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.

Watch out! There’s a new electric motorcycle in town. It’s the Enertia, from Brammo. Yes, like the word inertia, but with an E, which The Name Inspector supposes stands for electric. So, electric + inertia.

Inertia. Kind of an unusual word choice for a motorcycle, don’t you think? Inertia, as we all remember from physics class, is the tendency of a physical object to stay at rest or, if it’s in motion, to maintain direction and velocity until it’s acted upon by an external force. If you imagine a motorcycle in motion, you can think of inertia as a synonym for momentum: this thing will keep on going–just try to stop it! That seems to be what Brammo is going for. On the Enertia website they use the slogan “Enertia is Momentum for Change”.

The Name Inspector is willing to wager, however, that this is not the first idea that will pop into most people’s minds. They’ll think of the word inertia as it’s used in the everyday world, where it means, as the Merriam-Webster online dictionary puts it, “indisposition to motion, exertion, or change: INERTNESS”.

Inertia. Inertness. Stillness. Just sitting there. Not going anywhere. No energy or motivation. Lying on the couch, not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

It’s actually hard to think of another name that so clearly communicates exactly the wrong message. Let’s face it, people are going to be skeptical about an electric motorcycle. They’re going to be concerned that it just won’t have enough oomph. Putting the word inertia in their minds isn’t going to help with that. The Name Inspector loves this quote from an otherwise rather positive review of the Enertia: “I cannot think of a more stupid name for a motorbike. I mean my bike cannot get over 35mph but because it is called the Ruckus I always feel something exciting might happen.”

Maybe the name Enertia is part of a daring, counterintuitive marketing concept. This is the motorcycle for people who don’t really like motorcycles! Or any form of transportation, or movement, really. Don’t worry, it’s electric. It only goes 51 mph, for Pete’s sake–just hop on! No, actually, get on carefully, holding on tight to the handlebars–but first make sure your helmet straps are properly adjusted. Now are you ready for the ride of your life? No? Good–don’t get too excited. This is really just a moped without the pedals–a noped. OK, ride carefully, and you’ll get there eventually if your battery doesn’t run out.

There. The Name Inspector just had to get that sarcastic little tirade out of his system. But it may not be far from the truth. In a 2007 interview for the Portland Tribune, Brammo design director Brian Wismann said the Enertia “was designed to appeal to somebody like me who has always loved motorcycles but perhaps was too intimidated to go out and buy one”. He also said it was made to be “really inviting to sit on”. Like a cool, zippy armchair!

While perusing the New York Times magazine last weekend, The Name Inspector saw a big ad for a new organic vodka called Crop. It’s clear what they were going for with this name. It connects the product to its agricultural origins. It makes the vodka seem like something natural and fresh and wholesome–like food!

Let’s try the name out in some natural-sounding contexts. You might walk into a bar and say I’ll take a Crop! Or, you might order martinis* with a friend, and your friend might turn to you and say What kind of vodka do you think they used? And you might say I don’t know, but it tastes like Crop to me! Then you ask the bartender, who says I mix a strong drink–that’s almost pure Crop! Then she gives you a plate of those little cheese puffs and says These taste great washed down with a mouthful of Crop.

Hmm. The name Crop just doesn’t sound that appealing, does it? The Name Inspector realizes it’s kind of childish to say this–he’s embarrassed to bring it up, really–but this name looks and sounds like crap.

The problem stems from a phonetic resemblance, but goes beyond that. Since the name Crop is used to refer to the vodka, it winds up in the same kinds of contexts in which the word vodka gets used. The word vodka is a mass noun–one that refers to a substance that gets measured rather than objects that get counted–so it occurs in contexts like this tastes like ____ and a mouthful of ____. Like vodka, the word crap is a mass noun, at least when it refers to a substance. The word crop, on the other hand, is a count noun. We say things like They export three crops and We got a good crop this year. So the phrasal contexts in which the name Crop is used are much more similar to those of crap than those of the word crop. That pushes us toward the less appealing interpretation. The name Crop can be used in certain count-like contexts, like We’ll take three Crops, but in a bar- or restaurant-ordering situation, any mass noun can be used that way: three waters, three soups, etc.

Setting aside the main problem, the word crop is only marginally appealing. You can have a good crop, or course, and that’s great. But this clipped, no-nonsense word has none of the romance of, say, harvest. Crop evokes the industrial more than the bucolic.

Crop also has other meanings. You can crop a photo, and that’s okay but pretty irrelevant. Then there’s the riding crop, which vaguely calls to mind WASPy horse culture (which is related to cocktails, of course) and sexualized discipline, but is also mostly irrelevant.

So The Name Inspector has to give this name a thumbs-down. Please don’t give him a lot of Crop.

* UPDATE 1/8/2009 The Name Inspector knows that a real martini is made with gin.

Tags: crop, the name crop, crop vodka, vodka, martini

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

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