Whisper, according to an effusive TechCrunch post, is “the latest social app to capture the attention of a huge — and growing — audience of users, as well as the attention of a group of investors.” Like PostSecret (founded in 2005), the Whisper app encourages users to share secrets anonymously; Whisper’s twist is that users can communicate with each other in public or private. There’s also a do-good angle: Whisper is connected with Your Voice, “a non-profit organization … dedicated to raising awareness of mental health issues on college campuses.”
I like the Whisper name, with its suggestion of secrecy and its long etymological history going back to Old English. (I’m less enthusiastic about the tagline, “Your Secret Public.” My public is a secret? Publicize my secret? I’m confused.) Whisper.com was, of course, unavailable – it redirects to the job-search site Monster.com – and so were modified domains like WhisperIt, WhisperNow, and GetWhisper. But that didn’t stop the company’s founders. They skipped over the .com choices and picked .sh, the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of Saint Helena.
It’s perfect. After all, how better to reinforce “Whisper” and “secrecy” than with a whispered “sh”?
In case you’re wondering, Saint Helena is a speck of land in the South Atlantic Ocean. One of the most isolated islands in the world, it’s part of the British overseas territory of Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha. You may remember it as the island to which Napoleon I was exiled in 1815.
Well played, Whisper.sh. Let this be a reminder to other entrepreneurs that – as I wrote back in 2010 – “there’s a world of alternatives out there” if you’re open to jettisoning dot-com in favor of a creative substitute.
The latest namifying example to catch my attention is Zenify, a relaxation drink. The manufacturer was handing out free cans at last weekend’s Brewery Art Walk in Los Angeles.
Brother, can you spare a hyphen?
At least the makers of Zenify have made up a story about their verbifying suffix. It’s poorly articulated, but it’s something:
Zenify is a Zen state of mind, clearing away mental clutter to the power of the Phi(fy), which represents the perfect balance between excess and insufficiency. When you drink Zenify, you will be in a Calm, Sharp & Focused [sic] state and this feeling will allow you to react at peak performance in over-stimulating times. Zenify helps you harness your existing energy without being distracted by your surroundings.
Elsewhere on the site, you learn that by “the power of the Phi(fy)” they’re referring to the “golden ratio” or “golden mean,” a mathematical concept expressed by the Greek letter phi. What does all that have to do with the exponential numeral in “Zen2”? I’m in a state of not-knowingness.
The “zen” part of Zenify is even more pervasive in commerce than the “-ify” suffix. As I wrote in a 2008 column for the Visual Thesaurus, zen often stands in as “a synonym for ordinary nothingness”:
Zen can be combined with mail to describe “an incoming e-mail message with no message or attachments.” Zen spin is a verb meaning “to tell a story without saying anything at all.” And to zen a computing problem means to figure it out in an intuitive flash — perhaps while you’re plugged into the earphones of your ZEN MP3 player, now available from Creative with a 16Gb capacity.
Then there’s The Daily Show’s Moment of Zen, the brief video clip that ends each show. Satori not included; a better title for the segment might be Moment of Eye-Rolling, Forehead-Slapping Bemusement.
The “Downton Abbey” anachronisms story certainly has legs. I wrote about one out-of-place usage, “to contact [someone],” in January; this week Ben Zimmer compiled a video of several ahead-of-their-time usages and wrote about them for the Visual Thesaurus. Graduate student Ben Schmidt goes further and deeper in a post on his Sapping Attention blog that summarizes the results of feeding “every single two-word phrase through the Google Ngram database to see how characteristic of the English [l]anguage, c. 1917, Downton Abbey really is.” (Via Language Hat.) “Black market,” “shortages,” “mitral valve prolapse,” and even “wartime” and “peacetime”? All rare or unheard-of in England in the nineteen-teens. (“To have legs” = to show potential for a long run. First documented in 1930, “orig. and chiefly U.S.,” according to the OED. Keep that in mind when you write your Civil War novel.)
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Meanwhile, the Wordnik blog looks on the bright side, identifying some fusty (or simply odd-to-American-ears) words and phrases that “Downton Abbey” got right, like penny dreadful, dropsy, and sprat to catch a mackerel.
From another subculture, a dictionary of Western slang, lingo, and phrases, wherein I learned that a “banjo” is a miner’s term for a short-handled shovel and “goat meat” is venison killed out of season. As far as I could ascertain, the lexicon is free of Deadwood-esque naughty words.
Henry Hitchings, author of The Language Wars, talks to The Browser about “stupid myths” about the English language, e.g., “that Americans are ruining English or that American English is worse.” That, says Hitchings, “is just an absurd thing to say.”
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Speaking of stupid myths, did your fourth-grade teacher tell you there was a “rule” about never ending a sentence with a preposition? Then I implore you to listen to Slate’s new Lexicon Valley podcast, “Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From?” And worry no more about what you end your sentences with.
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And speaking of sentences and endings, here’s an appropriate cartoon by Wiley, via Mighty Red Pen:
Last Sunday, a New York Times story about life coaches in their 20s (“Should a Life Coach Have a Life First?”—in the Style section, of course) mentioned a website called Noomii.com, “a centralized online coach directory where coaches pay as little as $19 to advertise their services, in the hope that potential clients find their bios, fees and picture most suitable to their own needs.”
Does a 45-year-old with new professional ambitions really want to visit a site with a name that flouts conventional spelling with such whimsical abandon? Or, to put it more accurately, a site with a name that abandons conventionally conventional spelling to so fully embrace the contrived whimsy of a web startup struggling to find an available domain name?
My own two cents: If anything, “Noomii” is too conventional. In fact, I couldn’t help thinking I’d seen it before.
NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.) was a GM-Toyota auto-assembly plant in Fremont, California. It closed in 2010 and reopened several months later as a Tesla assembly plant. So you might say that Tesla is the new NUMMI.
I’d hoped never to revisit the subject of -ly names, which I covered—exhaustively, I thought—in an August post that listed 29 such names, including Chirply, Erply, Zerply, and Estately. But a news item on TechCrunch today makes a follow-up inevitable, if not welcome.
The item: Enterprise applications and services company Infor has paid $100,000 for Local.ly. “.ly” is the country code for Libya.
The same post noted that Facebook last month paid an undisclosed sum for Friend.ly.
Adverb-style names: the trend without end.
More evidence: Twitter friend Anthony recently pointed me to 500 Startups, which provides seed funding for new companies. Anthony wanted me to check out those companies’ names. “Brace yourself,” he warned.
Indeed. The companies themselves may be innovative, but you’d never know it from their names. We’re still seeing droppd vowls (Forrst, GoVoluntr, Redeemr, Spinnakr), diacritical abuse (Cădee, a golf site), multiple Dailys (DailyAisle, DailyGobble, DailyWorth), and -ly names. Lots of -ly names. (And one “-li” name.)
The 500 Startups roster includes:
Central.ly, “connecting local businesses to the web.”
Contactually, “an email interface for your CRM.”
Graphic.ly “provides an immersive social experience and marketplace around digital comics and associated merchandise.”
Lovely “takes the frustration out of your apartment hunt.” (I’ve included this -ly name even though it’s an adjective, not an adverb. To me it suggests a fashion or beauty site—or online dating—rather than “this lovely apartment.”)
Recurly “gracefully handles all the complexities of subscription billing and recurring payments.”
Rewardli “lets self-employed and small business owners leverage the buying power in their social networks so they can get better deals on the products and services they need.”
Texting.ly “enables businesses to easily and inexpensively interact.”
More evidence: Last week I read on TechCrunch about Womply (“Amazing offers loaded to your credit cards”). Womply has a cartoon mascot, Mr. Wombat. I can’t explain the shift from B to P; I’m guessing “Wombly” would have risked sounding like an obstetrics service.
Last week also brought news, via email, of Grammarly, which calls itself “the world’s best grammar checker,” an audacious assertion that remains to be proved. I ran a short passage from one of my recent blog posts through Grammarly; it dinged me on “passive voice use” and “writing style” without telling me why. If anyone’s tried the service and has good (or bad) things to say about it, please let me know.
And still more: Book.ly calls itself “the better way to buy textbooks.” Posterly has something to do with posters, events, and venues, but the writing is so vague and amateurish I couldn’t tell for sure. (“Browse posters, listen and see where it’s going on” does not tell me anything I need to know. “It”?)
Finally—or so one hopes—there’s Yummly (“Every recipe in the world”). The enterprise is well funded, the site is attractively designed, and the brand is cleverly extended (the blog is called “Nibbles & Bits”), but the name is, um, repeating on me.
If you’re keeping score, we’re up to 43 -ly names.
UPDATE #2, Nov. 11: Oh look, another -ly startup: Giftly.
The last laugh belongs to Jotly (“Rate Everything”), a fake and very funny enterprise from Firespotter Labs. Jotly’s home page declares “Everything about your life is exciting. To everyone.” The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal notes that the Jotly video “manages to send up nearly every startup cliché in just two minutes.” See for yourself:
A couple of years ago I published a post about the importance of writing a naming brief before you start your naming project. I thought I’d said all that needed to be said on the topic, but I continue to get queries that suggest more advice may be needed. So here are detailed guidelines for anyone (a) embarking on a do-it-yourself naming exercise or (b) planning to engage the services of a professional name developer.
Here, for starters, is what a naming brief is not:
A naming brief is not a business plan. Your cash-flow projections and exit strategy are vitally important to your business, but they aren’t relevant to the naming exercise.
1. Write the naming brief in the third person, even if it’s for your own company. This will help you take a step back and look objectively, even skeptically, at your own project.
2. If you’ve been using a placeholder name or a code name for your company or product, stop. Now. Instead, use “NewCo” or “NewProduct” or “XYZ” throughout the naming brief to talk about your project.
Here’s how New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto begins “Famous Names,” in the magazine’s October 3 issue: with an edge-of-your-seat account of the naming process that resulted in … the BlackBerry! In 1998! Stop the presses!
That story was already well known to those of us in the branding business, and to many civilians as well, when Alex Frankel related it in greater detail in his book Wordcraft, which was published in 2004. It was repeated in newspapers and magazines. But maybe you haven’t heard it. In that case, read the New Yorker article. Yes, it’s behind a paywall. Sorry about that.
You should also read Colapinto’s article if you’ve never heard the story of Ford Motor Company and the branding of the Edsel. It occurred in 1957, and it’s been told in print about a zillion times. But maybe it was new to John Colapinto and his editors.
I wonder about those editors, though—or, more specifically, about the magazine’s vaunted fact-checkers. Maybe they were on vacation, or replaced by interns, when this quote from the story’s protagonist, David Placek, made it into print: “You want to name it something that the big guys—A.T.&T., Southwestern Bell, California Bell—would never think of.”
Memo from the Left Coast: there never was a “California Bell,”* only Pacific Bell. Oh, and while I’m being picky: New Yorker, may I introduce you to Snopes.com? I don’t believe you’ve met, because you clearly never read the authoritative debunking of the Chevy Nova myth. Nova does not mean “no go” in Spanish; that's no va, which has a stress on the second syllable rather than the first. As a matter of fact, the Chevy Nova sold quite briskly in Spanish-speaking markets.
Slightly longer answer: Sometimes there are good reasons to alter the spelling of a name, but trademark protection is never one of them.
This persistent myth—“If we misspell the name we can get the trademark”—resurfaced this week amid the fuss over Netflix’s newly announced movies-by-mail service, Qwikster. (If you managed to miss the kerfuffle, read my post about it.) An MBA student tweeted that the kree8tive spelling of Qwikster made the name “trademarkable.” (I hope she wasn’t taught this in a marketing class.) And yesterday Brand New, the influential corporate-design blog, had this to say about Qwikster:
A silly name with such a ridiculous spelling that it makes Syfy and Cloo look like the authors of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Sure, it’s probably a breeze to trademark it but so would be Peenoz, that doesn’t mean it should be chosen.
The little adverbial suffix is really getting around in startup-land. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about 27 company names that end in –ly or dot-ly (the Libyan country code). Here are three more I recently discovered.
Versly calls itself “a better way to work together” inside Microsoft Office. The San Francisco startup (started by a team “comprised of [no! no! no!] serial entrepreneurs and rockstar talent,” just like all Bay Area startups) was recently acquired by Cisco but appears to be keeping its unexplained name.
Forkly is a new iPhone app that “shows you where to go and what’s tasty there.”
Erply sounds like a symptom of gastric distress—perhaps what you’d say after being too successful with Forkly—but it isn’t: it’s a new credit-card-payment system for the iPad. Before the recent launch of that application, Erply, which sometimes likes to spell its name in ALL CAPS, provided business-management services to small companies. Erply was founded in Estonia in 2009, but “ERP” isn’t Estonian: its an acronym for enterprise resource planning.
Then there’s a red herring: Zerply, “a professional network built around people who love what they do.”
One of the founders, Christofer Karltorp, is Swedish; another, Taaniel Jakobs, is Estonian. (Does “urply” sound particularly euphonious in Estonian? Anyone?) Adverbs were not on their minds, according to the About page:
The name Zerply, which is derived from serious play, came to C and T in the wee hours of the night in Tallinn in the summer of -09.
Got that? They somehow elided “serious play”—charmingly accented, no doubt—into “Zerply.” Which does not sound like either “serious” or “play” to a native speaker of English. No, it just sounds like anotherdumbportmanteau. Go figurely.
