If Obama wins the presidential election, he won’t just make history for being the first black president of the United States. He’ll also break new linguistic ground in the list of presidents’ names. And The Name Inspector is not talking about the fact that his middle name is Hussein. Coming to terms with the blend of bias, ignorance, and superstition that makes some people consider this fact relevant to Obama’s ability to lead our nation would take us too far afield.

The Name Inspector wants to talk about the name Obama. Just as Obama said about himself, “he doesn’t look like those other presidents on the dollar bills”, the name Obama doesn’t look–or, more importantly, sound–like the other presidents’ names.

An Obama victory would be a victory for vowels everywhere. It would be only the fourth name on the list of presidents to start with a vowel. The others are Adams, Arthur, and Eisenhower. And it would be only the fourth to end with a vowel. The others are Monroe, McKinley, and Kennedy. Well, actually there are six other names ending, orthographically, with r whose final syllables are r-colored schwas, which are technically vowels, but let’s just ignore those for the time being. So, ignoring those, Obama would be the only name on the list to start and end with a vowel. No matter how you slice things, Obama would be the only name on the list to have more vowels than consonants.

So, does this little tidbit of linguistic trivia have any meaning?

Well, The Name Inspector believes that it might have a hand in making Obama’s name such an object of fascination. Obama must be one of the most rhymed- and punned-upon names in the history of U.S. presidential candidates: Obama Mama, Obama-nation, Obamomentum, Obamanable Snowman, etc. (Of course, Barack has also gotten attention: Barack the Vote, Barack and Roll, etc.). Punning and other types of wordplay are ways of calling attention to the physical form of language, so people must think the look and sound of Obama is something special. The vowel-rich sound of Obama also makes it easier to combine with other words without creating ugly consonant clusters. The idea of people punning as much on John McCain’s name is sufficiently ridiculous to have warranted an article in the Onion.

The light, open sound of Obama seems to support the message of change that the campaign has highlighted. This is a case of serendipitous sound symbolism. Even the depiction of the “O” as a rising sun in Obama’s official campaign logo seems to delight in the very vowelicity of it all.

Of course, nobody planned this. Surnames are different from company and product names, which people invent. No candidate sits down and decides what name to use in a bid for the presidency. But a screening process has taken place historically. Though we’re a nation of immigrants from everywhere, the list of presidents’ names is overwhelmingly Anglo-derived, reflecting a prejudice that has stubbornly held on in political elections despite general improvements in Americans’ attitudes about ethnicity. It’s obvious that there are no non-European-sounding names on the list of U.S. presidents. But even if you limit yourself to Europe, there are no names whose origins are distinctly Polish, Greek, Italian, Spanish, or Norwegian, either. And lots of other European ethnicities could be added to that list.

The only “ethnic” (i.e. non-Anglo) names on the list of U.S. presidents are Roosevelt, Van Buren, and Hoover (Dutch); Monroe, Polk, Buchanan, and McKinley (Scottish); Kennedy and Reagan (Irish); and Eisenhower (an Americanized form of German Eisenhauer). Plotting the geographical origins of those names on a map doesn’t get you very far from England. Leaving aside the Celtic-derived names, which got all mixed up with English before there was a United States, you’re left with a list of names derived entirely from the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.

Now along comes this guy named Obama. His name comes from Luo, a Nilo-Saharan language spoken, among other places, in Western Kenya, where his father was born. This is a big jump in the linguistic family tree. What we see in the name Obama is a typological difference between Germanic and the languages related to Luo. While Germanic has a tendency toward closed syllables, which begin and end with consonants, Luo tends more toward open syllables, which end with vowels.

Shankar Vedantam recently wrote a column in the Washington Post about how people subconsciously associate non-European-sounding names with things that are “foreign” and Anglo-sounding names (even when they belong to Brits) with all that is American. Let’s hope Americans can sensibly overcome this bias and vote for Obama/Biden in three weeks!

Tags: election, presidential election, obama, vowels, sound symbolism

A while ago Allegra Searle-LeBel sent in a story about naming her online media-editing startup:

We had been struggling for about 2 months, trying to find the right name. There was this funny, almost mystical sense that it existed *somewhere*. We just needed to keep slogging through the troughs of lame options and almost good enough ideas. I tried combining different parts of my name with words describing our services or industry (BlissArt, MadriGal, DisinterMedia, FemMediate). Terrible and incessant variations on terrible. Not all of them were so bad; some of them would have been good enough. But I didn’t want to have just an okay name. I wanted one that felt right. That rolled off the tongue. That was easy to spell. That had meaning. Eventually, naming showed up on the list of milestones that had to be accomplished in order to further the work. I wrangled all day, learned more about the domain drop process, bought some domains that were “good enough”. I went to bed glad to have chosen something, but still unsettled. I dreamed of standing in a crowd with names being called out to me. I felt happy! I liked them! In the morning, I checked the domains, I checked Google, I laughed at the simplicity. Limber Media, Inc. Now the fun is coming up with slick soundbites, right…? “LimberMedia.com, For anyone who is overextended.”

Limber Media is a nice, mellifluous name. There’s a poetically symmetrical pattern in the consonants, from alveolar (produced with the tongue behind the top front teeth) to bilabial nasal to bilabial stop and then back to bilabial nasal and then alveolar again. And see how the phonetic representation is so pale? That shows what high sonority this name has. There’s uninterrupted voicing–vibration of the vocal folds–when you say the name, and three of the five consonants are sonorants–they allow an unimpeded flow of air and do not introduce noisy turbulence to the speech signal. These qualities provide sound-symbolic support for the idea of limberness (or suppleness or flexibility or something like that).

How does limberness relate to online media editing? Limberness is of course a property of people, not web applications. But, if you think of the users of the application as limber, the implication is that they’re able to move and bend freely with no constraints imposed by their own bodies. This idea of unimpeded motion can apply metaphorically to any kind of human task, suggesting that it can be accomplished easily. The metaphor works similarly if it applies to a personification of the company or its web app. The idea of limberness also makes a nice connection between the company and its founder, who is a choreographer and dancer as well as a web entrepreneur. Limberness also evokes the more general concept of flexibility, which can apply to objects and materials as well as people. A flexible medium is one that is easily manipulated, so this is a very appropriate association for a media editing service and application.

Allegra’s naming experience illustrates an important point that The Name Inspector has been trying to get across to people lately. The names that are the most descriptive of a company–the ones that are the easiest to come up with–are often not the best ones. Going directly from the idea of the company to the name just doesn’t seem to be that effective. In successful naming efforts, what often happens is that a name idea comes from a dream or a random connection of some kind, and after the name presents itself, so to speak, it just seems to fit. Then, on reflection, one can see what accounts for that fit. This is why naming seems so simple but is actually so hard. Going from the company to the right name is an uphill climb, but getting from the name to the company is–or should be–a ride downhill.

Thanks for your story, Allegra, and good naming work!

Tags: LimberMedia, Limber Media, limber, flexible, editing, online editing, media

It’s probably safe to say that Amazon (or Amazon.com) has achieved the status of an iconic name.

So, does the word Amazon bear any meaningful relation to the company Amazon.com? Amazon is of course the name of the South American river which is the largest in the world. There were also ancient women warriors, made famous through Greek mythology, that we call Amazons.

It’s unlikely that Amazon.com is intended to be associated with the second meaning. In fact, the company embarrassed itself back in 1999 during a trademark dispute with a feminist bookstore called Amazon Bookstore, which had been using that name since long before the web existed, and sued Amazon.com. According to Salon.com, Amazon.com lawyers questioned one of the bookstore owners in pre-trial depositions about her sexual orientation and the orientations of bookstore employees. Company representatives claimed they were just trying to establish that Amazon Bookstore catered specifically to a lesbian clientele, and that the two companies were therefore in “different businesses” and could both use the name Amazon. Yeah, right.

So it’s the river association they were going after. According to this WIPO arbitration document, about a separate trademark dispute in which Amazon was the complainant,

Mr Bezof [sic] chose the name for the site because the River Amazon in South America is the biggest river in the world and one of the company’s goals was eventually to offer the largest selection of book titles in the world.

A large river serves as a good metaphor for a a huge retail operation like Amazon.com. The comparison implies that Amazon has an endless supply of books (and now other products), just like a river has an endless supply of water. This idea also seems to be played upon by the name Endless.com, which Amazon chose for its new site selling shoes and handbags.

Note that an endless supply can mean either lots of actual physical books (or other items), or lots of titles, as in the indirect Bezos quote above. In the latter case it means endless variety, and is an example of what Chris Anderson calls The Long Tail. Amazon is a prominent case study in his book of that name. In case you’ve somehow managed to avoid discussions of the Long Tail, the idea is that Amazon’s web-based retail model allows them to profitably sell lots and lots of less popular items, items that, on a graph of items listed in descending order of popularity, would be way out on the long tail.

Aside from the image of a long tail/river, the river metaphor also suggests the inevitability of Amazon actually selling things. A river may have an endless supply of water, but so does the ocean (for all intents and purposes). What makes a river special is that the water is always moving in one direction (barring enormous civil engineering projects). When we think of rivers, deep ideas about force dynamics are active in our minds–we imagine the irresistible pull of the water. Such ideas are at work when we talk about the flow of goods (or of ideas). These associations might have been comforting to Amazon’s investors, who were concerned about Amazon moving enough merchandise to become profitable.

The pronunciation and sound of Amazon support the meaning. Because there are no stops and no voiceless sounds, there is continuous vibration of the vocal folds and flow of air when you say the name. The open vowels contribute to this feeling of free movement.

Amazon had to fight to use their name, and sometimes they fought dirty, but the name may have been worth fighting for.

Tags: Amazon, the name Amazon, Amazon Bookstore, books, bookstore, trademark dispute, Endless.com

As a denizen of the Emerald City, the Name Inspector has been intrigued by the meteoric rise of the online real estate service Zillow, and has speculated on the origins of their name. Those speculations, though enjoyable, have turned out to be pointless, because it says right there on their website how they came up with the name. Zillow is a blend (or, to be old-fashioned and French about it, a portmanteau) of zillions (as in “zillions of data points”) and pillow (a metonymic reference to home–where you rest your head).

Because blend names are based on real words, they often have a familiar ring to them. They can be especially seamless and elegant when, as in this name, they overlap through rhyming syllables.

Zillow adds an unusual first letter and sound z to an unusual and especially mellow-sounding word ending -illow. The only common two-syllable words that the Name Inspector can think of right now that share that ending are pillow, willow, and billow. Willow regularly shows up on lists of the most beautiful-sounding English words. Two qualities that make it beautiful are its symmetry (beginning and ending with w) and its high sonority (that is, its lack of sounds that obstruct the flow of air through the vocal tract). Both qualities are diminished when the z replaces the w, but the name still sounds pretty good. The Z is distinctive, but the company goes overboard applying it to other names for specific services: Zillow alone says “cool”, but Zindex and Zestimate tagging along say “zzz”.

Because both zill- and -illow are unusual word-halves and don’t evoke many competing meanings, Zillow brings to mind zillion and pillow surprisingly well. Even if you don’t get the “right” association for -illow, you’re bound to get an appropriate one: willow suggests yards or gardens, and billow suggests sailboats and, by association, wealth. Not bad.

Tags: Zillow, the name Zillow, Zindex, Zestimate, real estate