Seattle Interactive is about the sweet spot where “technology, creativity, and emergent trends” intersect. That means entrepreneurs will be chatting with UX designers, and advertising creatives will be rubbing shoulders with crack Ruby coders. Interactive indeed! You’ve heard of SXSW? Well, this is like a nascent NXNW, but with no homicidal crop duster.

There are some really great speakers lined up. You’re probably thinking, “Who? Who?” Why, The Name Inspector himself is one of them, and there will be many others on stage that you’ll no doubt find even more interesting, such as Jeff Barr, Vanessa Fox, and  Sir Mix-A-Lot!

If you want to attend this conference (and you probably do) The Name Inspector can get you a deal. A really great deal, actually: $150 off the price of registration. Since the reg fee is only $350 to begin with, that makes this exciting inaugural event practically free. 200 smackers, to be specific. Just register using the code SICSPEAKER2011.

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.

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!

(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.

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.

For The Name Inspector, this news conjures an image of two pigeons fighting over a moldy piece of hot dog bun.

For starters, Jobdango is just a silly name. Besides being phonologically inelegant after Job-, that dang -dango is either one of the most bizarrely gratuitous endings The Name Inspector has ever seen on a name, or it’s a cranberry morpheme that’s probably derived from the name Fandango, in which case it’s embarrassingly unoriginal. The -dango ending makes sense in the name Fandango, because fandango is a word for a Spanish dance that also happens to contain the word fan, which is kind of fitting for a site that sells movie tickets. The name Handango is clearly a play on the word fandango.

But what’s -dango doing in the name Jobdango, which bears no other resemblance to the word fandango? Well, what it’s probably doing is reminding us vaguely of successful commercial websites like Fandango, known to many through its TV commercials featuring hand puppets made out of brown paper lunch bags.

So Jobdango, you should be a tad embarrassed trying to protect -dango as if it’s some kind of special mark that’s uniquely associated with you. It’s not. You didn’t make it up, you weren’t the first to use it, and you might even benefit from people’s familiarity with -dango companies that have gone before you. So just drop it. Drop that moldy hot dog bun.