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!

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!

The Name Inspector has recently learned about Lard Butt, a new athletic apparel company based here in Seattle. This is a great example of naming done right.

First, there are the positive associations of lard, a filling and economical ingredient that makes fried foods taste great. The word lard also calls to mind larder, which means a supply of food or a place where food is stored. Having beans in the larder is almost better than having money in the bank, so everyone should respond positively to this association.

Then there are the many pleasant ideas and feelings evoked by the word butt. You can be the butt of a joke, which lends a mirthful quality to this name. There’s also the cigarette butt, a tangible symbol of a smoker’s satisfied craving. And of course butt means ass, bottom, rump, derriere–a crucial body part we all use and admire every day. To paraphrase Sir Mix-a-Lot, we all like butts–we cannot lie.

The words lard and butt together evoke a sense of homeyness, stability, security–even meditative stillness.

So kudos to Mark, Brent, Eric, David, and Dave. Let’s hope Lard Butt goes far. Or at least, as far as it feels like going.

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

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

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

We’re really getting a chance to enjoy the graphic possibilities of the letters i and j lately. If you’re a blogger you can put a Lijit Wijit on your blog. And now there’s Kijiji. Actually, there has been Kijiji for a while now in other countries, but eBay has just launched a U.S. version of this local classified ad network, putting them in direct competition with Craigslist.

Just look at all those dots and vertical lines. When the name is written in a serif font, as it is in the company logo, the dots look like heads, the vertical lines look like torsos, and the serifs look like arms reaching out in a welcoming embrace or unbridled enthusiasm or something else great like that. You would be forgiven for thinking that this unusual name was invented just to achieve this graphical effect. But actually kijiji is a Swahili word meaning ‘village’. It’s a diminutive form of the word mji, which means ‘town’. So it’s almost as if in Swahili they call a village a townlet.

Why choose Swahili for the name of an international network of classified ad sites? There are two good reasons. First, Swahili is a lingua franca–a common language used for business by speakers of other languages–in East Africa. Native speakers live in and around Tanzania.

Second, Swahili syllables tend to conform to what phonologists consider the universally preferred syllable structure, which is a single consonant followed by a single vowel, represented CV. (An exception is the first syllable of the word mji, which consists entirely of the nasal [m] sound. That may seem exotic, but in English we actually have syllables consisting only of nasal sounds, like the final syllable of the word button. We just don’t put those syllables at the beginnings of words.)

What does it mean for the CV syllable to be universally preferred? For one thing, it means kids produce this kind of syllable first when acquiring language. It also means that this kind of syllable is found throughout the languages of the world, while other kinds of syllable are more likely not to be allowed in this or that language. Most importantly, it means that in theory just about everybody in the world should find it pretty easy to pronounce this name.

About the first part of Kijiji: Have you studied French or Spanish or German or some other language and struggled with the system of grammatical gender? Well, if you didn’t enjoy that, steer clear of Swahili. It has more than ten genders, or noun classes, as they’re commonly called. Each noun starts with a prefix like ki- or m- showing its class. When a noun is used as a subject, verbs and some other words must be marked for agreement with its class prefix. At least the noun classes are based more on meaning than the random gender systems of other languages are, so it’s often easy to guess which class a word belongs to.

Anyway, The Name Inspector is getting off topic. How does this name do in English? Well, it’s actually a little hard to pronounce, preferred syllable structure notwithstanding. The two affricate sounds followed by high front vowels are kind of awkward to squeeze out. And despite the graphical gimmick of the name (or perhaps because of it), the orthography is a little hard to parse. When you see this name on the page or the screen, it looks like a bunch of scratches–it’s hard to distinguish the letters.

So this name makes perfect sense from a semantic and sociolinguistic point of view, but it suffers from the very orthographic and phonetic properties that make it special.

Tags: kijiji, the name kijiji, swahili, lijit, wijit, lingua franca, syllables

Tags: victrola, coffee, cafe, coffeehouse, sign, signs, capitol-hill, capitolhill, seattle

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