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.

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.

This isn’t the first time someone has tried to own a letter. According to MediaLife Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, which goes by the nickname of O Magazine, was sued for trademark infringement in 2001 by a German publication called O Magazine. Judge John Koeltl, who dismissed the lawsuit, reportedly said that O, The Oprah Magazine, which features stories about women’s health and well-being, and O Magazine, which features photographs of women in fetish attire, are “devoted to different aspects of women’s lives”. Indeed.

Now the folks at QVC may have had a purely metaphorical, fun, marketing use of the word own in mind. But companies often do get all hot and bothered about trying to own our cultural commons more literally. When The Name Inspector worked at a language technology company in the late 1990s, one of the executives thought we should seek a patent on our code because it would be “like having a patent on the English language”. Such hubris, such naivete.

Ah, now The Name Inspector is taking a trip down memory lane, and is reminded of another story from the late 1990s, which Geoffrey Pullum wrote about in 2004. James Pustejovsky, a famous computational lexical semanticist (at least, about as famous as a computational lexical semanticist can be), started a natural language processing company in 1997. First he called it Lexeme. This is a perfectly nice real-word name. Lexeme is a technical term in linguistics that means, basically, ‘word’. But a large company threatened to sue for infringement upon their trademark. Any guesses about which trademark it was? Lexus. Yep, for the luxury division of Toyota. Somehow they believed they owned the sequence of letters lex, despite the fact that this is an ancient Greek root found in English words like lexicon, lexical, and dyslexia.

As Pullum wrote, “Aren’t the owners of the English language ever going to rise up against greedy corporations like Lexus and Microsoft and Starbucks who lay claim to whole regions of the phonetosphere…?”. The prospect of huge legal fees forced Pustejovsky to change the name of his company, but he found his own way to fight back: he called his company LingoMotors, no doubt intending a dig at Lexus. But The Name Inspector fears that fighting linguistic land grabs with little witticisms is a bit like the idea, lampooned in Woody Allen’s movie “Manhattan”, of countering a Nazi rally with a devastating editorial.

Tags: q, the letter q, qvc, abbreviations, lexeme, the name lexeme, lingomotors, lexus, o magazine, oprah magazine, oprah