Name Inspector’s community.) If you shortened this name to MyBlog or BlogLog, you’d have something that fits a common naming pattern: MyBlog is like MySpace or YouTube, and BlogLog is like SmugMug or TagJag. With MyBlogLog, however, there’s kind of a lot going on. Technically it’s a phrase name, but the way it’s written, without any spaces, is an invitation to pronounce it as a single word. And that’s kind of kind of tricky. Which syllable do you emphasize? If you pronounce the name as a phrase, you probably emphasize both my and blog. If you pronounce the name as a single word, you probably de-emphasize either my or blog. But the result sounds kind of hurried and squished together, doesn’t it?

One of the clunkiest three-part names The Name Inspector has encountered recently is Side Job Track. Again, just Side Job or Job Track would be a very normal-sounding name (well, Side Job sounds vaguely lewd to those of us whose minds wander in that direction). But Side Job Track? With this name the natural phrasal pronunciation is not even available. You have to break it down as a compound that contains a compound–most likely side job + track. If you go with this analysis, you emphasize Side, kind of mumble out Job, and may or may not place any emphasis on Track. It just doesn’t flow.

Matters are complicated further by the fact that track can be a noun or a verb. It’s most natural to interpret the last word of a multi-word name as a noun, but if you do that you make a confusing connection to the phrase job track (like career track), which isn’t as clearly relevant as the idea of tracking side jobs. So this name is kind of a jumble.

That’s not to say Side Job Track isn’t a great service. The Name Inspector has been using it to keep track of billable hours and do invoices for consulting jobs, and while there are a few kinks to work out, it has a really nice set of features. Check it out.

While he’s on this topic, The Name Inspector must give a nod of grudging respect to Bare Escentuals, the San Francisco-based cosmetics company. Here’s a pun name with four meaningful parts (not including the morphological breakdown of essentials) that actually kind of flows. Built on the phrase bare essentials, it pulls off a double pun, tweaking essentials so that it evokes both the words scent and sensual. In the Olympic sport of naming, this one gets a good but not great score for artistry and extremely high marks for difficulty.

Tags: MyBlogLog, the name MyBlogLog, blog community, Side Job Track, the name Side Job Track, invoicing, Bare Escentuals, the name Bare Escentuals, double puns, cosmetics

Tags: watering kissmint, wateringkissmint, gum, chewing gum, chewinggum, uwajimaya, seattle

Have you noticed that your local Kinko’s has become FedEx Kinko’s?

Kinko’s is known for having a laid-back corporate culture. Maybe a little too laid back. The Name Inspector once went to a 24-hour Kinko’s in Manhattan, and there was no one there. Not only were there no other customers, but there were no employees, either. The doors were open, the lights were on, the copy machines were humming, but nobody was home.

So The Name Inspector saw FedEx Kinko’s as a promising development. Those people at FedEx have to be on top of things. You know, when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight and all that. The Name Inspector pictured someone with the quasi-military efficiency coming in and whipping things into shape, like Tom Hanks in that terrible stranded-on-a-desert-island movie (early in the movie, when he was a FedEx exec–not later, when he was a crazy hairy guy talking to a volleyball).

Despite the differences in corporate culture, FedEx and Kinko’s are a natural match. For The Name Inspector at least, both places inspire a combination of love and queasy dread. Love because both places provide important services when you really, really need them. Dread because both places are associated with impending deadlines and procrastination.

Suppose you’ve traveled to a strange city–oh, say, Houston–to make a presentation, and you’ve misplaced your handout. OK, suppose you didn’t finish the handout before you left home. You need to find a place to print it out and make copies. Suppose it’s very late at night. When you find a twenty-four hour Kinko’s, your heart soars, because you know that everything will be alright. Love.

But then you actually go to the Kinko’s and start doing what needs to be done. It takes longer than you expected, because two copy machines are jammed, the other one is low on toner, and there’s nary a Kinko’s employee in sight. It’s getting later and later. Dread.

No doubt the reader can imagine stories about FedEx that, while different in their particulars, have a similar emotional resonance.

Despite their association with dread, FedEx and Kinko’s are a couple of iconic names. Understandably, the big cheeses of the new hybrid company could not part with the brand equity of either name. So they went for the easiest option–the only option, really: they stuck the two names together. The result is a monstrosity of a name that would never make it in the biz if its parents weren’t celebrities.

Might they have gone with a blend? Well, Finko’s, KinkEx, and Fedinko’s are definitely memorable names, but those stodgy corporate types might have felt these options failed to project the appropriate image. On the other hand, they’re really no less dignified than Kinko’s–just less familiar. Kinko was, apparently, the nickname of the curly-haired founder, just in case you’re wondering where that gem came from.

Is the name FedEx Kinko’s a compound? No. A compound is made of two words but pronounced as one word. More specifically, it has the intonational properties of one word–most notably, only one of its syllables carries primary stress. In the name FedEx Kinko’s, both parts–FedEx and Kinko’s–have syllables that get full word-worthy stress. The first syllable of Kinko’s is emphasized a little more than the first syllable of FedEx, but that has to do with the phrasal status of this name.

The first part of this name, FedEx, is already a compound. Or rather, it’s what we at the old naming company used to call a clipped compound, or a clipcom, to use a term that demonstrates what it describes. A clipcom takes the first part of each of two words and sticks them together.

Did you know that the word taxicab comes from the words taximeter and cabriolet? That’s another clipcom.

Putting the clipcom FedEx in front of the name Kinko’s makes for a real mouthful. The pronunciation is awkward, especially with the x right in front of the k. Besides, the whole thing just feels wrong. It resembles a company name modifying a brand name, like Apple Macintosh or Oxo Good Grips, or a brand name modifying a generic term, like Northwest Airlines, but its meaning doesn’t seem to fit either of these familiar patterns.

But what are you gonna do? They had no choice, really. When you walk past your local copy store, you can still look up and see the familiar Kinko’s name. Now you just see FedEx right there with it, riding its ass and keeping it in line. And, of course, offering shipping services.

Tags: fedex kinko’s, the name fedex kinko’s, fedex, kinko’s, finko’s, kinkex, fedinko’s, company name, business name, frankenbrand, volleyball

If you found the title of this post a little confusing, then you have some idea what’s wrong with the name Tenacious Offense. This name belongs to young Seattle-based company that seems to be a kind of rent-a-bizdev team for small startups trying to land big clients. Thanks to Brant Williams for writing and sharing his concern about his company’s name.

The Name Inspector was quite surprised to learn that the phrase tenacious offense is actually attested in the world of sports. Much more common is the phrase tenacious defense, which gets 57,700 hits on Google vs. 238 hits for tenacious offense. The expression tenacious defense was the inspiration for the name of the satirical rock duo Tenacious D. You know, Jack Black and that other chunky guy who sometimes prances around in his tighty-whities while rocking.

The first problem with Tenacious Offense is that it has an ambiguous pronunciation. It’s unclear whether the first or second syllable of the second word should get the main emphasis. Both pronunciations are fine English phrases. The second pronunciation has a pretty bad meaning, though: it can be a criminal infraction, or in the social world, a faux pas or insult. It takes some imagination to work out what a tenacious one would be like, but it sure couldn’t be anything good, or anything you’d want to happen during a business meeting.

Of course, the company would like to call to mind the sporting meaning of tenacious offense, with the emphasis on the first syllable of offense. They’re trying to say that they’ll work hard and persistently to score for you and help you win. They use the common metaphor that casts business as athletic competition, and extend this metaphor into their job titles. Brant Williams, for example, has the title Offensive Coordinator–a position normally associated with a football team. But does he really want to have the word offensive in his job title?

The sound of this name doesn’t really help to make it more appealing. It’s pretty long, at five syllables, and gets an unusually mushy, noisy quality from all those hissing fricative consonants. The spelling isn’t very crisp, either–with the syllable cious, the double f and the silent e, it uses lots of extra letters to represent its sounds.

The basic message that this name is trying to deliver is a good one. The idea of hiring a special team to go score points for you is powerful. The Name Inspector read the marketing materials sent by Brant and wanted to hire the company immediately. So they do know how to sell–they just aren’t doing it with their name. Maybe it works for their market, though. Brant says the name was given to them by their clients and partners.

Tags: Tenacious Offense, the name Tenacious Offense, tenacious defense, tenacious d, business development, bizdev, sports metaphor

When The Name Inspector decided to go into business, the first book he bought was Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start. Why? Well, it did get great reviews on Amazon. But another factor was the poetic title. Not only does it rhyme, but the word art is orthographically and phonetically contained in the word start. Like the slogan I like Ike, famously analyzed by Roman Jakobson, this title uses linguistic form to highlight its meaning: There’s an art in starting something. And that’s a powerful and appealing idea. The use of the expression the start, rather than startups or starting your business or something equally specific and pedestrian, promised that the book would present a kind of philosophy, which it did. The Name Inspector was not disappointed.

In addition to nuggets of wisdom that can only come from experience, the book offered the kinds of useful checklists of ideas about which it’s easy to say “I could have thought of those myself”. But the thing about such ideas is, unless you actually do think of them at just the right times, they don’t do you any good. Ideas are tools, and they need to be right at your fingertips when you need them. If you have to tighten a bolt when you’re on the road, having a wrench in the toolbox at home doesn’t help. The Art of the Start makes you feel equipped.

Guy Kawasaki’s current blog is called How to Change the World. According to Guy, that’s also the planned title of his next book. This is a deceptively simple name. It combines the kind of grandiose message that’s typical of business books with the ubiquitous instructional formula “How to …”. But that combination is kind of clever and funny. Changing the world is something for which there should be no step-by-step instructions, but here’s a blog and a book promising just that.

Because the name How to Change the World has this almost imperceptibly odd juxtaposition, the mere act of interpreting it can cause a cognitive shift. Why? Well, we know that it’s intended to say “This is going to tell you, the reader, how to change the world”. Of course, many people don’t believe that they can change the world. Such people are bound to be a little suspicious and to look for some way to reconcile their own modest activities with the idea of changing the world. The shift occurs with the realization that all action changes the world, at least in some small way. That may take some of the awesome luster away from the idea of world-changing, but it also adds a special importance and dignity to the things we actually do. It makes a person want to take work seriously and do things right.

Another interesting thing about the name How to Change the World is that its audacity and optimism, while standard fare for business books, is actually pretty surprising in the context of blogs. Blog titles tend to be ironic, self-referential, self-deprecating, obtuse, or just silly. Blog titles often say “This blog is about nothing”, because a lot of blogs are about nothing. Blog titles often say “Don’t expect too much”, because a lot of people are ambitious enough to have blogs but not ambitious enough to try to get people to read them. How to Change the World really puts it out there.

The name How to Change the World projects the same kind of personality that Guy does in his writing. It’s optimistic without being simplistic, and, with its common monosyllabic words, it’s solid and friendly.

Tags: how to change the world, kawasaki, guy kawasaki, guykawasaki, the art of the start