Groupon offers ridiculous discounts to its users, on the condition that enough people commit to making a purchase. It thus delivers new customers to hungry businesses, making everyone happy and Groupon very rich.

The name Groupon has always kind of irritated The Name Inspector, and now it’s time to write about that.

The unpleasantness of the name Groupon, at least to this particular name inspector’s ears, can’t be attributed to obviously poor construction. It’s not exactly a case of awkwordplay, because one emphasized syllable is replaced with another, and there are no difficult consonant clusters. But something still sounds awkward. The Name Inspector believes it might have to do with the way the syllable division in Groupon (Grou + pon) splits up the word group. But even that’s not quite right. The name Scoopon, which belongs to an Australian company that’s been sued by Groupon for domain squatting (they bought groupon.co.au), has the same problem, but sounds better than Groupon. Maybe it’s the way the r in Groupon changes the sound of the first syllable. Or maybe it has to do with the meaning: if you think of the name as group + on, you get kind of an orgiastic vibe from it: group, grope, grab on, get your group on… That’s not just The Name Inspector, is it? You get that too, right? Right?!

Of course you do. So don’t the people at Groupon know their company has a funny name? They probably do. According to the company blog, the guy who came up with the name Groupon is Aaron With, the Editor in Chief at Groupon. Apparently he’s responsible for the unique voice in which Groupon’s deals are presented. In its short life as a big deal, Groupon has become known for its goofy and irreverent content. For example, here’s how today’s offer for Seattle starts out:

Though they work best as a gleaming smile, perfectly white teeth can also be removed in emergencies and inserted into candelabra for the purposes of exploring haunted houses. Keep your incisors illuminated with today’s Groupon…

This attitude extends to their naming. In one of the oddest promotional stunts in The Name Inspector’s memory, Groupon offers a chance at a college scholarship to any “Groupon baby”, defined as “a baby parented by a couple that used a Groupon on their first date”. The name of this program is Grouspawn.

Then there’s the name of that company blog: Groublogpon, which uses the extremely rare word-formation strategy of infixation–plopping one word right into the middle of another. The name Groublogpon actually separates the final p from the rest of the word group–it almost seems to make fun of the very property that contributes to Groupon‘s funny sound. Here’s the tagline that appears under the blog name: “Sweet name, I’ll totally remember it”.

Maybe The Name Inspector is just being crotchety. Mrs. Name Inspector likes the name (as do several other people). And thanks to her, The Name Inspector is going to enjoy a wonderful massage next week, at a deeply discounted price. So he should just chill out.

But when did people start to think of sugar as something wholesome? The Name Inspector is asking that question rhetorically, because he knows perfectly well when it happened: when HFCS became the new demon of the nutritional world, and hip foodies started buying Mexican Coke thinking it’s made with pure cane sugar (or just because they like the cute retro glass bottles).

Is HFCS really so bad? One thing that muddles the issue is that people get their politics mixed up with their science. They don’t like Big Agra, and in particular, they don’t like King Corn. They object to the practice of feeding corn to beef cattle, which leads to an increased use of antibiotics and a higher level of bad Omega-6 fatty acids and saturated fat in the resulting beef.

But does that make HFCS bad? Politically, perhaps, but not nutritionally. The main nutritional objections to HFCS seem to be (1) it’s very sugary, (2) it’s in lots of foods, including ones where you wouldn’t expect to find it, and (3) it’s usually made from genetically-altered corn. But it’s gotten an especially bad rap lately, partly because it has a name so long and scientific sounding that it has to be abbreviated.

Compare poor HFCS to the much more groovily-named “agave nectar”, available in health stores everywhere. Agave nectar is essentially high fructose agave syrup, make from agave starch rather than corn starch, but through a similar process. Seeing how its hippie cousin got a free ride for so long, poor HFCS is trying to cast off the yoke of its demonized, scientific-sounding name. Who can blame it?

Of course, x has always done a little moonlighting, expressing the sound z at the beginnings of certain words and names, such as xylophone, Xerox, and Xobni, while the letter z is otherwise engaged.

Now consider the name Predixion, for prediction software. That’s not at all confusing, right? Presumably it’s pronounced just like the word prediction. If you were telling someone about it, you’d simply have to say “It’s prediction, except with an x rather than a ct”. When you look at the name you can figure out the pronunciation, but expressing the sounds k and sh squished together is something new for the letter x.

It’s the company Adapx, however, that really asks too much of poor x. In the name Adapx, the x must express either the sounds t and s squished together, or just the sound s, if you say the name like you’re pronouncing the word adapts in an especially jaunty nonstandard way. Adapx makes handwriting capture software called Capturx, which is supposed to be pronounced just like the word captures. Here x is called upon to express the sound z at the end of a word instead of the beginning, again expanding its job description. The hardware that goes with this, a special pen with sensors that record its movements while you write, is Penx, pronounced like the word pens. Besides being another strange use of x, the implied plural is odd in this context. It would be natural to allow the name to be used informally to refer to the pens, the way we call our cars Toyotas and our jeans Levis, but the plural form almost guarantees that won’t happen. You just can’t say “I got a pens” and feel good about it. You have to say something like “I got one of those Penx pens, you know what I’m talking about?”

The Name Inspector would like to urge everyone to give x a break. You’re overtaxing the poor letter, and its job performance is suffering as a result.

Have you noticed how many of these there are? In the TechCrunch index you can find Bridgevine, CrowdVine, Newsvine, Snapvine (now defunct), and SwingVine Inc. Other names The Name Inspector has come across include Comic Vine, LeadVine, Loudvine, PlaceVine, Racevine, RiotVine, Sandvine, and Widevine.

So what’s up? The Name Inspector believes that the -vine ending has become popular because it simultaneously meets four naming challenges, two more or less universal and two specific to web-based “connecting” tools such as communication services, aggregators, and social networks.

The first universal challenge is to find a name that evokes an appealing visual image. Vines are lovely, with their curly stems and foliage, and make a great visual design motif. The second is to find a word that combines well. Vine is great because it’s a single syllable with no clusters of multiple consonants.

Another more specific challenge is to evoke the idea of connection in a fresh way, avoiding words such as net and link. A vine makes a great visual metaphor for a network, with the leaves representing nodes and the stems representing edges. This metaphor is strengthened by the idiom “to hear something through the grapevine”, which uses the vine image to represent a network of friends and acquaintances.

The remaining challenge is to hint at the “organic” nature of social networks and crowdsourced recommendations and rankings–the way they grow through the complex actions of many people, not according to someone’s grand design. A vine is of course a plant, in keeping with the metaphor we evoke when we use the word organic that way.

The vine, thanks to its simple name, lovely appearance, and metaphorical potential, has flourished as a natural choice for namers. But has it perhaps begun to wilt?

If this post works out, The Name Inspector might just do a whole series of posts about naming trends in different startup centers, to add a comparative dimension. Ooh, that could be fun.

But for now, send your thoughts, Seattleites! Use the email address that appears under The Name Inspector’s pondering visage.

This is a name that might have great positive associations for some and leave the rest of us scratching our heads. Salal is the name of a shrub that’s popular in the Pacific Northwest. It has tough shiny leaves, pink blossoms in the spring, and edible purple berries in the late summer. (Actually, they’re technically fleshy sepals, or flower parts.) King County (the county where Seattle is) calls it “the single best ground cover for northwest gardens”. So, it might give gardeners a warm, fuzzy feeling. And the strange sound of the name might not seem so strange to people who are used to place names like Sammamish, Snoqualmie, Issaquah, and others that come from the original languages spoken in the Pacific Northwest.

The word salal is derived from Chinook Jargon, a trade language based on Chinook that was used widely in the Pacific Northwest in the 1800s. But if you’re not familiar with the plant, the name Salal is likely to seem like Arabic, as James Callan (@scarequotes) pointed out on Twitter. The Name Inspector, not much of a gardener himself, must confess to having been ignorant of the plant and puzzled by the name. Salal doesn’t appear to be an actual Arabic word, but there’s a municipality in Qatar called Umm Salal, and there are people with the surname Salal. The Arabic flavor of Salal seems to come from the sequence -al-, which is very common in transliterated Arabic, being one way to write the definite article (as in Al-Qaeda, which can be transated as ‘the base’). Also, after the vowel that appears twice in this word, the English /l/ sound gets velarized–pronounced in the back of the throat–which might remind people of the voiced velar and pharyngeal fricatives that English-hearing ears find so distinctive in Arabic.

This seems like a risky rename. Maybe the reference to a local plant is meant to make people in these parts feel like they’re part of a special in group. Others, however, will feel left out.

Now, The Name Inspector realizes he’s been a little absent lately. But remember, he’s been advancing the cause of traditional nonfiction book publishing. And all you have to do is find “The Name Inspector” on a conveniently alphabetized list, click a little radio button, and think nice thoughts. Then, no flowers or bottles of artisanal rye whiskey expected!

Because it’s been such a long time since The Name Inspector did his last post, he’ll make this a special one. He’ll give you the inside story of the naming of Gist, a Seattle company that connects your inbox to the web to give you information about the people and companies that are important to you. And all this told from the perspective of the hard-working naming consultant who proposed the name! This post will show you how a startup naming project can evolve over time and how different constraints make different results possible.

First, about Gist. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should. It’s an application that mines your email contacts, ranks them according to importance, and gathers information about them from all over the web: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It’s especially useful in business–a sort of dashboard that instantly gives you the gist on all your most important contacts.

It all started back in 2007, when The Name Inspector was no bigger than–well, when he was just about exactly as tall as he is now. THIS tall. Anyway, a guy named T.A. McCann hired him to rename his company, which was called Minebox. That was a pretty apt name for a company that created software to datamine your email inbox. The problem with the name Minebox was that the .com domain wasn’t available. T.A. could only get mineboxx.com. And that seemed to The Name Inspector to be (1) a little tacky, (2) a little too suggestive of porn, and (3) a little too x-centric in a space where two of the main competitors were called Xobni and Xoopit (which as since been acquired by Yahoo).

The first round of work focused on other names relating specifically to the email inbox. An early name contender from this round was Plumbox. Surprisingly, the domain plumbox.com was available. (It’s not any more). There was a nice visual to go with the name–picture an old-fashioned produce crate filled with plums. A plum represents something valued (like a “plum job”), so the name made a great metaphor for an application that finds the value in your inbox. And finally, there was a great double meaning: a good alternative metaphor for “mining” an inbox would be to “plumb” an inbox (like “plumbing the depths”). Alas, Plumbox was not to be, because a Minebox investor was already involved with a similarly-named company.

So, round two. This round focused less specifically on the inbox. T.A. was beginning to envision a broader horizon of possibilities.  But there was still a belief that the .com domain should be available.

So, what do you do when you want the associations of a real word but you also want a short, available domain name? In classic Web 2.0 fashion, you get creative with your spelling. At one point, Dystyl was under consideration. However you feel about creative spelling (and The Name Inspector has mixed feelings about it), you have to admit that the name is interesting from an orthographic point of view. (And here’s an aside: naming isn’t a purely aesthetic pursuit. It’s also a type of problem solving.)

In any event, no one felt completely happy with Dystyl. It was too gimmicky.

Then we received word from the main investor, Mr. Big, that there was real money available to buy a domain name. That opened things up tremendously. Real-word names became a possibility without the creative spelling. When you’re looking for real-word names, you have to do a lot of scouting of web real estate, because almost any real English word you can think of has already been registered as a .com. You have to figure out what you might be able to buy. A domain name that has a major corporate website sitting on it is not going to be available for any price. A domain name that’s parked is very likely available for the right price. And when a domain name has a blog or other personal site or a very small business site on it, you can sometimes convince the owner to part with it.

So this round focused on real-word names with registered domains that didn’t seem entirely out of reach. The name Gist caught the attention of many people involved in the naming project, and the domain had belonged to a long-defunct website. The domain owner was contacted. After some polite but persistent prodding and some hard negotiation, the owner agreed to sell the domain. The final seal of approval came from Mr. Big himself, who weighed in saying the name was “not bad”. So Minebox becamse Gist.

The pithy, scrappy little name Gist came into a market where the best-known company was probably Xobni. If you don’t happen to notice that Xobni is inbox backwards, it simply functions as an arbitarary name. The initial X and final i make it exotic, like a foreign word, and that’s pretty much the extent of it. If you do know about the word inbox in there, then you know something about the application (that it has to do with email). But there are no other ideas introduced. This is an illustration of the principle that saying things too directly makes for a name with little conceptual resonance

One nice thing about the name Gist is that it demonstrates its own meaning. The gist of something is an economical expression or understanding of what’s important about it. The four-letter word gist was a very succinct expression of this very concept.

Now, The Name Inspector realizes that the “millionth word” story is a ridiculous play for attention that’s not to be taken seriously, and that the folks at the Global Language Monitor know it. But the story has gotten people talking about what a word is, and that’s a topic that The Name Inspector can warm to.

The easiest criticism of the millionth-word story is that Web 2.0 isn’t a word, but a phrase. That’s the main thing that linguist Geoffrey Pullum had to say about the matter on Language Log. And that’s pretty disappointing, actually, because it ignores the fact that the whole enterprise of counting words that precisely is linguistically suspect.

Why would The Name Inspector object to counting words? Believe it or not, it’s not due to a perverse academic refusal to give simple answers to simple questions. The innocent word, which seems to be the very simplest little bit of language to understand, is remarkably hard to pin down. There are very clear examples of words, like dog, but around the edges the word category is fuzzy. That makes it hard to count words with any precision, let alone announce the exact time of day when a word enters the language.

Let’s start with the very dumbest definition of word, the one used by the “word count” function on your word processor: A word is a string of characters (lets say letters) with no spaces. Well, that would mean the following string consists of five words: jjj akjsdhfjkh auygfh tg drqwds.

We can do better than that: A word is a string of letters with no spaces that has a meaning and can be used in a sentence. By this definition, Web 2.0 doesn’t cut it. And many people who’ve weighed in on the issue in blog comments have raised just that objection. Some object to the space, some to the digits, some to the punctuation. Sorry, sorry, and sorry. If inclusion in a dictionary is the ultimate proof of wordhood, then consider this: Even the abridged online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary includes entries for deep six, 12-step, 20/20, 24-7, 3 D, and even 86ing (a slang term for refusing to serve a customer). All these include numbers, all but one include digits, some have punctuation, and one has a space.

Now about spaces. It’s commonly accepted that English has complex prepositions that consist of parts. In some cases the parts are separated by spaces, and in others they’re not. We write in lieu of as three chunks, and instead of as two, even though their structures are parallel, etymologically speaking. Then there’s notwithstanding.

There are many compound words in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (and others) that are written with spaces. A space is a purely orthographic entity, and it’s silly to define a linguistic unit based on orthography alone. Spoken language is primary. Written language is, ultimately, a representation of spoken language. There are compounds that some people write as “one word” and some people write as “two words”, though the pronunciation remains constant. Website/web site is one example. If you use the no-space criterion, you end up saying that such expressions are sometimes words and sometimes not words, based on orthographic variation. And that just doesn’t make good sense.

Of course, you might appeal to The Language Boss to tell you which version is “correct”. But people, it’s time to wake up and realize that The Language Boss is a fiction, like the Wizard of Oz. There are just different people, sometimes with different opinions, bumbling around behind their curtains. Pay no attention to that language maven behind the curtain!

Lurking behind the orthographic issue, of course, is a deeper linguistic one: If some words are made of pieces that are themselves words, how do we know when a group of words adds up to a complex word as opposed to a phrase or a random stretch of language? Here linguists begin to rely on criteria that distance the definition of word from the pragmatic, what-you-list-in-the-dictionary understanding of what a word is. The linguists might, for example, think about how an expression interacts with the rules of English stress assignment, or about it’s syntactic behavior. In any event, for a group of words to add up to a complex word, it has to be a conventional, cohesive unit.

And here there are no hard and fast rules. Idioms make things especially complicated. Merriam-Webster lists kick ass and kick the bucket under its entry for kick. So these idioms get a sort of honorary word treatment. But notice that idioms don’t always occur in exactly the same form: we can kick a little ass or kick some ass or even kick some Raider ass. In idioms, words begin to blend into grammar, and that’s where things get really tricky.

Some idioms, like kick the bucket and kick ass, are identified mostly by the presence of certain component  words. Others, however, are more like grammatical templates. Consider sentences like There’s only so far a car can go with a flat tire, There’s only so long you can sit before you have to get up and walk around, and There’s only so often you can talk or sneak your way out of a fight. There’s a pattern here that’s something like There’s only so X Y can Z, where X is a scalar measure or property of some kind,  Y is a noun phrase, and Z is a verb phrase. Most people wouldn’t call this pattern a word, but it’s hard to find the exact barrier between this pattern and something like kick ass. (To see lots of patterns like this, you might take a look at the Snowclone Database).

Even when you’re talking about words with simple forms, it can be hard to decide how to count them. That’s because words aren’t just forms–they also have meanings, and it’s often the case that the same form has more than one meaning. If the meanings are very different, we usually think of there being more than one word. For example, bank used in connection with a river is one word, and bank used in reference to a financial institution is another.

But what if the meanings are only a little different? How many “words” are represented by these different uses of the verb see?

Can you see the car?
I see that it’s raining.
I don’t see why you’re so angry.
Let’s go see grandma.
Are you seeing anyone?
I’ll see your twenty and raise you ten.
Let me see you to your door.
See to it that this doesn’t get out.

All these complexities don’t mean it’s impossible in principle to count the number of words in the English language. They do, however, mean that it’s very, very hard, and that you have to know what you mean by word before you start.