So The Name Inspector has turned to a lesser-known tacky misspelled name, Egnyte, which belongs to a Silicon Alley “Cloud File Server” startup. This is a name with a very clear rationale: based on the word ignite, easy to pronounce, short (it meets the persistent six-letters-max expectation for domain names), and available or acquirable as a .com domain name. The E-for-I substitution works phonetically here, as it does in the name Enertia, because there’s little if any distinction between the two vowels when they occur in an unemphasized syllable.

That’s all fine. Yet, this name is just so unappealing.

The Name Inspector is not opposed in principle to creative spelling. But there are better and worse ways to do it. Creative spelling should have a little subtlety and/or flair. It should be almost unnoticeable, as in the name Flickr, or it should be motivated by wordplay, as in the name Automattic, or it should be efficient and phonetically apt, as in the name Pipl (which is almost how the word people is spelled in the International Phonetic Alphabet), or it should be odd in a way that’s cute or comical, as in the name Digg. Egnyte comes closest to falling into the last camp, because it’s odd, but it lacks humor. Somehow individual vowel substitutions just aren’t funny. Unless they involve umlauts.

The Name Inspector doesn’t presume to know exactly how the people at Egnyte
came up with their name. But he suspects they used this common technique: pick a real word and keep respelling it until you find an available domain name. That’s one of the least imaginative ways to do it.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” -Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Do you spend too much time on Facebook, or Twitter, or Google+? Well take heart, because there’s a new app called Unsocial, which might be just what you need to wean yourself from your social networking addiction. Except it’s not. It’s actually a social networking app.

The Name Inspector was quite surprised to learn about this name, and wondered what would lead someone to think it up for an app that helps you meet people. After all, a person who is “unsocial” is someone who doesn’t want to be around other people. Isn’t this a bit like calling your paper towels Mess? Or your encryption software Expose? Yes, it is.

The tagline for Unsocial is “It’s not who you know. It’s who you need to know.” This location-based app helps you meet people who match your specified criteria when you’re hanging out in a hotel lobby, airport, or some other public space. So in a way it’s not merely about being social–it’s about being downright extroverted.

Re-purposing the word unsocial to name this app is just wishful thinking. It doesn’t say “go beyond social”. It says “I’d rather just stay in my hotel room and watch HBO”.

Language is the most efficient tool your business can use to get attention and build a brand. It gives your business a human voice, and costs almost nothing to reproduce and share. In fact, it costs nothing at all when other people spread your message for you, using only their voices or their fingers and keyboards.

Language is for expressing ideas. You can’t get the language right until you get the ideas right. When you’re pitching, naming, and selling, the ideas you start with have to go beyond just identifying the unique benefits you provide. They have to present a vision that will make those benefits clear and meaningful to others.

To develop a vision like that, you need to put your company, product, or service into a compelling human context. It’s a matter of what some people, such as linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff, call framing.

Metaphor is one of the most powerful tools for framing. Metaphor allows people to project their basic knowledge of the world imaginatively to understand unfamiliar and abstract things. It’s especially important if you offer a product or service that’s innovative or hard to explain.

Some metaphors are more useful than others. The success of a metaphor depends on how apt it is and on the richness of the conceptual world it opens up.

Here’s an example from ancient internet history showing two different attempts to make a new technology accessible through metaphor. The first popular web browser was called Mosaic, and its successor was called Netscape Navigator. Those names used two different metaphors to convey something about what a web browser–a new kind of software at the time–was all about.

Mosaic likened the web, and perhaps the individual web page, to a familiar kind of picture made out of little pieces.

Netscape Navigator treated the web as a vast physical space to explore.

While the metaphor behind Mosaic has already been forgotten, the one behind Netscape Navigator has proved indispensable. It is, of course, the metaphor we all use now to think and talk about the web. It gives meaning to the names of two other currently popular browsers, Internet Explorer and Safari.

The contrast between these metaphors illustrates two important things to keep in mind about metaphor in general.

First, a metaphor that invites you to imagine you’re participating in an activity is better than one that makes a static comparison. Mosaic treated the web experience as a still picture. All the name really conveyed was that you would look at a complex whole composed of numerous parts. It suggested no imagined activity, purpose, or emotional engagement. Netscape Navigator, on the other hand, hinted at all these things. It suggested that the user was moving, in control, possibly headed somewhere important, and definitely in for an adventure.

The second important lesson is that it’s hard to come up with a new metaphor that’s as powerful as one that already exists. The metaphor of the internet as a physical space was established before Netscape Navigator came on the scene. People already used William Gibson’s term cyberspace to refer to the internet, and used the phrase “surf the internet”. That way of thinking and talking about the internet was, in fact, based on a metaphor that’s deeply engrained in our culture and our minds, and that may be universal: one that treats any purposeful activity as movement through a landscape. Metaphors like this run deep because they’re rooted in experiences that begin in early childhood. (Incidentally, before The Name Inspector was The Name Inspector, he was something of an expert on this topic.)

When you’re coming up with a company or product name, or a tagline, or a pitch, or copy for your website, it pays to think hard about how your message will tap into the conceptual lives of the people you’re trying to reach. What’s important to them? And how will they use metaphor to think about you? That’s partly, but not entirely, up to you.

Before you start trying to come up with a name, you have to get real. Recognize your true goals and fully acknowledge your practical constraints. That will save you time down the road. Get started by answering these questions honestly.

What does the name have to do?

First you have to decide what the name is going to do for you. Does it have to communicate clearly and directly, or serve as the basis for a brand? These are really the two main possibilities. A name has to communicate clearly, for example, if you’re hoping it will turn up in results for generic web searches like “sandwiches in seattle”. (But remember, it doesn’t have to be your name that captures search traffic like that.) If you want a name that will help people remember you and think good thoughts about you, then you want a brandable name. Brandable names almost always communicate indirectly. More on that in a future soft, fuzzy, language-y post.

Do you need a .com domain for this name?

If it’s a company or service that exists primarily as a website, you probably want a brandable domain name, and a short, memorable .com domain will lend you the most credibility. Still, you can get creative and use a different domain extension until you make it big (or get funded) and can afford to acquire the .com.

If you’re naming one of several products or services, you can probably get by with different pages on your main company site.

Are you prepared to spend serious money on a domain name?

If not, then you have to rule out using a single correctly spelled real word. A name like Amazon or Gist is out of the question, because all the real words that are even semi-common have been registered, and the ones that are for sale have asking prices in the thousands.

Is it important for you to choose your name within a couple weeks or so?

If so, buying a domain is not the way to go, unless you find one that you can buy immediately for a specific price. Otherwise, contacting the owner of a domain and negotiating a sale takes too long.

Do your criteria for choosing a name match your goals and constraints?

Too often people use vague criteria for choosing a name, like “It has to jump out and grab me” or “It just has to feel right”. Of course, it’s great for a name to grab you and feel right, but these vague criteria often mask implicit, unrealistic ones that will never be met, and can doom a naming effort to endless stagnation. Occasionally The Name Inspector has a client who is willing to spend no more than $500 or so on a domain name, but who wants a name “like” Twitter or Apple, and not one that’s just “squished together words”. Big red flag. What such a client really wants is a cool English word available as a .com domain (see above) that everyone else has somehow overlooked. Such names might be available for pennies on Fairy.com. If not, it’s time to take a hard second look at goals and success criteria and make sure they’re consistent with practical constraints.

OK, now that you’ve faced these hard truths, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get naming! Of course, you don’t have to do it alone.

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?

Thuuz is a startup that assigns an “excitement score” in real time to sporting events, notifies fans when things get especially thrilling, and even tells them how they can tune in to share the excitement. Pretty great idea, right? (If it really works. But let’s face it, the users of this are going to be big sports fans. They’re just looking for more excuses to watch sporting events.)

But then we have the name Thuuz. The Name Inspector is not a fan. Clearly it’s built on the bones of the words enthused, enthusiasm, and enthusiastic. So far so good–apt, if a bit pedestrian. But that syllable is pretty weird sounding. It’s really the first consonant and the vowel together that sound odd. The Name Inspector talked about this in connection with the name Thoof a while back. He quite reasonably declared that the “Thoo-” part was a bit counterintuitive in English, and then this smartypants named John commented that it was an accident of history that there is no word thoof, and The Name Inspector held his ground, and John was all “what about enthusiasm“, and The Name Inspector was like “good point but what about at the beginning of a word”, and John was all “historical linguistics blah blah”. So clearly The Name Inspector won that round.

The real problem with Thuuz is the spelling, which uses not one but two cheesy alterations: the double vowel and the z at the end. Thuze would be more straightforward–the founders were probably unable to acquire the domain thuze.com. In Thuuz the “uu” performs an odd function of sorts, because if the name were spelled Thuz people might think it rhymes with fuzz. But the “uu” is just weird. (And now John is going to say “What about the word vacuum“, and The Name Inspector will be all “It’s still unusual”, and the disagreement will escalate until there’s a fistfight followed by an exhausted moment of bonding, just like in a bromance movie, and an unbeatable linguistic duo is formed.)

This is one of those names that will have to be spelled for anyone who hears it without seeing it.

Fans are really great about jumping and shouting and being noticed and painting their chests purple. The Name Inspector thinks that non-fans need to stand up and get noticed sometimes, too. So here he is. He wishes the founders of Thuuz the best of luck with their startup, but he’s got to say, “Let’s not hear it for the name Thuuz!”

In fact, some people love the name Zulily in ways The Name Inspector never expected. It recently came to his attention that a new mother announced last summer on the Baby Name Genie forum that she was naming her daughter Zulily Charlotte. The Baby Name Genie site displays lots of banner ads for Zulily, so most contributors to the forum knew exactly what inspired the name Zulily Charlotte, and the post triggered a bit of a diaperstorm. Some people expressed incredulity and derision: It’s just weird…Can you imagine being a grown woman with that name? Ridiculous…If I got introduced to an infant named Zulily I think I’d die laughing…I think Zulily is silly sounding, but it’s your baby…

Others, however, defended the name (though some were a bit…defensive about it): I know lots of people will hate it, but every time the ad pops up on the site, I think it’s cute…In my preggo hormones, I thought it was cute, too…This name is no worse than some of the crazy celebrity names out there that people choose to name their children, and I think it’s pretty…Zulily, hmmm–I like it actually! I like that you’re bein’ bold!…

Now, The Name Inspector never imagined Zulily as a name for a girl, and if he had a daughter of his own, he probably wouldn’t be as bold as this new mother. But oh, how he hopes the story of Zulily Charlotte is true! What better validation could a namer receive than to have a creation be chosen, from all the possibilities in the world, to name a new human being?

If you’re out there, Zulily Charlotte, The Name Inspector wishes you all the happiness in the world.

Photo from Flickr by Stuart Seeger. Used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Remember a while back when The Name Inspector did a post about Seattle startup names, and promised a series of posts about names in other entrepreneurial hotspots? This is the next in that series: a little post about Austin startup names.

To keep things simple, The Name Inspector used the Austin Emerging 100 list. Unlike Seattle 2.0′s Seattle Startup Index, which is constantly updated, the Emerging 100 list seems to have been a one-off thing done back in 2008. Almost ancient history in startup years. But that might not be all bad–the trends we see in it can’t be attributed to recent changes in naming practice or name availability.

In some respects the breakdown of name types is similar to the Seattle Startup Index. For example, the number of compound names is comparable: 17% for Austin and about a quarter for Seattle.

The big story has to do with the number of real word versus phrase names–the same issue that stood out when comparing Seattle startups to the startups listed in the TechCrunch index a few years back. Though The Name Inspector thought Seattle was phrase-crazy, Austin takes the phrase cake! Almost half the names in the Austin 100 list are phrases. And do you know how many real-word names there are? Four. Out of 100. And one of those, Conformity, used the not-just-one-word domain conformity-inc.com (and, incidentally, just relaunched last month as IronStratus).

You might recall that The Name Inspector’s take on the large proportion of phrase names to real word names among Seattle startups was that Seattle has lots of bootstrapped startups. They don’t have investor dollars, so they can’t afford to pay domain speculators for the “premium” domain names consisting of one real English word. Those names almost always cost a few thousand dollars at least. So instead founders have to get creative and put words together. The phrase is the most natural result of that impulse.

The proportion of phrase names to real word names down in Austin suggests it’s even more of a bootstrapping kind of town than Seattle. And that’s appropriate, right? More boots down there. Or at least, fancier boots. But really, does it indicate a lack of available funding? Maybe so. Check out this post from last year by startup consultant Carla Thompson on the Austin Startup blog. Here’s a quote:

There’s a level of frustration toward the Austin investor community that should be acknowledged and addressed. Austin entrepreneurs are increasingly flying to Silicon Valley to seek investment, after months of futile conversations here in town.

Hmmm…maybe The Name Inspector is on to something. Can the temperature of a startup scene be taken from a list of names?

Adify

Crowdify

Mobify

Navify

Optify

Shopify

Spotify

Storify

Topify

There are lots of English verbs that end with the Latin-derived suffix -ify. In most of them, the main part of the word, or the base, is an adjective. Usually the resulting word means ‘to make (adjective)’–so intensify means to make something intense, purify means to make something pure, and so forth. In some of these words, the base is a noun, and the meaning is roughly ‘to make into (noun)’–so personify means to make something into a person (at least imaginatively), mummify means to make someone into a mummy, and zombify means to make someone into a zombie. Sometimes the meanings are a little more complicated. Yuppify doesn’t mean to make someone into a yuppy, but rather to make something (usually a neighborhood) more full of yuppies or more appealing to them. (For you youngsters out there, yuppie is a word, short for “young urban professional”, that we oldsters used derisively back in the 1980s when we were secretly aspiring to be yuppies ourselves). Sometimes the base of an -ify word is a twist on an existing word, as in clarify, horrify, and terrify, or it’s a Latin root that doesn’t stand on its own as a word but that’s related to familiar words, as in verify, rectify, and unify.

Despite these complications, one thing you can say about all these words is that the bases are simple and usually don’t carry any other suffixes before the -ify ending. Names using the suffix are another story:

Playlistify

Backupify

Linksify

Zensify

Here we have the -ify ending attached to the compound noun playlist, the nounified verb-particle combination backup, the plural noun links, and, inexplicably, a base made out of zen + s (maybe this is supposed to be a blend of zen and densify). Then we even have the -ify ending redundantly added to verb bases:

Chargify

Predictify

Restorify

You don’t find -ify attached to verbs in natural English, because the point of the -ify ending is to make a verb out of a different kind of word. The only exception The Name Inspector has thought of is preachify, and he’s willing to wager that’s a tongue-in-cheek word, based on the similar word speechify, that’s meant to illustrate the kind artificially puffed-up speaking style it refers to.

The Name Inspector fears that this approach to namifying has gotten out of hand. When will the madness stopify?