The Name Inspector knew it. He just knew that Microsoft went with the name Bing because it makes a better verb than, say, Kumo, which sounds like a radio or TV station (like Seattle’s KOMO). Or that crazy killer dog dreamt up by Stephen King.

When people write about the name Google, they almost invariably mention that it has become a verb. Some entrepreneurs, including some of The Name Inspector’s own clients, think that a “verbable” name is highly desirable. Now here’s Miguel Helft reporting in yesterday’s New York Times that none other than Steve Ballmer thinks the name Bing has great potential to “verb up”. And the Bing home page actually conjoins Bing with another verb (”Bing & Decide”), just to nudge things in that direction, real subtle-like.

It’s kind of sad, really. The thing is, if Bing the name is going to become a verb, Bing the web app is going to have to offer a great experience that’s markedly different from the one Google gives us. People already have a verb for searching on the web. It’s google. They don’t need a new one.

Trademark sticklers will say that a company shouldn’t even want its name to become a verb, because that puts a company in danger of losing its trademark. Verbhood is a sure sign that a name has become a regular old word. When an originally trademarked name becomes widely used as a generic word, the name enters the public domain and can no longer be protected. That means anyone can legally use it. Some people call this “genericide”. Aspirin, cellophane, escalator, kerosene, laundromat, trampoline, and yo-yo are all the ghosts of once living trademarks.

In fact, from the perspective of trademark law, trademarks are always supposed to be used as “adjectives” modifying generic nouns. It’s not “a Band-Aid”, it’s “a Band-Aid brand adhesive bandage”. It’s not “a Kleenex”, it’s “a Kleenex facial tissue”. But The Name Inspector is afraid this rule fights the tide of common usage. People always use trademarks as nouns.  You drive a Toyota. You drink a Coke. You use a Mac.

And let’s be realistic: becoming the paragon of a product category, with a name that’s a household word, is a nice kind of trademark problem to have. Many companies whose names are unofficially used as generic words have mounted campaigns to protect their trademarks and are doing quite nicely, thank you. For a while we were all xeroxing, but now we mostly photocopy, thanks largely to an aggressive Xerox PR campaign.

So, what to make of the name Bing? Some bloggers have had a negative reaction to it that seems mostly like a kick-Microsoft reflex. Some say it sounds “silly”. But Google sounded pretty silly back in the day, too. Bing actually has a lot going for it. It’s short, easy to pronounce, and easy to spell and type. It has a kind of friendly “ring” to it. In fact, according to Helft, the marketing people at Microsoft say the name is meant to represent a bell going off, to evoke that eureka moment we have when we find something. It’s “the sound of found”.

Bing, of course, is also a kind of cherry. Sort of reminds The Name Inspector of the name Macintosh, come to think of it. Helft says the marketing people at Microsoft weren’t going for that association, but it’s not a bad one for a search engine (or a “discovery engine”, as Bing is being called). Think “cherry picking”–cherries represent things that are carefully selected and highly valued. Like great search results.

So, while Bing isn’t a bad name,  it may not be destined to be a verb, for reasons that have nothing to do with its linguistic merits. But just in case, The Name Inspector wants to know: Would the past tense of bing be bang? Would the past participle be bung? That would be unfortunate.

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

Entrepreneur and longtime reader Rich Skrenta has a search start-up called Blekko (click on that link and say hi!). It was covered on TechCrunch, and then Rich wrote a follow-up blog post telling the story of the name Blekko and asking for The Name Inspector’s input.

OK, here goes. Obviously Blekko is a ridiculous name and Rich knows it. He says in his post that it was chosen as the funniest of a number of options. He claims that one vendor told him the name was fantastic and must not be changed, but admits that those comments might have been intended ironically. He also hints that part of the reason he even got written up on TechCrunch was because of the silly name.

Comments on the TechCrunch post, when they address the name at all, are uniformly negative. Someone says the name sounds like retching. Another asks if they went with Blekko because blechbarf.com wasn’t available.

Rich writes that he spoke to some naming firms and they told him that, despite some negative phonetic associations, the name Blekko is essentially an empty vessel.

Oh, how The Name Inspector hates the expression empty vessel. The implication of calling a name an “empty vessel” is that you can fill it up with whatever meaning you want. That’s such a silly branding cliche.

Of course, the way a company name is ultimately perceived will depend on what people know, believe and feel about the company it’s attached to, and that’s going to depend on lots of other things. A good name for a company that fails will come to seem not so good. A silly name for a wildly successful company–Google comes to mind–will start to seem like pure naming genius.

Some people conclude from this that names don’t matter. That’s faulty reasoning. If a company made bad hiring decisions, but prevailed anyway due to its kick-ass technology, you wouldn’t say that hiring doesn’t matter. All companies do some things right and some things wrong, and their ultimate success depends on the complex interaction of all those little successes and failures.

The point of a name is that it’s there from the beginning, and can influence the way people feel about your company before they know anything else about it. Even when names are not obviously meaningful, they remind people of words, and invite them to make relevant connections, perhaps only subconsciously, between the meanings of those words and the company in question.

So, do you want those associations to make things easier or harder?

There are, of course, different ways a name can help you. If you want to blend into the background, it can help you do that. If you want to be provocative to get some attention, a name can help with that, too.

But after the attention dies down, you still have the name. Then it should be able to help you in other ways. If you’re lucky enough to do everything else right, your silly name may not be a hindrance. But if you make some missteps along the way, a silly name will make people less forgiving. What did you expect, they’ll say, from a company named Blekko?

So what, exactly, is wrong with the name Blekko? It’s not a mystery. It sounds like an exclamation of disgust, usually written as blech, that may represent vomiting onomatopoetically. As The Name Inspector likes to pronounce it, blech ends with a voiceless uvular or velar fricative, but the k sound in Blekko is a close approximation.

If you search for blech on Google, you’ll mostly find pages where it’s used as a surname or as a German or Yiddish word. If you search on Technorati, however, you’ll find lots of examples like this:

Blech. Sucks gettin’ old, I tell ya.

I also used fat free cheese, which I wouldn’t recommend using. Blech!

I absolutely abhorred mopping the floor. It was futile. There was so much grease and gunk and nasty on the floor, you just schmeared it everywhere. blech!

Rich, if you’re not comfortable naming your company Yukko, it’s safe to say you shouldn’t call it Blekko, either.

But you’re in stealth mode. The Name Inspector believes you have no intention of launching as Blekko. Though he hopes he’s wrong.

Tags: blekko, the name blekko, blech, blech! exclamations

While perusing the children’s section of a local used bookstore, The Name Inspector came across a lovely book that’s basically about naming. He was as surprised as you are.

The book, first published in 1958, is Ounce Dice Trice. It was written by Alastair Reid and beautifully illustrated by the artist Ben Shahn. Reid is a poet, and the book is based on a notebook of words that he kept for a number of years.

OK, the book is more about words and their poetic properties than it is about naming per se. But it does contain this passage:

It is most important to be a good namer, since it falls to all of us at some time or other to name anything from a canary to a castle, and since names generally have to last a long time. Here are some possible names for possible things, to give you ideas.

It continues with lists of suggested names for elephants, cats, insects, whales, houses and places, and other things.

The connection between naming and poetry is strong. Naming lore, to the extent that such a thing exists, includes the story of a correspondence that took place in the 1950s between the Ford Motor Company and the poet Marianne Moore about naming what was eventually called the Edsel. In case you’re not too up on your modern poets, you might remember Moore for her widely anthologized poem “Poetry”, which begins with the perfectly disarming line “I, too, dislike it”. There’s another turn of phrase, which The Name Inspector has not been able to get out of his mind since high school, about poets inventing “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”.

Anyway, Moore, perhaps not taking her role as namer entirely seriously, suggested names like Mongoose Civique and Utopian Turtletop.

What’s especially interesting about the lists in Ounce Dice Trice is the way they demonstrate different aspects of sound symbolism, a topic that comes up from time to time in this blog. Suggested names for insects include Twilliter, Limlet, Tilltin, Legliddy, and Tristram. Notice the preponderance of sounds produced lightly with the tip of the tongue behind the front teeth: t, l, r, n, d. Notice also how often the short, high vowel found in the word pin makes an appearance. All these sounds suggest smallness and lightness.

Another aspect of sound symbolism that hasn’t been discussed much here is the way a consonant cluster can suggest certain ideas due to its strong association with the beginning of a particular word or cluster of words. One example is the sense of quick motion evoked by the consonant cluster fl-, as in flip, flit, flick, flicker, flutter, etc. Another is the “squishiness” of the squ- words in the illustration above.

Sound symbolism is an important tool for namers, poets, and poets acting as namers, and The Name Inspector is delighted to have been given a chance to show such a great drawing in his post.

Tags: ounce dice trice, alastair reid, ben shahn, poetry, poet, marianne moore, toad, squid, edsel, ford motor company, ford, mongoose civique, utopian turtletop

The Name Inspector has sort of been on vacation this week, but came across a name whose existence cannot go unremarked. It’s Thoof, for a user-submitted news personalization site. This is a name that defies criticism. It’s so intentionally meaningless and phonetically counterintuitive that it renders irrelevant any earnest discussion of its strengths and weaknesses. A commenter on TechCrunch said it sounds like a potato gun being shot. What more is there to say?

Tags: thoof, the name thoof, personalization, news

The thing is, the real value of this kind of visualization is in comparing names to one another, which is hard when each phonetic representation occurs alone in a post. So The Name Inspector has added a page that simply presents all the phonetic representations in a list. Each item is a link to the relevant post. Scanning the list gives you a sense of how each name compares to the others: how long it is phonetically, what kinds of sounds are predominant, and the like. You can also use the list to practice reading phonetic transcription. And it looks kind of cool. Enjoy.

Tags: visualization, phonetic, phonetics, phonetic transcription, IPA, linguistic, linguistics

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

The name Twitter is not itself a pun, but it’s a set-up for a pun. It pretends to be a simple metaphorical name that casts the textual cacophony of its special kind of web exhibitionism as bird noise. But then there’s the connection to the expression all atwitter, used to describe someone filled with emotional agitation and excitement. That expression makes lines like this one, from Dan Frost’s Twitter story in the SF Chronicle, inevitable:

A simple little technology has the digerati all atwitter.

Frost can’t resist making another pun in his next line:

Make that the Twitterati.

In case you haven’t come across Twitter yet, it’s an application that lets anyone read and contribute to a constant stream of short text messages from people describing what they’re doing at that very moment. You can follow it on your phone, an IM client, or the Twitter website.

The Name Inspector signed up for a Twitter account but has not yet succumbed to its temptations. He works hard not to check his email every five minutes–the last thing he needs is something he can check every five seconds.

Something interesting about the metaphor behind Twitter is that it evokes the concept of twittering from the perspective of birds, not humans. If you’re on Twitter, you’re listening to others twitter and you’re twittering yourself. You are a bird. The Name Inspector imagines that for birds it’s very reassuring to be surrounded by the cheerful chirps of your conspecifics. That seems to be at the heart of this name’s charm.

Never mind that the word twitter sounds inconsequential. That’s beside the point. Or rather, maybe it is the point. Twitter is the antidote to news sites where you can read endless articles about the last terrible thing that happened. It lets you revel in non-news–the minutia of everyday human existence. It also, of course, creates a surprising sense of intimacy among complete strangers (even more than a blog does).

A somewhat unfortunate association evoked by this name is the word twit, which has not quite been reclaimed as a badge of honor the way geek and nerd have. Oddly, there’s a netcast company called TWiT (for This WEEK in TECH) whose founder stopped participating on Twitter because his many fans there assumed his company must be part of or associated with Twitter in some way. Consider the irony: someone whose company is called TWiT worrying about being associated with someone else’s company name.

The sound of the name Twitter is light and quick, and there’s something onomatopoetic about it. The voiceless alveolar stop [t] followed by the liquid [w] comes just short of making a whistling or chirping sound. When you say the name, the smallness and rapidity of the movements you make with your tongue, especially when pronouncing the tiny second syllable, suggest little creatures like birds.

Tags: twitter, the name twitter, birds, exhibitionism, voyeurism

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

If you’ve bought an artsy-crafty item on the web lately, or if you read Fred Wilson’s blog A VC, then you’ve probably run into Etsy. Since launching in June 2005, this Brooklyn-based company has managed to build an extremely enthusiastic fan base and become the eBay of handmade goods.

Etsy is all about community. There’s a blog (of course) and a forum and a wiki and something called Etsy Labs, an actual physical space in Brooklyn where they give classes about how to make things. Pretty brilliant–building community and training their own suppliers!

And what about the name Etsy? Where does it come from? Ah, that is the mystery. There’s been a thread about that question for more than a year and a half on the Etsy forum. Etsy developer Rokali/Rob has done nothing to clear the mystery up, and has even cranked up his own fog machine. First he hinted that the name is somehow related to Federico Fellini’s film 8½. In a brief television spot on the company, he suggested that the name is from Latin et si ‘and if’. Another Etsy developer, RevolvingDork, cryptically mentioned the sentence “IT’S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY!” on the forum, and pointed to a screen capture from a video game (which has since been removed). Someone picked up on the clue and conjectured that Etsy is based on that sentence: ignore the article a, make an acronym, reverse the letters, and replace the i with a y. Simple.

Contributors to the forum have also come up with their own theories. One is that Etsy is based on the Unix directory /etc, pronounced “et-C”. The Name Inspector came up with his own crazy theory: if you write eBay as Ebay, the orthographic similarity to Etsy is striking, because the t in Etsy looks like a b missing part of its curve, and the s looks like a backwards a missing a line. Simple. Turns out someone on the forum already thought of that.

Does it really matter where Etsy comes from or what it means? What’s really interesting is the strength of the community’s conviction that Etsy must mean something. People crave meaning, and will look for it if it doesn’t walk up and say “hey”. The desire to figure out the “secret” of the name Etsy might matter more than any true story about its origin.

Of course, whatever the founders may have had in mind when they came up with it, the name Etsy has its own special character. It rhymes with the name Betsy, which makes it vaguely personified and friendly. Mostly it’s tiny. It evokes the phrase itsy-bitsy, and has all the right sound symbolism to match. The -y ending is unmistakeably diminutive sounding. The short and high-ish first vowel and the voiceless alveolar consonants in the middle all add to the smallness evoked by the sound. Also, when you say this name, you make tiny little gestures with the tip of your tongue.

So, why would a company want its name to seem small? Well, it’s cute, and a lot of the stuff sold on Etsy is cute (plush toys that are “shy” and need “lots of hugs”, crocheted anthropomorphic ice cream cones, Big Eye kitty patches, etc.). The cuteness also contributes to the friendly vibe on the website and in the forum.

Cuteness aside, the concept of smallness fits the company. It conveys the idea that the merchandise on the site is made in small quantities on a small scale (usually by individuals rather than companies), and Etsy itself is a small company. Also, smallness suggests precision and attention to minute detail, which is perfect for handmade goods.

The name Etsy projects the image of a small grass-roots start-up. If the company continues to live up to this image, it could be really big.

Tags: Etsy, the name Etsy, handmade, hand-crafted, crafts, artisans, eBay