Brevity is a virtue in a name, usually. Come up with a short name that relates to your company or product in an imaginative way, and you’re golden. A sort of verbal minimalism is the goal of most naming efforts.

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?

On a recent flight to San Francisco, The Name Inspector was seated, by coincidence, right across the aisle from an acquaintance. On the return flight, he was moved from an aisle to a middle seat to accommodate a family, and found himself right next to the same guy. Weird. Anyway, the two had ample time to chat, and this guy told The Name Inspector about a Seattle business called BackFire Chiropractic. The Name Inspector was, needless to say, appalled and fascinated. This has to be the worst medical name he has encountered since learning about a dental practice called Fiddler on the Tooth.

What on earth would make someone think it’s a good idea to name their business BackFire? Especially a chiropractic practice (a chiropractice?)?

Here’s what the word backfire makes The Name Inspector think of:

1. A plan going terribly wrong
2. A loud noise coming from a vehicle’s tailpipe
3. A back that is on fire

The least objectionable association is (2), and with a bit of imagination, that one is pretty bad (picture an especially elaborate chiropractic version of the “pull my finger” gag). (1) is just terrible in an obvious way (and chiropractic, with all that yanking and twisting, just seems like it’s bound to go wrong). (3) seems uncomfortable under any circumstances, but potentially especially acute in a chiropractic setting. If your chiropractic treatment backfires, you might find yourself saying, “Doc, it feels like my back is on fire!” And here’s the kicker: in the window of this chiropractor’s office there is a neon spine.

Just to be generous, let’s enumerate the appropriate things about the name BackFire:

1. It contains the word back

That’s about it. Maybe that feeling of one’s back being on fire can be interpreted as the reason for seeing a chiropractor in the first place. Or maybe (this is really a stretch) a back on fire can be understood as a good thing-a metaphor for vitality. On second thought, maybe not.

A tip to business owners: don’t pick a name just because it contains a word related to your business. Context is everything.

Every year, the blog LexioPhiles has a contest of sorts to pick the world’s top language blogs. The Name Inspector has been lucky enough to be included in those unscientifically chosen but distinguished ranks in the past. Now they’re at it again. Please consider casting a vote. Just click on this button (included for your convenience, despite the fact that it clashes so horribly with The Name Inspector’s lavender and red color scheme) and then select The Name Inspector from the list:

Who hasn’t had the frustrating experience of regretting having missed a big game that everyone talks about the next day? Actually, The Name Inspector hasn’t-for a reasonably sporty fellow he’s oddly immune to the normal enthusiasms of sports spectatorship. Don’t get him wrong, he can appreciate a well caught ball, an impressive defensive maneuver, or even a good pummeling as much as the next guy. He’s just happy to take these things as they insert themselves into his zone of attention. But more to the point: The Name Inspector knows there are lots of people out there who do have that frustrating experience, and that’s why he can appreciate the ingenuity of Thuuz.

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!”

The Name Inspector was fortunate to have had the opportunity to help Zulily come up with their name. In case you haven’t checked it out, Zulily specializes in daily deals for moms, babies, and kids. The company offers amazing bargains and inspires great enthusiasm among its customers. The name Zulily, while odd to some, is loved by others.

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?

Don’t be misled by the title of this post: The Name Inspector has not started outsourcing his content to Demand Media. He simply felt that he had to find a way to acknowledge National Grammar Day, founded to promote good grammar and observed just this past Friday. But given his misgivings about pop prescriptivism and the monopoly it has on the public’s linguistic imagination, he couldn’t simply celebrate National Grammar Day. (And that’s not because he doesn’t love grammar. No one loves grammar more than The Name Inspector does.) So, as a response to National Grammar Day, respectfully postponed until after the fact, here’s a topic about breaking the rules: how to misspell a word.

Misspelling-let’s call it “creative” spelling to put a less negative spin on it-is a mainstay of consumer brand names from Cheez Whiz to Flickr. Doing it right requires careful attention to microstyle.

An important principle of microstyle, and one that applies to spelling, is expressive economy. That means getting the most meaning out of the least message. Applied to spelling, expressive economy means not using more letters than you have to. If you’re going to misspell a word, you might as well make it more compact, right? Typically, yes. Cheez Whiz and Flickr both do well with expressive economy, and they’re quite memorable. Names that don’t observe the principle, like Brandtology (are we supposed to pronounce that t?) and Bountii, often look clunky and confusing. Perhaps more importantly, since the extra letters aren’t motivated by the pronunciation, it’s hard to recover the spelling from the sound, and that makes the spelling much harder to remember.

It is possible to add letters to a word in a cute way. The name Digg comes to mind: the double “gg” on the end can’t help but remind you of the adorable word egg. And that tells us something important about extra letters: when they work, there’s usually a reason for them to be there, however subtle. Automattic is a good name for a company started by a guy named Matt, for example.

Some names push expressive economy to the limit, eliminating letters that can’t be unambiguously recovered. The defunct url-shortening service br.st, for example, should probably be pronounced like the word burst, which sort of turns the r into a vowel. But can we be certain it’s not based on the word breast? And how about gdgt, for a tech review site. It’s based on the word gadget, but outside a tech context it might be hard to see that.

Balance also plays an important role in creative spelling. Correct spelling has plenty of redundancy in it. If you simplify spelling in some parts of a word while leaving other parts noticeably redundant, the result seems like a job half done. Take Clikthrough, for example. Since they’ve gone to the trouble of simplifying click to clik, why not streamline the cumbersome word through, which uses seven letters to express three sounds? Clikthru would be much better. Maybe the owner of the parked domain clikthru.com wouldn’t part with it, at least not for a reasonable price.

So, in the wake National Grammar Day, when we’re supposed to remember to do things right, let’s also remember that there’s a right way to do things wrong.

The Name Inspector has been thinkifying about naming fads lately. For example, there was that post a while back about names ending with the word vine. One trend that naggifies at him every day, though, is the gratuitous use of the suffix -ify. This one is bound to worsify before it gets bett…OK, he’s done with the stupid sarcastic examples now. You’ve seen these names all over the place, right? Here’s a little list:

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?

Update 7/2/13: A while back The Name Inspector created a Pinterest board called the Wall of Namifying, where you can see 80+ examples of the namifying trend.

Somehow, when The Name Inspector wasn’t looking, Groupon grew from an obscure startup with a funny name to a business robust and confident enough to say “No thank you” to a $6-billion acquisition offer from Google. Maybe that’s why Forbes.com called Groupon the fastest-growing web business ever. Faster than Ebay, Amazon.com, or Google. Whoa.

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.

The Corn Refiners Assocation has recently petitioned the FDA to change the name of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) to “corn sugar”. They’re following the new rule: if your name gets dragged through the mud, get a new one!

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?