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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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WotD Perfect Tweet Challenge – Week of November 26, 2012

Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week.

Remember that once a month we’re giving away Wordnik T-shirts to two randomly chosen players, to be announced the last Monday of the month, and as always, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.

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Gaming Words: Celebrating Pong’s 40th Anniversary

pong

pong, by Trevor Pritchard

[Photo: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 by Terry Pritchard]

Forty years ago today, Atari released Pong, that ridiculously simple video game that paved the way for an entire industry and, for some, a lifestyle. In celebration, we’ve gathered ten of our favorite gaming words here.

chiptune

“Having germinated in the hacker stronghold of 1980s Scandinavia, chiptune music has become a worldwide scene with no clear geographical center. Perhaps the ultimate musical form for hackers, the international chiptune scene spawned directly from the cracking of copyright protection.”

Eliot Von Buskirk, “‘Chiptune’ Bands Blitz New York for Blip Festival,” Wired, November 28, 2007

Chiptune refers to “a piece of computer music in which the sounds are generated and mixed in realtime, common in the 1980s before the advent of mass storage for prerecorded sound.” The term seems to have originated in the 1970s or 1980s.

Other video game music genres include fakebit, Game Boy music, bitpop, Nintendocore, and skweee.

frag

“And how does it feel, Julia,” Oprah Winfrey soon purrs, “when you… what was that again? When you ‘frag’ someone?”

Wagner James Au, “Deathmatch: Julia Roberts-style,” Salon, June 23, 2003

To frag means “to kill (another player) in a deathmatch computer game.” Deathmatch refers to “a competitive mode found in first-person shooter games in which competitors attempt to assassinate one another.”

Frag probably comes from another sense of the word, “to wound or kill (a fellow soldier) by throwing a grenade or similar explosive at the victim,” which comes from fragmentation grenade, “a grenade that scatters shrapnel over a wide area upon explosion.”

griefer

“A griefer is a person who likes to cause problems for the sake of causing them. As the criminals of the virtual world, their goal is to make virtual life miserable for the other player. Depending on the environment, the mischief can come in the form of player killing, vandalism, player trapping or taunting.”

Nicole Girard, “Griefer Madness: Terrorizing Virtual Worlds,” Linux Insider, September 19, 2007

A griefer is “a player who plays a game primarily to reduce other players’ enjoyment of it.” The terms seems to have originated in 2000 or earlier, “as illustrated by postings to the rec.games.computer.ultima.online USENET group,” while griefing is older, dating back to the late 1990s. The word grief comes from the Old French grever, “to harm, aggrieve.”

Related is ganking, in gaming, “to kill, ambush, or defeat with little effort,” as well as “to swindle; to steal; to copy, reproduce, reuse, or save an image, idea, or work of another person, often in the context of materials posted on the Internet.”

hack-and-slash

“Using an improved version of the conversation mechanism from Mass Effect 2 and battles that demand strategic thought alongside the more usual hack-and-slash technique of repeatedly battering the ‘attack’ button, Dragon Age 2 manages an impressive story to complement its more involved combat.”

Nick Gillett, “This Week’s New Games,” The Guardian, March 11, 2011

Hack-and-slash refers to a game or movie that focuses on violence and combat. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the gaming term seems to have originated first, in the late 1970s, while the film term came about in the mid-1980s.

Slasher movie seems to be more specific than a hack-and-slash in that it depicts “the activities of a vicious attacker whose victims are slashed with a blade,” says the OED. Slasher originally referred to snuff films, and came to its more mainstream definition in the 1980s.

ludology

“Game studies (or ‘ludology,’ as it’s known, from the Latin for ‘game’), has spawned a new class of academics who devote themselves to analyzing how the wildly popular form of entertainment tells stories — and what it reveals about how we express ourselves.”

Nick Wadhams, “Academics Turn Their Attention to Video Games,” USA Today, February 13, 2004

Ludology is “the study of games and other forms of play,” and comes from the Latin ludere, “to play,” which gives us ludicrous, “laughable or hilarious because of obvious absurdity or incongruity.” Game comes from the Old English gamen, “game, joy, fun, amusement.”

XCU

Screenshot from machinima, Breathing

[Photo: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by Lainy Voom]

machinima

“In the cash-strapped world of low budget movies, many see machinima as a cheap way of getting their ideas on screen. The technique involves recording footage from games consoles and editing shots together to tell stories.”

Peter Price, “Machinima Waits to Go Mainstream,” BBC News, October 16, 2007

Machinima, a blend of machine and cinema, “the rendering of computer-generated imagery using low-end (real time) 3D engines such as those found in video games, as opposed to the high-end, complex 3D engines used by professionals.” According to the OED, the word originated around 2000 and may be influenced by the word anime.

MMORPG

“Designing an MMORPG is a unique creative challenge. The initial game universe can take up to five years to build and often requires the formation of a complex mythology to provide and maintain its narrative thrust through future add-ons and expansion packs.”

Keith Stuart, “World of Warcraft Cataclysm,” The Guardian, July 15, 2010

MMORPG stands for massively multiplayer online role-playing game, “an online computer role-playing game in which a large number of players can interact with one another.” A precursor is the MUD, or multi-user dungeon, “a text-based command line online game in which players may jointly engage in role-playing.”

nerf

“Across the roster the Japanese company has resisted the temptation to nerf powerful characters (Sagat and Ryu), and instead tried to make established lower to mid tier characters more viable.”

“Super Street Fighter IV Preview,” Video Gamer, March 22, 2010

To nerf means “to water down, dumb down or especially weaken, particularly in the context of weapons in video games,” coming from Nerf brand foam rubber toys, known for being relatively safe. The opposite of nerf is buff, to make a character stronger.

pwn

“‘Some common [gaming] words originated as typos when people are typing fast during a game,’ says Chandronait. A popular word used by gamers is ‘pwn,’ which means ‘to own’–as in ‘you are better than’ or ‘own’ another player. Chandronait suspects ‘own’ probably turned to ‘pwn’ because the p and o keys are adjacent on a standard keyboard, and gamers, during their quick typing, simply hit the wrong key.”

Anna Vander Broek, “Gamer Speak for Newbs,” Forbes, April 23, 2009

Another popular theory of the origin of the word pwn is that “the term originated back in the 1930s in the world of chess when a Russian competitor’s accent changed ‘I will pawn to your knight’ to ‘evil pwn you tonight.’”

zerg

“In some multi-player games, ‘zerging’ has come to refer to a gamer who, often against the game’s rules, creates multiple accounts to get an unfair advantage over other players.”

Doug Gross, “‘Zerg Rush’ Chews Up Google’s Search Results,” CNN, April 27, 2012

To zerg is “to attack an enemy with a large swarm of units before he/she has been able to build sufficient defenses.” The word comes from the game StarCraft and its Zerg race of insects which operate “as a hive mind. . .[striving] for genetic perfection by assimilating ‘worthy’ races into their own, creating numerous different strains of Zerg.”

As for what typing “Zerg rush” into Google does to your search results, give it a try.

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Word Soup Wednesday: Boom carpet, Iron Dome, waggle dance

Welcome to Word Soup Wednesday, in which we bring you our favorite strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words from TV.

awesome sauce

Jon Stewart: “Right there [Broadwell was] talking about how thick a coat of awesome sauce Petraeus is bathed in – the thing never crossed my [expletive] mind!”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, November 12, 2012

Awesome sauce refers to something particularly awesome. The term seems to have originated around 2001 from the sketch comedy show, The Kids in the Hall.

boom carpet

Jon Hagstrum [regarding the Great Pigeon Race Disaster]: “It turns out they flew [the pigeons] across the English Channel just as the Concorde, which was leaving Paris, was going supersonic, and laying down a boom carpet that these pigeons were caught in.”

“What Are Animals Thinking” NOVA ScienceNOW, November 7, 2012

A boom carpet is the result of a sonic boom. An aircraft going supersonic fills out “a narrow path” – like a carpet  – “on the ground following the aircraft’s flight path.” According to NASA, “the width of the boom ‘carpet’ beneath the aircraft is about one mile for each 1000 feet of altitude.”

boydle

Teddy: “And now I’m fat.”
Bob: “You’re not that fat, Teddy.”
Teddy: “I’m wearing a guy girdle. It’s called a boydle.”

“The Deepening,” Bob’s Burgers, November 25, 2012

Boydle is a blend of boy and girdle, “an elasticized, flexible undergarment worn over the waist and hips, especially by women, to give the body a more slender appearance.” Boydle may also be a play on goidle, the pronunciation of girdle in a stereotypical Brooklyn accent.

dabbling

Narrator: “Buffleheads are diving ducks, but this little female has spied something delicious beneath the surface. She’s not good at dabbling, but she can’t resist.”

“The Original DUCKumentary,” Nature, November 4, 2012

Dabbling is the act of “[bobbing] forward and under in shallow water so as to feed off the bottom.” Dabble comes from the Dutch dabben, “to strike, tap.”

high-frequency trading

Stephen Colbert: “In high-frequency trading, computers can move millions of shares around in minutes, earning a tenth of a penny off each share.”

The Colbert Report, November 14, 2012

High-frequency trading, or HFT, is “the use of sophisticated technological tools and computer algorithms to trade securities on a rapid basis,” and has taken place since 1999.

Iron Dome

Newscaster: “The Iron Dome, Israel’s homegrown defense shield. The system is designed to protect populated areas, allowing non-threatening short range missiles to drop into open fields or water, and intercepting those headed for cities.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, November 26, 2012

The Iron Dome, also known as the Iron Cap, is a “mobile all-weather air defense system developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems,” a defense technology company in Israel. The iron curtain was “the military, political, and ideological barrier established between the Soviet bloc and western Europe from 1945 to 1990.”

shanghai

Bob: “Linda, we’re being shanghaied!”
Linda: “Shanghai? Ooo, ancient Chinese vacation!”

“Mutiny on the Windbreaker,” Bob’s Burgers, November 11, 2012

To shanghai means “to kidnap (a man) for compulsory service aboard a ship, especially after drugging him,” or “to induce or compel (someone) to do something, especially by fraud or force.” The word is named for the Chinese city of Shanghai, “from the former custom of kidnapping sailors to man ships going to China.”

trepanning

Anthony Bourdain: “Back in the day, if you had a bad headache or were acting weird or were just out of sorts, a popular treatment [called trepanning] involved popping your head open like a beer can and letting the pressure out. Fun, huh?”

“Chicago,” The Layover, November 19, 2012

Trepanning is “the operation of making, with a trepan, an opening in the skull for relieving the brain from compression or irritation.” A trepan is “an instrument, in the form of crown-saw, used by surgeons for removing parts of the bones of the skull.” The word ultimately comes from the Greek trūpē, “hole.”

waggle dance

Tom Seeley: “Each bee that finds something comes back and announces her discovery by performing these waggle dances.”

“What Are Animals Thinking” NOVA ScienceNOW, November 7, 2012

A waggle dance is “a dance in the form of figure eight performed by the honey bee in order to communicate the direction and distance of patches of flowers, water sources, etc.,” first discovered by Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, waggle dance translates from the German schwänzeltanz, which appeared in a 1923 paper by von Frisch and translates literally as “tail wagging dance.”

wendigo

Nick [reading]: “I came upon the cave of the wendigo, rife with human remains and the scene of many murders and cannibalistic acts.”

“To Protect and Serve Man,” Grimm, November 9, 2012

A wendigo, also windigo, is “a malevolent, violent, cannibal spirit found in Anishinaabe, Ojibwe, and Cree mythology, which inhabits the body of a living person and possesses him or her to commit murder.”

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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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WotD Perfect Tweet Challenge – Week of November 19, 2012

Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week.

Remember that once a month we’re giving away Wordnik schwag to two randomly chosen players, to be announced the last Monday of the month – and that’s today! This month’s winners are @QueenTechnoGeek and @Kotonosato. Congrats! We’ll be in touch soon to get your addresses.

As always, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.