Not so long ago, The Name Inspector’s younger son got his first pair of shoes at Nordstrom. As a little lagniappe, he also got a plush toy named Nordy, whose head is shown on the right above. This is definitely The Name Inspector’s favorite plush toy inspired by a sketch by a famous philosopher of language.

Nordy is an ambiguous toy. Aside from the dot for an eye and the protuberances vaguely suggesting snouts and/or head-tops, it has no facial features. If you look at it one way, it seems like the bigger protuberance represents ears, and the smaller one a little bunny-ish nose. If you look at it another way, the bigger protuberance looks like a proboscis, and the littler one suggests the top of a head.

In other words, Nordy looks like a stylized version of Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, pictured in the middle. Wittgenstein was interested in ambiguity and in the phenomenon of “seeing as”-what we experience when we first see the drawing “as a duck” and then see it “as a rabbit” (or vice-versa). What did he conclude from the duck-rabbit? Well, that’s not entirely clear. But the duck-rabbit is cute, right? Apparently some plush toy designer, perhaps a frustrated (or happy?) philosophy PhD unable to land an academic job, thought so.

Wittgenstein got the idea for his duck-rabbit from an American psychologist named Joseph Jastrow, who probably saw the picture at the left, which appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1892. Harper’s, in turn, seems to have swiped it from a German publication called Fliegende Blätter. To learn more about the provenance of the duck-rabbit, take a look at John F. Kihlstrom’s page on the topic.

On Wednesday the Global Language Monitor “announced” that English got its one-millionth word at precisely 10:22 am GMT that day. And the word was Web 2.0, so naturally, blogs such as Mashable, John Battelle’s Searchblog, and TechCrunch took notice.

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.

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.

A few days ago John Cook reported that lawyers from job site Jobdango want the folks at Zoodango, a site that has nothing to do with jobs, to stop using the name Zoodango because the -dango ending infringes on Jobdango’s trademark. Zoodango CEO James Sun said they’d fight the trademark issue even though they’re changing their name to GeoPage.

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.

The Name Inspector would like to apologize to those of you who’ve recently contacted him about office hours. He’s been overwhelmed with requests, too busy to schedule times for consultation, and falling behind in his email. So he’s done what any sane person would do under the circumstances: slipped out of his office in disguise and hidden. Office hours are, he’s sorry to say, over until things calm down a little. The Name Inspector will try to get in touch with each of you who has contacted him, but asks that you please be patient.

The Name Inspector is pleased to make an announcement: After months of arduous book proposal writing and revising, he’s landed a book deal with W.W. Norton. Norton is the largest American book publisher not owned by a corporate media conglomerate, and The Name Inspector is thrilled to be under contract with them. The book is tentatively titled Microstyle: How to Get the Most out of Every Word and Phrase, and will appear under The Name Inspector’s nom de plume Christopher Johnson.

As you might gather from the title, the book isn’t about naming per se. It’s about a more general phenomenon: the growing need felt by ordinary people to craft short verbal messages that grab attention and stick in people’s minds. Think domain names, blog post titles, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This book will be a kind of Rhetoric 2.0. Or, to use a more timely point of reference, it will be like Made to Stick for language.

The Name Inspector would like to thank a few people who made this deal possible: Seth Godin, who kindly made a referral to his literary agent; Lisa DiMona, said agent from Lark Productions, who patiently helped with and represented the proposal through several drafts; Brendan Curry, Associate Editor at Norton, for championing the proposal there; and Brendan’s colleagues at Norton who gave the book project the thumbs up. Whew-past all those hurdles! Now all The Name Inspector has to do is write the damn book.

When people face challenges they feel unprepared for, they want rules. They want experts to explain to them clearly and unequivocally what to do. And there’s usually no shortage of people willing to step into that expert role.

Naming is one challenge that many people find baffling, and naming rules abound in blogs, books, and magazine articles. The rules are often stated in uncompromising terms that make them easy to follow with minimal thought. Today The Name Inspector wants to talk about some of those rules and why they’re dumb.

1. Your domain name should have no more than six letters

Some rules are bad because they continue to be passed around after they become obsolete. The myth of the six-letter domain name is one of those rules. The Name Inspector doesn’t know how it got started, but he found something like it in writing. A Microsoft publication called Managing Your E-Commerce Business, Second Edition has the following guideline:

The perfect domain name is less than six letters long, followed by .com or some other suffix. Short domain names are easier to remember and type. However, let’s be realistic: Fewer and fewer one-word domain names are left with each passing hour.

That was written in 2001, but you’ll still find people talking about how domain names are ideally no more than six letters long. Sometimes they point to a bunch of prominent names like eBay, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, etc. as “proof” of this idea. But anyone who has tried to find a good domain name in the last five years or so knows that the six-letter limit is unrealistic. The five-letter limit urged in the passage above is now laughable. Some companies, like Biznik, do manage to find great six-letter domains, but they’re the lucky exceptions.

There’s some truth to the idea that short domain names are more memorable than long ones, but it’s not a matter of counting letters. The name ICanHasCheezBurger.com is far more memorable than the name jfhpnx.com, even though the former has eighteen letters and the latter has only six. Memorability depends on the units being remembered. Meaningful phrases are more memorable than random sequences of letters, for example.

While it’s true that there are several big names on the web that have six or fewer letters, there are plenty of popular sites that have longer domain names. The following sites are all in the Alexa Top 100: YouTube (7 letters), FaceBook (8 letters), Wikipedia (9 letters), Craigslist (10 letters), Photobucket (11 letters), and even Adultfriendfinder (17 letters). What these names have in common is that they consist of familiar parts put together (except Wikipedia, which was named before anyone knew what wiki meant).

So when you’re trying to come up with a domain name, you want to keep reasonably short, but you might also want to make it meaningful. If that’s your goal, don’t worry about arbitrary letter limits.

2. A name should be an empty vessel

You’ll hear a lot of marketing people say that a name should be an “empty vessel”. Hardly anyone gives a coherent explanation of the term, though. Here’s a statement taken from the website of Heckler Associates, the esteemed Seattle branding agency that came up with the name Starbucks:

Unique brand names serve as relevant ‘empty vessels,’ their meaning filled entirely by brand equity. Brand names that embrace market trends and conventions or associate too closely to common words signal a follower’s position. They reduce the opportunity for distinction, limit assimilation of your brand values, and make legal protection difficult.

The phrase “their meaning filled entirely by brand equity” implies that an empy vessel has no meaning. But what counts as meaning? Heckler came up with the name Cinnabon, which clearly resembles the phrase cinnamon bun. That’s not meaning? Do they mean the name doesn’t appear verbatim in the dictionary? If so, they should say that. The image of an empty vessel is a terrible way to get that point across. Cinnabon does not get all its meaning from brand equity. It gets most of its meaning from its resemblance to the phrase cinnamon bun. The first time The Name Inspector saw one of these places in an airport, he thought to himself, “Huh, I guess they sell cinnamon buns”. Cinnabon is about as descriptive as a name can be.

So it’s really unclear what marketing people are getting at when they talk about this empty vessel stuff. One thing they mean is that a name shouldn’t limit a company too strictly to one area of business, lest it make future diversification difficult. That’s a legitimate concern. But it has nothing to do with a name being devoid of meaning.

When you talk about the “meanings” of a name, you really have to consider two things. First there are meanings of the word(s) that the name is based on. Then there’s the way those meanings relate to the company, product, or service the name stands for. Some names based on real words, like Internation Business Machines, are essentially literal descriptions and can indeed be limiting. Other names based on real words, like Apple, evoke concepts that relate only imaginatively to what the names stand for. Two very different kinds of name, neither devoid of meaning.

So, there are three problems with the “empty vessel” idea: (1) no one explains clearly what it means, (2) actual naming practice doesn’t seem to follow the dictate of the empty vessel, and (3) this way of talking about meaning completely misses the crucial role of context.

Meaning is good. Meaning is your friend. You just have to use it imaginatively. Forget the empty vessel.

3. Your name should yield almost no results in Google

This rule is proposed by Seth Godin in his post The New Rules of Naming. It’s based entirely on the idea that customers will find a company’s website by typing the company’s name into a search engine. It is important to be findable in that way. But to be found on Google, what you really need is to be the first search result. The rest don’t matter for findability purposes. If you own yourcompanyname.com, then you’re already halfway there.

There’s another important way potential customers use web searches: to learn about the credibility and reputation of a company before becoming actual customers. If you search on a company’s name and their site doesn’t turn up as the first result, you might think the company lacks legitimacy. If the first several results aren’t web pages that mention the company, you might think the company is small potatoes. Godin’s rule will help a company avoid these situations. But it’s overkill to say a name should only yield a few results in Google before you start using it. What’s really important is that you be able to dominate the top ten or so results for a search on your name. Results after that will probably be ignored by web searchers. So what matters is not so much the number of results you get for a search on a potential name, but how much “Google juice” those results have to compete with you, should you decide to use the name.

Let’s amend Seth’s rule: It’s a good idea to choose a name that will allow you to dominate the first page of search results on Google (and other search engines, of course). That means not having too much competition from popular websites.

4. Your name should start with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet

Guy Kawasaki promotes this rule in his book The Art of the Start. It’s a pretty old-school rule, based on the idea that you want to appear early in alphabetical listings like the phone book or a list of conference vendors. Again, the validity of this rule really depends on the situation. How much of your business do you expect to get from the phone book or from conference attendees? How much do you expect to get from web search, word-of-mouth, and advertising? If you’re relying more on the latter, message and memorability are way more important than what letter your name starts with.

5. Your name should begin with/contain the letter(s) __.

Experts often tell you that your name should ideally start with or contain a certain letter.

From the website of KaZaK Composites:

While visiting Sony in Japan, Dr. Fanucci [that's the founder] attended a presentation on the principles of choosing a good corporate name. There he learned what makes a good company name, including that it should include the letters k, z and x.

Who was that mysterious “expert” giving bogus naming advice in Japan?

The branding professionals at Shift Partners suggest that a company name should begin with the letter V.

Now, The Name Inspector is obviously in favor of being sensitive to the nuances of words, sounds, and even letters. But people, there are no magic letters. Worry about things that matter first, like whether your name evokes ideas that help your brand.

6. Names of such-and-such a type are bad

The company Brains on Fire sometimes advertises itself this way in Google search ads:

No Latin roots. No mashed together words. Names that mean something.

The Name Inspector has already made it pretty clear that he loves meaning, so he doesn’t object to that last sentence. It’s the first two that are puzzling. Surely the folks at Brains on Fire don’t actually avoid using any words based on Latin in their names. They’re probably talking about avoiding a certain naming style that was popular in the 1990s-the one that gave us names like Acura Integra. Fair enough. But no mashed together words? Does that mean no blends, like Viralmentalist or Fiskateers? Wait, those names came out of Brains On Fire projects. Do they mean no compounds, like IndieBound? Oh, that’s a name they came up with. So what does their ad mean, exactly?

Linguistically speaking, there are only so many ways to create a name. The Name Inspector can’t understand why anyone would want to take perfectly serviceable types of name off the table. It’s already hard enough to come up with a good, meaningful name.

The bottom line: when naming, you can follow simple rules that will get you nowhere, or you can do the hard work of using language creatively to help people see your company, product, or service in the best and most interesting way.

The office hours experiment has been a smashing success. The Name Inspector should have done it a long time ago. So the fun continues! If you haven’t signed up for your own $20 verbal branding consultation yet, you can still do it.

And here’s a new twist. The Name Inspector feels bad about excluding people who don’t live in the Seattle area, so if you want a long-distance consultation, we might be able to arrange one using the magic of telephony and PayPal. If you’re in Seattle, though, it works best and is more fun to meet face-to-face.

So what are you waiting for? The Name Inspector is getting in touch with his inner car salesperson. These prices are CRAZY!!

The Name Inspector has recently learned about Lard Butt, a new athletic apparel company based here in Seattle. This is a great example of naming done right.

First, there are the positive associations of lard, a filling and economical ingredient that makes fried foods taste great. The word lard also calls to mind larder, which means a supply of food or a place where food is stored. Having beans in the larder is almost better than having money in the bank, so everyone should respond positively to this association.

Then there are the many pleasant ideas and feelings evoked by the word butt. You can be the butt of a joke, which lends a mirthful quality to this name. There’s also the cigarette butt, a tangible symbol of a smoker’s satisfied craving. And of course butt means ass, bottom, rump, derriere-a crucial body part we all use and admire every day. To paraphrase Sir Mix-a-Lot, we all like butts-we cannot lie.

The words lard and butt together evoke a sense of homeyness, stability, security-even meditative stillness.

So kudos to Mark, Brent, Eric, David, and Dave. Let’s hope Lard Butt goes far. Or at least, as far as it feels like going.

Marcelo Calbucci and the other good people at Seattle 2.0 have done a lot to help the startup community in Seattle. Now they’re doing something else: organizing the Seattle 2.0 Awards 2009 to recognize others who’ve made important contributions to the startup scene. Please consider visiting the awards website and nominating your favorites in a number of categories. If you happen to feel like nominating The Name Inspector for, say, Best Service Provider to Startups or Best Blog from/about Startups, he would have no objections whatsoever. Nominations are anonymous, so he could just nominate himself, but that’s just not as fun. And it seems so unseemly.