Other Voices, Other Names

I'll have something original up later this week; in the meantime, enjoy what some of my confrères in nomenclature have to say:

From Killian & Company¹, an ad agency in Chicago, "The Curse of the Three-Initial Name," whose very first sentence had me pumping my fist and saying "Yessss!":

Naming a company should never be left to its owners; their lack of objectivity often leads to the dreaded Three Initial Company Name, a mis-branding mistake that puts them at a permanent disadvantage.

You know what they're talking about: TCL, ZTE, BYD, etc. (All of those acronyms are the "names" of actual Chinese companies. Let's just say that China is a mighty nation that excels at many endeavors, but branding is not among them.)

Killian's conclusion:

[A] zero-content, opaque name is (transparently) all about you, and not about your customer. It's not about what they need or want, has no implied benefit, takes no position, fails to differentiate, and conveys bupkes² to prospects who want to be persuaded. A three-letter puzzle name is an inside joke, with the customer left out.

(Earlier in this essay Killian uses the expression "tinker's damn," which I had learned as "tinker's dam." Turns out the latter is a bowdlerized spelling. Who knew? Well, these guys, for one.)

*

NameWire, the blog of Strategic Name Development in Minneapolis, is generally a straightforward chronicle of branding and naming news. But yesterday Diane Prange cut loose with "2008 Celebrity Baby Names Find Inspiration from Popular Product Names." I wish it were satire; alas, all names are reported accurately. For example, in product naming we have the "Invented Spelling" category--the RAZR phone, Geox shoes. Parallels in celebrity baby naming include Wynter (the offspring of Brittany and Harold Perrineau, whoever they may be) and Jaxson (child of Eric Mabius, of "Ugly Betty"). "Place Names" brands include Amazon, Olympus, Oshkosh, and Alamo; actual human parents have named their unsuspecting babies Bronx (Ashlee Simpson), Egypt (Paris Bennett), and Dakota (Jessica Lynch). Don't miss the sly dig at the very end of the post.

___

¹ While you're visiting the Killian site, do peruse the Cover Letters from Hell, but preferably not while you're eating unless you don't mind laughing so hard you choke. Even the Killian Contact Us page is funny. ("Fax? Fuggetaboutit. Faxing is sooooo 20th century.")

² I love that they used bupkes here. It's one of my favorite words. Say it a few times. See what I mean?

Comments

[Jon Carroll]

Harold Perrineau is (or was -- you never can tell) on Lost; he kept getting kidnapped or killed and then showing up again. He has a son, Walt -- a perfectly sensible name -- who now seems to have become an agent of supernatural entities.

[Nancy Friedman]

@Jon: Many thanks. I'm a bad pop-cult student: I don't watch Lost. Or Heroes. Or Mad Men.

[Glen Turpin]

Two related peeves:

1. Referring to a company by its ticker symbol rather its name.

2. Products with initials for names. I once worked for a company that named most of its products using three letter acronyms. It became so bad that even employees didn't know what they meant.

[Amy Reynaldo]

The Harold Perrineau fans bubble to the surface—he was also in that Anthony Hopkins movie about the bear, The Edge (written by Mamet). Hopkins is the rich man, and he invites Alec Baldwin and a photographer played by Perrineau out to his cabin and eventually damn near everyone (except the billionaire) gets et by a bear. You know the cinematic rule, "The brother always gets it first"? Perrineau's indeed first on the menu. There's a lot of screaming. He's a memorable screamer.

[Drew]

Perrineau is also memorable to people who were teenagers in the mid-nineties as the cross-dressing Mercutio in Baz Luhrman's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Now there's a bad name, what with the plus sign and the needless reference to the author.

[Tom Adams]

I once had a housemate who had worked for a company named NBI, which of course stood for Nothing But Initials

[Nick]

I've just realized that I've read "bupkes or bupkis" (usually in Lawrence Sanders novels) but never actually heard it said. Thought it was one syllable.