(The Name Inspector used to do this as a semi-regular feature, and then stopped. He’s going to try reviving it for a while, but this time, with words!)

While strolling down 1st Ave in Seattle, The Name Inspector was struck by the name of this cafe. Inside there were displays of what looked like traditional art of native Pacific Northwesterners. So the name is meant to evoke long-time inhabitants and the special relationship they develop to their land. But whoever named this place was unable to resist one of the most overused tropes of cafe-naming: punning on the word grounds. There are cafes called Common Grounds, Uncommon Grounds, Sufficient Grounds, and…well, you’ve seen these places, so think of some more yourself and don’t make The Name Inspector do all the work. He’s tired.

Anyway, there’s a problem with this name. Like all such names, it has two meanings: one that’s not related to coffee, and one that is. Usually the coffee-related interpretation is a positive one, as in Uncommon Grounds (uncommonly good, we mean!), or at least a neutral one, as in Sufficient Grounds (yes, we use enough coffee to brew your cup!). But Ancient Grounds makes it sound like they keep pouring water over the same coffee grounds again and again, and have been doing so for centuries. That just doesn’t promise a tasty cup of joe.

The word awkwordplay is an especially silly example, and it’s made up. But the problem it demonstrates is found in a subtler form in many actual names. Consider the name Teensurance, for an insurance program for parents with teen drivers. Whenever you have a single-syllable word like teen in a blend, you’re going to want to give it some emphasis, especially when it expresses a distinguishing characteristic of something, as teen does in Teensurance. Yet in this name, teen replaces the first syllable of insurance, which isn’t emphasized. As a result, the name sounds strained. It’s an example of awkwordplay.

A similar example is the name Carticipate, for a mobile application to support ridesharing. Car is an important word in this name and deserves emphasis, but it replaces the unemphasized first syllable of participate.  Again, awkwordplay.

Contrast Teensurance and Carticipate with a well-constructed blend like Farecast, for an airfare forecasting service. The one-syllable word fare takes its rightful place as the emphasized syllable of the name, which preserves the rhythm of forecast as well.

Combine syllable emphasis mismatch with difficult or unpleasant transitions between sounds, and you’ve got a real mess. The name Mapufacture commits only a minor infraction with respect to syllable emphasis, because map replaces a syllable that receives secondary emphasis. But replacing a syllable with main emphasis would be much better. And, while the transition between the first and second syllable of manufacture sounds nice and smooth, when you replace the n with a p, the result sounds pretty bad.

An especially egregious example of awkwordplay is the name Syncplicity, for file synchronization and backup software. Pronouncing this name is not a matter of the utmost syncplicity. Not only is the word sync stripped of its natural emphasis, but there’s also that ugly consonant cluster between the first two syllables. As a result, the structure and sound symbolism of this name work directly against the intended message. The product is supposed to be about combining things simply, but the name combines things incompetently, and with great difficulty.

The lesson here, dear naming public, is that you shouldn’t jump on every coincidental syllable similarity you find to make a play on words. Sure, map sounds a little like the first syllable of manufacture, car rhymes with the first syllable of participate, teen shares a final sound with the first syllable of insurance, and sync sounds a bit like the first syllable of simplicity. But you’ve got to consider the overall rhythm and flow of your play on words. That means preserving the patterns of emphasized and unemphasized syllables that you find in the words you start with, and not creating ungainly new sound combinations.

Now go and play nice.

Tags: awkwordplay, wordplay, puns, teensurance, carticipate, mapufacture, syncplicity

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

Phil Butler over at ReadWriteWeb has written a post about a new online music service called Fairtilizer. Oh dear. The Name Inspector doesn’t even know where to begin.

This name is presumably a pun: the first syllable of the word fertilizer has been changed to the similar-sounding word fair. Or maybe the word air has been used as the end of that syllable. Either way there are problems.

As The Name Inspector wrote in his post about different types of name, “Nothing sounds dumber than a bad pun” (or, if you translate that statement into Russian and then back into English with Google translate, “Nothing sounds glupee than bad pun“). Fairtilizer, unfortunately, is a bad pun.

So what makes a pun bad? That’s a really tough question to answer. But The Name Inspector is going to try to reverse-engineer this name to come up with some guidelines.

1. Base your pun on words that are semantically iffy on their own.

Fertilizer is not the greatest word to use in any name. Sure, it’s nice that fertilizer makes plants grow, and the metaphorical use of that idea in the context of listening to music makes a lot of sense. Your music collection and your musical awareness will be nurtured here. So far so good.

But fertilizer is also manure. People sometimes say fertilizer when they’re too delicate to say bullshit. And fair isn’t so great either. Sure, in a name like Fair Trade Coffee it sounds pretty good, because the familiar phrase fair trade makes it clear that the relevant meaning is related to fairness and justice. But fair also means ‘so-so’. Not great. Not good. Just OK. Fair.

2. Combine meanings without creating relevance.

It’s hard to see how the meanings of fertilizer and fair might relate to one another. That’s partly a result of using fertilizer metaphorically while also building a pun on it. What would make fertilizer more just and fair? Is there something unfair about most fertilizer that makes this fertilizer special, metaphorically speaking? Compare this pun name with a name like Farecast, made out of the words fare and forecast. It’s immediately apparent how those words relate to one another: the service forecasts what fares will be in the future.

Maybe they were going for air, not fair. Metaphorically fertilizing the “airwaves” (even though we’re talking about the web here) makes a little more sense. But the word fair stands out so much that air is not likely to be recognized in there.

3. Invite scatological humor.

More than one commenter on the web has claimed to mistake the name for Fartilizer. Childish, yes, but it’s important to avoid provoking the eleven-year-old inside all of us.

4. Use morphologically complex words.

The word fertilizer has three meaningful parts: fertile + ize + er. That kind of complexity competes with the intrinsic complexity of a pun.

5. Create a name with an unnatural pronunciation

At least in American English, the vowel sound of the word fair sounds strange followed by the second syllable of the name Fairtilizer. It’s hard to think of words that contain that sequence of sounds.

Now the folks who created Fairtilizer are from Geneva, Switzerland. That means they’re probably French speakers. It’s possible that the name works better in French. The French verb meaning ‘to fertilize’ is fertiliser, and the first syllable of that word is more similar to the first syllable of Fairtilizer than to the first syllable of English fertilizer. So the pronunciation might have seemed more natural to them because of their linguistic background. The word fair and the -izer ending are tip-offs, however, that this is supposed to be an English name. In English it just doesn’t work.

An online music service should have a musical name that strikes the right tone. Fairtilizer falls flat. Maybe you should sign up for alpha testing and give them feedback about the name.

Tags: fairtilizer, the name fairtilizer, puns, online music, online music service, farecast, fair trade coffee