Name in the News: Skiff

If you prefer your reading to be dead-tree-free, your options are increasing steadily. There's the Amazon Kindle, of course, as well as the Vook and the Nook. Now the bendable Skiff e-Reader, financed by newspaper publisher Hearst, is making its public debut at CES, which opens tomorrow in Las Vegas.

MediaBistro called the introduction "auspicious," but asked, parenthetically: "'Skiff'? Where are they getting these ugly names?"

Well, MediaBistro, in this case they're getting them from a standard English-language dictionary. A skiff is a small boat (originally a boat on a ship); the word was imported from French esquif around 1575, and it's closely related to German Schiff and English ship.

An "ugly name"? Not to my ears. I recognized the word (yes, I solve crossword puzzles), got the "boat" connotation right away, and remembered my Emily Dickinson:

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away...

A book as a little boat: what an appealing image. The flexible Skiff device even looks like a sail, an association reinforced by the stylized sailboat logo (see above)

As a word, "Skiff" is easy to pronounce; it sounds fast (think jiff), light (think whiff), and fun (think skip and riff). As a company, Skiff looks impressive: Besides the Hearst millions, it has a solid, experienced management team of actual grownups.

And, not for nothing, the company managed to secure the skiff.com domain. It's not strictly necessary—skiffreader.com would have been just fine—but it does communicate to other investors, and to the business community in general, that this is a serious company that has staked a claim in its market.

Hat tip to Karen Wise, who alerted me to the MediaBistro post.

Comments

[Walter Olson]

The name also evokes one of the best novelty songs Broadway ever produced, Comden and Green's jealousy rant "If You Hadn't But You Did", where it serves as one of a dozen or so imaginative rhymes for the hard-to-rhyme word "if":

If/I had not seen you take/Geraldine on the lake/In your flat-bottomed skiff...

I hope Hearst's Skiff has a flat bottom.

[Nancy Friedman]

Walter: One of my favorite novelty songs ever. Thanks for the reminder.

[Vlb]

I thought "Nook" was a great name for an e-book reader. Kindle, not so much, as I'm not convinced flames and books go together, even in the e-version.

Skiff has a pleasant sound to the ears, with cognates skim and skip. It sounds right for a bendable reader.

[Jessica]

Weighing in from the trademark perspective, I think Skiff is excellent. For most of the consuming public, it conveys nothing and is thus an arbitrary mark entitled to great protection (e.g., APPLE for computers, CAMEL for cigarettes). And for literati like you, Nancy, and Walter above - those suggestive references only serves to amplify the mark's distinctiveness. My only gripe would be that Skiff e-Reader, when pronounced quickly, sounds like "Skiffy Reader." Not as bad as "Nooky book," though, by any stretch of the imagination!

[Nancy Friedman]

Thanks for your perspectives, Vlb and Jessica! I'm flattered, Jessica, that you consider me one of the literati; in fact I'm just an unabashed fan of musical theater.

[mike]

I wonder whether the writer who sniffed at Skiff was thinking of terms like skunk and skank, and generalizing a negative connotation to an initial sk- . I bet if you tried to pin him down, he wouldn't have a very concrete reason for his claim that the name is ugly.

Trivium for you: sk- as a sound existed in proto-Anglo Saxon, but was shifted to the sound we now have as "sh". Since that time, however, we have borrowed many sk- words (often from other Germanic langauges). This has led to some interesting etymologically identical but denotatively distinct terms like shirt/skirt, ship (scip in Old English)/skiff.