Category Archives: language

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Celebrating ‘The Hobbit’: Journey Words, Unexpected or Not

hobbit

Hobbits, by loresui

We here are Wordnik are quite excited that The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens today. While we didn’t go as far as to don Hobbit ears and wizard caps and camp out in front of our favorite theater, we did gather 10 of our favorite journey words (not Journey words) right here.

booze cruise

“The head of the Massachusetts Port Authority resigned yesterday after it was learned that he went on a ‘booze cruise‘ paid for by his agency during which a woman bared her breasts.”

“‘Booze Cruise’ Flap Ousts Board Head,” Toledo Blade, August 19, 1999

In American English, booze cruise refers to “a recreational trip on a cruise ship or boat usually tailored to young people, with the expectation of heavy consumption of alcoholic beverages.” This meaning originated around 1979, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The British English meaning, “a brief trip from Britain to France and/or Belgium in order to buy alcohol (or tobacco) in bulk quantities without paying excise duty,” is newer, coming about in the mid-1990s, says the OED.

The word booze comes from the Middle English bousen, “to drink to excess.”

jaunt

“Such a jaunt was a rare treat to the child, for Isabella Spencer seldom allowed her to go from home with anybody but herself.”

L.M. Montgomery, Further Chronicles of Avonlea

A jaunt is “a ramble; an excursion; a short journey, especially one made for pleasure.” An earlier definition was “tiresome journey,” says the Online Etymology Dictionary, and earlier than that was the verb sense, “tire a horse by riding back and forth on it.” The origin is unknown, perhaps coming from “some obscure Old French word.”

Jaunty, “having a buoyant or self-confident air” or “crisp and dapper in appearance,” has a different origin, coming from the French gentil, “nice,” which in Old French means “noble.”

junket

“Businesses are providing lavish junkets to little-known but highly-influential staff across swathes of the public sector, a Sunday Herald investigation can reveal.”

Paul Hutcheon and Tom Gordon, “Junket Scotland,” Herald Scotland, October 18, 2008

A junket is “a trip or tour,” especially “one taken by an official at public expense.” The word’s earliest meaning is “a basket made of rushes,” or a type of marsh plant; then, “curds mixed with cream, sweetened, and flavored,” and by extension, “any sweetmeat or delicacy.”

The meaning shifted in the 1520s, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, to “a feast or merrymaking; a convivial entertainment; a picnic.” The led to the sense of “pleasure trip,” and to the American English meaning, around 1886, of “tour by government official at public expense for no discernable public benefit.”

The word ultimately comes from the Latin iuncus, referring to the rush marsh plant. Iuncus also gives us junk, originally a nautical term meaning “old or condemned cable and cordage cut into small pieces,” perhaps named for its similarity in appearance to the reedy marsh plant.

milk run

“Tired of the same old ‘milk run‘ to work every morning? Try the ‘computer run.’”

“Coming Next, The Morning Computer Run,” The Milwaukee Sentinel, July 23 1966

A milk run is “a routine trip involving stops at many places,” as well as “an uneventful mission, especially a military sortie completed without incident.”

The phrase, which originated around 1909, seems to come from older milk round (1865), which, according to the OED, is “a fixed route on which milk is regularly collected from farmers or delivered to customers; a milk delivery business covering such routes.” Milk round gained the figurative meaning of “a series of (typically annual) visits to universities and colleges made by business representatives to recruit graduates.”

mush

“I just came in from a seventy-five mile ‘mush,’ but will start to-morrow for Chena. Nearly all our people are going or have gone. I have no dogs, but combine with two other fellows and pull our sleds.”

“The Assembly Herald,” Presbyterian Magazine

Mush, which is “used to command a team of dogs to begin pulling or move faster,” also refers to the journey itself, “especially by dogsled.” Earlier was the verb sense, “to trudge or travel through the snow, while driving a dog-sled.” The word may come from the French marcher, “to walk, go.”

peregrination

“After slipping among oozy piles and planks, stumbling up wet steps and encountering many salt difficulties, the passengers entered on their comfortless peregrination along the pier; where all the French vagabonds and English outlaws in the town (half the population) attended to prevent their recovery from bewilderment.”

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

A peregrination is “a traveling from one country or place to another; a roaming or wandering about in general; travel; pilgrimage.” The word ultimately comes from the Latin peregrinus, “from foreign parts, foreigner.” The first child born in Plymouth Colony was Peregrine White, where peregrine means “a foreign sojourner.”

sally

“Even a captain in war must know the special virtues and vices of the enemy: which nation is ablest to make a sudden sally, which is stouter to entertain the shock in open field, which is subtlest of the contriving of an ambush.”

Clare Howard, English Travellers of the Renaissance

A sally is “a run or excursion; a trip or jaunt; a going out in general,” and comes from the Latin salīre, “to leap.”

Sally, the proper name, is an alteration of Sarah. Sally Ann is a nickname for the Salvation Army.

sashay

“I fell down eleven steps into your garden, knocked on the front door, knocked on the side door, talked to some one called ‘Ma,’ talked to some one called ‘Lydia,’ and learned that Miss Martha Brunhilde Monroe was out for a sashay.”

Kathleen Thompson Norris, Martie, The Unconquered

Sashay, which has the more common meaning of “to walk or proceed, especially in an easy or casual manner,” or “to strut or flounce in a showy manner,” also refers to “an excursion; an outing.” The word is what the Online Etymology Dictionary calls a “mangled Anglicization” (manglicization?) of the French chassé, “gliding step.”

schlep

“This election season, Jewish grandchildren all over the United States are schlepping to crucial swing states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan to convince their grandparents to vote for Obama as part of The Great Schlep, a project of the Jewish Council for Education and Research.”

Nandini Balial, “Students ‘schlep’ To Sway Relatives To Obama,” CBS News, February 11, 2009

A schlep is “an arduous journey,” and is Yiddish in origin, coming from shlepn, “to drag, pull.” This sense of schlep entered English in the 1960s, says the OED.

walkabout

“When the royal couple arrived for a ‘walkabout‘ in some town and split up the street — Charles heading to one side, Diana to the other — people on Charles’ side of the street would groan audibly: they had wanted HER and got stuck with HIM.”

Pat Morrison, “Sarah Palin and Princess Diana,” The Huffington Post, September 12, 2008

Walkabout has multiple meanings associated with a journey: in Australia, “a temporary return to traditional Aboriginal life, taken especially between periods of work or residence in white society and usually involving a period of travel through the bush”; “a walking trip”; and, chiefly British, “a public stroll taken by an important person, such as a monarch, among a group of people for greeting and conversation.”

This last sense is the newest, originating around 1970, according to the OED, while the other senses are attested to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 by loresui]

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Taxi Words: A Brief History

[Photo: stock.xchng]

Taxi, cab, black cab, yellow cab, gypsy cab, hack – how many different words are there for that vehicle for hire? We decided to find out.

On this day in 1897, London became the first city to host licensed taxicabs. But vehicles for hire were around long before that.

The word hackney, referring to “a coach or other carriage kept for hire,” came about around 1664, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but originally referred to a place “now well within London, it once was pastoral and horses apparently were kept there.” Eventually, the word came to refer to “a horse kept for riding or driving,” as opposed to a war horse, and then “a horse kept for hire.”

From the “ordinary horse” sense came other meanings: “a person accustomed to drudgery” (1546), and “a prostitute” (1579). It’s also where we get hack, “a drudge; one who is overworked; especially, a literary drudge; a person hired to write according to direction or demand.”

The word cab is newer than hackney, originating around 1826 as a shortened form of cabriolet, “a covered one-horse carriage with two wheels.” Cabriolet comes from the Italian capriolare, “jump in the air,” so-named for the vehicle’s “light, leaping motion.”

A black-and-tan was “a cab of the coupé type, introduced in New York in 1883,” and named for its colors. An 1885 New York Times article reported that “‘black and tan’ cab No. 257 was going slowly down Broadway when a snort of steam from an elevated train at Thirty-third-street startled the horse and sent him on a gallop down that street.”

Livery cab is chiefly a U.S. expression, says the OED, attested to 1896. However, the word livery is much older, originating in the 14th century, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, as “an allowance of food or other provisions statedly given out; a ration, as to a family, to servants, to horses, etc.,” and coming from the Old French livrer, “to dispense, deliver, hand over.” Livery car came later, in 1906, at the time that motorized taxicabs were introduced in New York.

London Black Cab

London Black Cab, by stevelyon

[Photo: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 by stevelyon]

Black cab, how the taxicab is commonly referred to in British English, is first attested to 1914, says the OED, but didn’t seem to gain popularity until the 1970s. Gypsy cab, “a taxicab that is licensed only to respond to calls but often cruises the streets for passengers,” attests to 1964.

The word taxi, short for taxicab, came up around 1907. Taxicabs were first known as taximeter cabs, where taximeter was “a commercial name of an instrument for automatically recording and mechanically computing the tax or charge to be made for the use of a hired vehicle in accordance with a determined tariff for such charges.” Taximeter comes from the Middle Latin taxa, “tax, charge,” and the Greek metron, “measure.”

In the early half of the 20th century, taxi was a colloquial term for “a (small) passenger aeroplane,” says the OED, which gave us the verb sense of taxi, “to move slowly on the ground or on the surface of the water before takeoff or after landing.”

Taxi is also U.S. slang for “a prison sentence of between five and fifteen years,” says the OED, perhaps from the analogy between a short taxi ride and relatively short prison term. Taxi dancer, “a woman employed, as by a dance hall or nightclub, to dance with the patrons for a fee,” is recorded from 1930 and comes from “the fact that the dancers are hired, like taxis, for a short period of time.”

Taxi squad is an American football term meaning either “a group of professional players who are under contract to and practice with a team but are ineligible to play in official games,” or “the four extra players on the roster of a professional team who are prepared to join the team on short notice, as to substitute for injured players.” The term is from 1966, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, possibly “from a former Cleveland Browns owner who gave his reserves jobs with his taxicab company to keep them paid and available,” or else from the idea of “short-term hire or shuttling back and forth from the main team.”

Hindu Priest - India (LOC)

Hindu Priest – India (LOC)

[Photo: No known copyright restrictions by Library of Congress]

Rickshaw, a sort of human-powered taxi, dates to 1887 and is an alteration of jinrikisha, which comes from the Japanese jin, “a man,” plus riki, “power,” plus sha, “carriage.” The word was popularized by Rudyard Kipling.

A pedicab is similar, except the passenger is drawn by rider on a tricycle. An autorickshaw, as its name implies, is a rickshaw with a motor. The tuk-tuk is a motorized rickshaw of Thailand, India, and other countries. The word is Thai in origin and named for the sound of the motor. The boda-boda in East Africa is “a bicycle or motorcycle used as a taxi.”

For even more on the history of the taxicab, check out this timeline from PBS, this photo series of New York City taxis, and this roundup of taxi related links from around the web.

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The Name Game: Anthony Shore of Operative Words

“I do what I do because I hate ugly words,” says Anthony Shore of Operative Words.

Continuing our series on naming (check out our interviews with Nancy Friedman and : : CRONAN : :), we spoke with Bay Area-based professional namer and logophile, Anthony Shore. Anthony has a background in linguistics, typesetting, copywriting, software marketing, and product management, and has named products such as the Lytro camera, the Fanhattan entertainment app, and Pause beverages.

Anthony tells us how he got into naming, the method behind the madness of the process, and about one very badly named shoe.

You can also find Anthony on LinkedIn and Twitter.

What got you interested in the naming business?

The first book I became fascinated by was the American Heritage Dictionary, specifically the section on Proto-Indo-European roots. I’d spend hours going over these roots from a hypothetical language spoken 5,000 years ago that gave rise to Latin, Greek, English, German, Hindi, Sanskrit, all these languages. I was fascinated that one little root could end up meaning so many different things in so many different languages.

When I was college, I studied artificial intelligence and did some natural language processing and Lisp. From linguistics, I got into a different kind of obsession with words in typesetting. It’s not too far related from the world of computational linguistics in that typesetting, back when I was doing it, was photomechanical. You’d work on a terminal that was not WYSIWYG and would enter codes to format the type.

My obsession with the written word continued and I ended up getting another job at an ad agency who needed a typesetter. At that point I got my foot in the door doing copywriting and ad conceptualization, then moving on to desktop publishing. Later, I moved on to a wine distributor, typesetting wine list publications and looking at the taxonomy of wines and restaurants, helping to organize and present their wine lists.

Next I moved onto a software company, where I became a marketing communications generalist, and then Landor Associates. I started as a naming manager, and eventually became global director of naming and writing, responsible for all word work and expressing strategy.

What types of customers and clients do you work with?

I’ve worked with well over 200 companies, and in every possible industry there is. Consumer packaged goods, wine and spirits, industrial and manufacturing, insurance, healthcare, and a lot of technology. There’s a great need for names in technology because technology is so prolific. Obsolescence is built into the category. Because there’s so much creativity, generation, and production in technology, there are many naming opportunities.

How do you work with your clients in the naming process?

Coming up with the story and telling that story is in some ways the most important part of naming, because what you’re doing is looking for different ways to express the essence of a brand, company, or product.

An important element is what makes the company different, and what their personality is as a company. This is something you can only understand by paying attention to the people in the room. You can come up with a great name that has logic and rationale, but if it doesn’t reflect who the people are in the room, it’s never going to get adopted.

The name development will start very broad, a mile wide and an inch deep. The second round is an inch wide and a mile deep, and focuses on the types of names that are really going to resonate with [the client]. When you begin creative, you have some idea of what’s going to work for the client, but you never know exactly what their reactions will be until you present the names.

That’s also why it’s dangerous to have proxies on naming projects. If a VP has a senior manager or director stand in for them, that’s a very dangerous situation because that person doesn’t really know how their superior is going to react to a specific word.

Something else I do is show names that are both on strategy and that violate strategy. We may all agree what looks good on a white board strategically, but the reality is there may be a great name that takes a different approach. The name never lives in isolation. There’s always context around the name that can help support other strategic elements. A name might follow a strategy that is different than the one they thought they wanted.

What are some resources that you use?

I like using all kinds of resources, the more the better. I’ll use websites like Wordnik, OneLook, Rhyme Zone, and Word Menu software.

I’ve been doing a lot of work in corpus linguistics, using Sketch Engine for example. It’s the ultimate concordance of words. Typical databases have over a billion text entries in them. So if I’m looking for an idea like love, I can be exposed to 10,000 words that have appeared near the word love. There might be a series of syntactic structures like love of blank, and then suddenly you’ll find a whole list of things that people love, like music, the ocean, neighbor or laughter.

I’ll use Wordnik to help me find words related to things I’m working on. I recently named an interactive children’s book line Wanderful. In the exercise that eventually led to Wanderful, I was looking at the world of children. There are great lists on Wordnik that have to do with kids. Words my two-year old daughter says. All the names of My Little Ponies. I’ll start with one list on Wordnik, which might lead to ten new lists.

I might be looking for the word fun. I’ll open all the lists that contain the word that look interesting to me. From one of those lists, I might find a word like wonder, and look at all the lists that contain the word wonder. Then I’ll enter the word wonder into something like Rhyme Zone, looking for words that rhyme with wonder, such as thunder. I’ll put thunder into OneLook and find all the words that combine with thunder, like thunderclap. I’ll substitute wonder for thunder. Wonderclap. It’s a very generative approach to finding natural, fun, unique brand news. And it’s been very fruitful as a technique.

I try to algorithmize my work. Because I like computers and think analytically, and I’m a linguist and I like looking for rules of language, I create formulas that produce creative, good, natural names.

What are some mistakes you’ve seen companies make in terms of naming?

There are names out there that are thought to be very bad. There’s the story of the Chevy Nova. The myth goes that it means “It doesn’t run” in Spanish, but actually the Chevy Nova sold very well in Latin America.

Then there was the woman’s running shoe Reebok launched called the Incubus. An incubus  is a demon that attacks women in their sleep, and so naming a shoe after this demon: bad idea. You hardly need a naming expert to tell you that.

It’s pretty easy to get a large group of people to agree on a word that doesn’t mean anything because there’s nothing to disagree with. The hardest words to sell are those with the greatest emotional resonance and affect on people.

The naming process is more than about taking a bunch of roots that mean love and tacking on prefixes and suffixes, although that’s also a part of the creative development process. The other part has to do with looking at words that are deeper and richer because those are the names that are going to give the client much more to work with and have much more emotional resonance.

Having a more memorable name means the client will need to spend less money on media to have their name remembered. Words that are polysemous, that have many meanings and associations with them, are the ones that are more memorable. But it’s also those words that are hardest to build consensus around.

I recently saw a company change their name from Watson to Actavis. Maybe they were legally compelled to change the name Watson, but Watson is fantastic. It’s human and rich. It has a history and a kind of mythology. This other name is pretty much an empty vessel. Maybe there’s some Latin root that you can latch onto. However, if there was a legal reason they had to change the name, I have compassion for that.

I also have compassion for the issue regarding international brand names. People feel differently about names in different parts of the world. Like Steve Martin said, the French have a different word for everything. For instance, in Europe they generally like these more empty-vessel, Latinate-sounding names. Those kinds of name speak to them more because English is not their primary language.

In Asia, the sound and the backstory of a name are more important than whatever obvious meaning is communicated by the word itself. You can spin any story, no matter how far removed it is from the name.

What are some other challenges namers might face?

Naming has become a specialized industry in part because of the proliferation of trademarks and the difficulty of finding a good name that you can use without infringing on another company’s trademark.

People have said all the good names are taken, and that’s absolutely not true. There are great names out there waiting to see the light of day. It’s only the obvious names that are taken. Finding the non-obvious names requires skill, diligence, and focus, as well as expertise in things like trademark screening – all of these have compelled the birth of this new industry.

I believe, however, that great names can come from anywhere. There are fantastic brands and brand names out there that were never developed by a naming expert, like Virgin, Google, Apple, and Yahoo! These weren’t developed by some naming geek but by creative people who found the right word that captures the essence and the spirit of their organization.

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The Name Game: Michael Cronan and Karin Hibma of : : CRONAN : :

Continuing our series on the art of naming, today we talk to Michael Cronan and Karin Hibma, founders of : : CRONAN : :.

: : CRONAN : : is a Bay Area-based naming and brand design agency that has named many iconic consumer products and companies, including TiVo, Amazon Kindle, and the Kno tablet.

Michael has a background in fine arts. He taught at the California College of Art, Oakland and San Francisco for 20 years, was consulting product development and design director of the SFMOMA MuseumStore, is a founding member and former president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts San Francisco chapter, and much more.

Karin also has a fine arts background, working as a freelance design researcher and founding a creative research company and an award-winning product development company. She also recently received the AIGA Fellow lifetime achievement award.

How did you get started in the naming business?

It has become our sweet spot. Designers have the opportunity to understand a client’s business deeply and help them achieve their goals. We were fortunate to cut our teeth with designing for national and international branding, corporate identity packaging, store design clients – in a very wide set of activities.

We’ve had spectacular long-term relationships with Levi Strauss, Estee Lauder, William Sonoma, Blue Cross, Apple, the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many more. Naming products and then entire companies came as a natural extension of those pursuits.

During the early 2000s, we began to work more remotely with our teams and clients, coming together at key moments in the process to move projects along very effectively. We realized that we could focus more and more on what for us is the most generative part of the process – the naming and identity design. And we could do it as a collaborative process, helping the clients evolve and grow their business through our approach.

We’ve found that our approach has been productive for our clients. One recently referred to us as “ninjas” as we helped his company move through a very narrow time window to create a new business personality, unify the team, and create a platform for their growth, all announced with new company, brand, and product names, as well as a dynamic new identity.

What types of customers and clients do you work with?

We work with companies in high technology, consumer products and mobile apps, community foundations, banking, movie and music entertainment – the category of clients is always mixed. We work with those companies who are making a strategic change with an eye to national or international reach, from conceptualizing a new service, starting a new company, launching a new product, all the way to re-energizing an existing brand. There is a spectrum of points where we get involved.

Minimizing the risk of change and expanding change’s positive branding opportunities for company leaders is essentially what we do. We help our clients answer who they are, and move from where they are to where they want to be. We only work with the leaders and the key decision-makers in a strategic team they pull together. We always have the leader’s direct line and they are in the majority of meetings. As it turns out, that is very powerful. It is one of the things that makes what we do work.

Please describe the naming process. Do you usually start with ideas, or do you find your customers often have their own ideas already?

We never start with ideas just because we will get distracted before we truly know what it should be, or even what it can be.

And we do find that clients come with and have pretty terrific ideas. Sometimes they have exhaustive lists of names they’ve generated but not found yet the answer. If they don’t bring ideas and lists, they do work with us in a collaborative environment created to give them the confidence and excitement they need to bring their ideas forward, appreciate ours, and to find what they need and want to get to YES – that’s the answer!

We design the exact approach around each client and for their project. We work in various ways but the core of our process begins with what we call Deep Listening. We listen and picture the results of what the client intends to do with all the positive outcomes and everything fitting into place, essentially focused on long extended success. We do this as a thought experiment, but we remove any critique from our thinking. We try to live in that positive outcome reference before we come back and look at the project from a critical point of view. There is always plenty of time to critique and evaluate what may or may not work.

Deep Listening helps us understand that an idea needs a chance to live before it can work. It is our way of getting on the same page with our clients and quickly sharing their vision without forsaking the discriminative abilities and successful outcomes they pay us for.

That Deep Listening phase includes a one-room meeting with all the people that will have input on the decisions including the CEO, founder, partners, executive director, chairman – you name it. We get them to speak about why they believe in what they do. We call the meeting an Intensive because many times the outcomes are well, intensive, with everyone speaking personally and responding directly to the questions we ask.

At the same time there is a lot of laughter in the meetings. Plato said something about learning more about a person with an hour of play than in a month of conversation. When you play or laugh, you drop your guard and new ideas can enter your consideration set and the realm of possibility.

And finally finding the right naive questions to ask of our clients and ourselves is probably the key to our process and the success we’ve enjoyed. Asking the right questions is a way to rapidly uncover what is not being considered and many times, leads to higher order thinking. When you get to that point the choices and design become easy.

What are some resources that you use?

We use a mad set of classic and multi-lingual dictionaries and of course Wordnik, plus comparative linguistics, standard search, the US Trademark resources and search urls, all without getting wonky. We need to keep current on business, communication, cultural and design trends while trying to stay as naive and open as possible to new ideas. One thing for sure, experience is and becomes the brand, so we use any means we can to understand and live the client’s product and business experience.

What are some mistakes you’ve seen companies make in terms of naming?

Our favorite is a successful Japanese fermented milk based soft drink that tried to capture the American market, named CALPIS. Sometimes a name can spell doom, or at least something you really do not want to drink.

One client we averted from a potential name disaster years ago was a company that syndicated internet services. They came to us to design their identity after recently investing in the name SYNDIC. They felt the name they had commissioned described what they did. We did not like it because it had SYN in the name as well as a DIC, and the graphic we could envision was funny but wasn’t where we thought they wanted to be.

Syndications were not happy new opportunities, and the name also seemed cold and selfish. We suggested that the naming firm should maybe take a second look. After two weeks the client came back unhappily with SYNDICA, a feminized version of the same name. We renamed and branded them Verio, from the Latin veritas or truth. They lived up to the promise in the name and today are one of planet earth’s largest internet service providers.

What are some new names that you particularly like?

Of those we did not name, how about Pinterest, Instagram, ModCloth, and Zite? They are not overly descriptive yet they communicate the core value being offered in a fresh and appealing way.

What are some trends you’d sooner see die off?

We generally would love to see arcane (fill in the culture) sky god names go the way of the white clouds. If you have to explain the attributes of the sky god and how your company has the same attributes, you have lost.

We’d like to see the overly cute double entendre names split from the scene. Constantly cute works for cupcake shops but a cute name will get more foolish with time. And too geeky names are a dime-a-dozen, indistinguishable from one another.

The oooga booga, zoooma, looma oomph names with too many vowels are hard to remember. Try keeping track of where you are driving in Hawaii. Without GPS all you have are lovely words with extra vowels.

And consumer drug names in general – it is completely confusing to have 2-3 names for the same product, all un-memorable.

UPDATE: We were saddened to hear of Michael Cronan’s passing on January 1, 2013. Our condolences to his loved ones.

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The Name Game: Nancy Friedman and Wordworking

Many of us take brand and company names for granted. We run in Nikes, stare at our iPhones, and hit Target on the weekends. Some brand names become so common, we forget they were even brands to begin with. But how did these names come about?

We decided to talk to a few professional namers about the art of naming. First up is Nancy Friedman of Wordworking. In addition to verbal branding, Nancy writes about words and language at her blog, Fritinancy, and as a contributor to the Visual Thesaurus. You can also follow her smart word snarkery (we do) on Twitter.

Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks as we interview more naming experts.

How did you get started in the naming business?

I was in the right place at the right time. I’d worked as a journalist and copywriter and moonlighted as a poet, and a friend with a similar background asked me casually whether I’d like to get into the name-development game. I started freelancing for an agency that trained all of us in namestorming techniques such as mind-mapping and word-building. I got to work with uber-smart people, exercise my word-play muscles, and get paid! And, usually, fed! (Agencies do like to put on a spread.)

As it turned out, journalism and marketing were the perfect preparation for my name-development career. The first phase of any name-development project involves asking a lot of questions, so that who-what-where-when-how-why training proved indispensable. Later phases require a strong sense of the market, the audience, and the competition, which is what marketing is all about.

What types of customers and clients do you work with?

Well-funded ones.

Seriously, though, I’ve worked with small, medium, and large businesses in virtually every industry: software, hardware, middleware (yes, there is such a thing), hospitality, fashion, medical devices, furniture, food, transportation, nonprofit … I even did one pharmaceutical-naming project, although that’s a highly specialized field that nowadays is handled by niche agencies.

Please describe the naming process. Do you usually start with ideas, or do you find your customers often have their own ideas already?

A professional naming process ideally starts with a blank slate and a lot of questions. The answers to the questions become the basis of the naming brief, a detailed written document that describes the objectives and criteria for the name: what it needs to say and how it should (and shouldn’t) say it. Most do-it-yourself namers skip – or aren’t even aware of – this crucial step.

In many cases the slate isn’t 100% blank: I’m renaming an existing brand, or the client has already developed a list of names that haven’t passed the test (usually because the test hasn’t been well defined—that’s why you need a naming brief), or there’s a code name that’s for internal use only. I do an audit on those internal names as well as on competitors’ names.

What are some resources that you use?

I have several shelves full of specialized dictionaries: The Surfin’ary, The Cowboy Dictionary, From Juba to Jive, The New York Times Crossword Puzzle Dictionary, a word-parts dictionary, and many foreign-language dictionaries. And that’s a very partial list. I use online resources, too, including Wordnik, of course!

But mostly I use my stored knowledge about how language works – sound symbolism, market-appropriateness, and so on. I use lateral-thinking techniques to get beyond the obvious and the descriptive: for legal and other reasons, a “suggestive” name is much stronger than a descriptive one.

What are some mistakes you’ve seen companies make in terms of naming?

Not taking the time to develop the naming brief is the biggest one. The naming brief is a road map for the creative process and a benchmark for evaluating the results.

Next in line: confusing a domain with a brand name. Trademark is a much more important consideration than domain availability; there are all kinds of ways to get a domain, including, yes, buying one from a domainer. You have to face reality; this isn’t the wide-open domain market of 1997.

Next: Confusing a name with a brand. It takes much more than a name to build success: word of mouth, advertising, customer service, consistent communication. Don’t say “We want a name like Zappos” when you mean “We want to build a company like Zappos.”

Other mistakes: Too many decisionmakers. (I like to keep it to four or five, max.) Not generating enough names. (Only about 5% will be available, so you need to create at least 300 names, preferably more. That’s not a challenge for professional namers, but most amateurs find it very difficult.) Not understanding how long the naming process takes or what it should realistically cost. Resistance to metaphor. Fixation on an internally developed name, even when it’s clearly problematic. Ego.

What are some new names that you particularly like?

Beeminder is the very nice name of a website that helps people set and meet goals. It suggests industriousness and reminders, and it’s fun and easy to say – much better than the company’s original name, Kibotzer (sic!). The original tagline, “Reminders with a Sting,” made me smile. The current tagline is more pedestrian: “Solving the Self-Control Problem.”

I also like Weightless Books, which sells DRM-free publications in a variety of formats. They’re e-books, so they are literally weightless, and you get them instantly, so they’re waitless. Very nice.

In big-company-land, I’m a fan of Surface, the name of Microsoft’s new tablet device. As a noun, it draws attention to the device’s near-two-dimensionality; as a verb, it suggests “coming up for air.” And it subtly reinforces the Windows brand: windows are, after all, mostly surface.

What are some trends you’d sooner see die off?

What’s up with the adverbs and forced verbs? So many names end in –ly (I’ve created a Pinterest board with 117 examples, and I add a few new ones every week). So many names end in –ify (Storify, Zenify, Securify, Themify…). And in retail I’m seeing a lot of X+Y names: Circle & Square, Imogene + Willie, Time & Silence, Georgi & Willow, Holler & Squall. These concepts may have seemed fresh early on, but now they all blend together.

Oh, one more: the all-caps, no-vowels name. BHLDN. STK. BLK DNM. It’s as though we’re all shouting while texting. UGH.

Anything else to add?

I tell my clients that a brand name is an arranged marriage, not a love match. If you’re waiting for your heart to pound and your pulse to race, forget about it! You want a name with a good background (meaning, spelling, pronunciation) and good prospects (able to stand the test of time) that won’t embarrass you in front of strangers or bore you at home.

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The Language of the Telegraph

en-first-telegraph-painting

On this day in 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse sent the first public message over his invention, the telegraph. The message, “What hath God wrought?” was dispatched, says the Library of Congress, “over an experimental line from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore,” and “had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of a friend.” Some proclaim today Morse Code Day, while others prefer April 27, Morse’s birthday. Either seems like a good time to celebrate telegraph language.

The word telegraph came about before the invention of the electric telegraph. In 1794, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, the telegraph was a “semaphore apparatus” invented in France, which translated literally as “that which writes at a distance.” In 1797, the word was applied for the first time to an “experimental electric telegraph.”

Wireless telegraphy, also known as spark-telegraphy, is “telegraphy by radio rather than by long-distance transmission lines.” The marconigraph was a wireless telegraph developed by Guglielmo Marconi, one of the earliest developers of long-distance radio, while to aerograph means “to communicate by means of wireless telegraph.” The marconi system uses Hertzian waves “in transmission and a coherer. . .as the receiving instrument.” A marconist practices marconism, “the art of wireless telegraphy according to the Marconi system.”

Morse code, a type of symbol-printing, was invented in part by Morse and expanded by Alfred Vail, a machinist and inventor. It uses dots and dashes to communicate, the dot, “the short sound or signal,” and the dash, “the long sound or signal.” The spoken representations of the dot and the dash are, respectively, dit and dah since they “more closely resemble the timing of the sounds.”

A prosign, or procedural signal, is “any of a set of special sequences in Morse code used as control characters and punctuation.” An example of a prosign is SOS, “an international distress signal, especially by ships and aircraft.” SOS, by the way, isn’t short for “save our ships” or “save our souls.” The letters were “chosen arbitrarily as being easy to transmit and difficult to mistake.” An alternative suggestion was C.Q.D., which may mean “come quickly, distress.” SOS “is the telegraphic distress signal only,” with the spoken equivalent being mayday.

Like all languages, Morse code has its own slang. Rag-chewing refers to a conversation that’s longer than usual, “generally a conversation extending about 30 minutes,” and comes from the idiom chew the rag. Achy digits? You might have morse finger, a “contraction of the finger following a traumatic inflammation of the joints excited by overuse in pressing the keys of the Morse telegraph.”

Umpty, an indefinite number, was “originally Morse code slang for ‘dash,’ influenced by association with numerals such as twenty, thirty, etc.” Thirty indicates “the last sheet, word, or line of copy or of a despatch,” while in the 20th century “jargon of journalism, it came to be a traditional sign-off signal and slang word for ‘the end.’” Seventy-three means “best regards” while eighty-eight means “hugs and kisses.” (The origins of these is unknown, as far as we can tell.) Check out even more telegraph and radio slang.

Then there are the non-telegraph words the telegraph gave us. For instance, while today we know a troubleshooter as “a worker whose job is to locate and eliminate sources of trouble, as in mechanical operations,” as well as “a mediator skilled in settling disputes especially of a diplomatic, political, or industrial nature,” it was originally “one who works on telegraph or telephone lines.”

Most of us have heard a rumor through the grapevine, but you may not know that grapevine is actually short for grapevine telegraph. World Wide Words says the phrase originated in the U.S. “sometime in the late 1840s or early 1850s,” providing “a wry comparison between the twisted stems of the grapevine and the straight lines of the then new electric telegraph marching across America.”

Unlike the electric telegraph, “the grapevine telegraph was by individual to individual, often garbling the facts or reporting untruths (so reflecting the gnarled and contorted stems of the grapevine), but likewise capable of transmitting vital messages quickly over distances.” It was during the Civil War that the phrase gained widespread popularity.

Those are the dits and dahs from us. Till next time, 73 and 88!

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Elementary, My Dear Wordnik! Mystery Words

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes

Today marks the 153rd birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man behind Sherlock Holmes. To celebrate (and console ourselves over the end of the second season of the Masterpiece Mystery series), we’ve rounded up some words about mysteries and mystery solvers.

The word detective, which came about in the early 1800s, was originally short for detective police. Detective is the adjectival form of detect, which comes from a Latin word meaning “to uncover.” Tec is an abbreviation of detective that originated in 1879.

The origin of sleuth is less direct. The word, which has Old Norse origins, came about in the 13th century, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, and meant “track or trail of a person.” This sense of sleuth gave us sleuthhound, a kind of bloodhound, which gained the figurative meaning of “keen investigator” in 1849. In 1872, this sense of sleuthhound was shortened to sleuth.

Hawkshaw is American English slang and comes from the “name of the detective in ‘The Ticket-of-Leave Man,'” a 19th century British play. (A ticket of leave, in case you were wondering, is “a license or permit given to a convict, or prisoner of the crown, to go at large, and to labor for himself before the expiration of his sentence.”) Snoop, another synonym for detective, gained its mystery-solving meaning around 1891. It originally meant “to go about in a prying or sneaking way” and probably comes from the Dutch snoepen, “to eat on the sly.”

While the character Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print in 1887, it wasn’t until 1903 that sherlock came to mean “detective” in general. The phrase no shit, Sherlock, said when someone is being obvious, seems to have gained popularity in the 1980s. However, we did find a mention in a 1976 book, No Bugles, No Drums.

Gumshoe originated around 1906, and comes from “the rubber-soled shoes [detectives] wore,” perhaps because they allow the wearer “to move about stealthily.” Dick meaning detective “is recorded from 1908, perhaps as a shortened variant of detective.” Shamus, slang for a police officer or private investigator, may come from the Hebrew shamash, “servant,” referring to the “sexton of a synagogue,” and influenced by the Irish name Seamus, or James, “a typical name for an Irish cop.”

A skip tracer specializes in “finding people who have attempted to disappear,” with the idea of tracing someone who has skipped town. We couldn’t find an origin, though we did spot this mention in a newspaper article from 1930 about lexicographers and slang expressions: “Of course, I know without being told what a stick-up artist is, even tho yesterday I did not know what a skip-tracer was.”

Finally, private eye was first recorded around 1938, according to World Wide Words, and is “a pun derived from private investigator, via the abbreviations PI and private I.”

Usually where there’s a detective, there’s a mystery. Mystery in the sense of ‘detective story’ was first recorded in 1908. The word originally referred to ancient religious rites such as “purifications, sacrificial offerings, processions, songs, dances, dramatic performances, and the like” before it came to mean anything “of which the meaning, explanation, or cause is not known, and which awakens curiosity or inspires awe.”

A whodunit is “a story dealing with a crime and its solution,” while a howdunit focuses not on who committed the crime but how the crime was committed. Similar is a howdhecatchem, also known as an inverted detective story, which reveals the crime and perpetrator in the beginning, then focuses on how the perpetrator was caught by the crime-solver. In a locked room mystery, the crime is “committed under apparently impossible circumstances,” involving a “crime scene that no intruder could have entered or left, e.g., a locked room.” A procedural is so-called because it involves a sequence of technical details or procedures.

Hard-boiled meaning “callous” came about around 1886. The origin of the hard-boiled detective is unclear although we did find this citation in a 1925 issue of Collier’s Magazine. Hard-boiled fiction, which gained popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, is “ distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sometimes sex.” Noir is a type of crime literature that features “tough, cynical characters and bleak settings,” and is short for the French roman noir, literally “black novel,” a type of gothic fiction.

In cozy mysteries, or cozies, “sex and violence are downplayed or treated humorously, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community.” The crime-solvers are “nearly always amateurs. . .and frequently women” who are “well-educated, intuitive, and often hold jobs (caterer, innkeeper, librarian, teacher, dog trainer, shop owner, reporter) that bring them into constant contact with other residents of their town and the surrounding region.” The blog Traditional Mysteries does a great job researching the origin of the term, tracing it back to the early 1960s. The term may come from tea cozy.

For even more mystery words, check out this list of snoops, some perponyms, and these words noir.

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by timofeia]