How Cataphora Got Its Name

Cataphora is an employee-owned technology company based in Redwood City, California. It tracks and predicts human behavior, often for investigators and litigators. According to the company's website, it is "the world's authority on the implications of personal and organizational behavior as evidenced by the use of electronic media."

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Cataphora founder and CEO Elizabeth Charnock, a theoretical mathematician, said her company has built "the only search engine in the world that will find things that aren't there."

So where did they get the name? Cataphora figures you'd ask. Its website includes an "Our Name" page, titled "Once You Know to Look for Them . . ." The sentence continues in the body copy:

...you can see cataphora everywhere!

Cataphor (plural: cataphora) is a grammatical term describing a word or phrase that refers to something that is identified later in the sentence. For example, in the sentence:

"If you want them, there are cookies in the kitchen"

"them" is a cataphor – you don't know what "them" refers to until "cookies" comes along later in the sentence.

The significance of a piece of evidence is often not apparent until further information is revealed at a later time. The name Cataphora neatly captures our specialty – making sense of potentially cryptic evidence by putting it into its proper context.

Cataphora is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable. Its literal meaning, in the original Greek, is "a lethargic attack, a bringing down, a fall." Let's hope Cataphora's clients aren't obsessed with etymology.

I don't think I've encountered another technology company whose name comes from the lexicon of grammar. Are there others?

Comments

[Jessica]

If the emphasis is on the second syllable, doesn't that make the listener think "catastrophe"?

[Jessica]

Or "cadaverous"?

[twitter.com/NextMoon]

I've never heard the term "cataphora" before, or its counterpart "anaphora." They are great additions to my lexicon of almost-useless terms (like "antepenultimate"), but I'm not sure about using it as a corporate name, no matter how apt it might be. Frankly, without knowing its meaning, I associated it with "catastrophe" and "catatonic."

[Lknobel]

There's a software company called Semicolon Software: http://www.semicolon.com/. Sadly, someone has parked www.interrobang.com.

[Erin]

There is a company called Anaphora (which is the first thing I think of when I see "Cataphora"), but they don't really do technology: http://www.anaphoramusic.com/

[Drew]

Is there a reason a lot dictionaries list the term only as "cataphora" and not as "cataphor"?