Google has a new AI-assisted chatbot, and—surprise!—it isn’t called GoogleAI. It’s called Bard, which is an excellent name and not, I’m told on good authority, an acronym, a backronym, or an eponym.
Image via Tom’s Guide
Too bad about Bard’s snafu* last week when it attempted to answer a question about NASA’s** James Webb Space Telescope. But I’m here to praise Bard, not to bury it in smarty-pants ridicule.
The Bard of Avon, aka William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon
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“It is not a war on Russian TV,” Stanislav Kucher, a Russian television host, told the New York Times in an article published March 8, 2022. “You will not see explosions, you will not see strikes on neighborhoods where civilians live, you will not see a lot in terms of troops, soldiers, heavy armored vehicles or anything like that.”
How to debunk—or even prebunk—Russia’s propaganda and disinformation? One answer is the work done by an open-source intelligence (OSINT) organization called Bellingcat. Founded by British journalist/blogger Eliot Higgins in 2014 and headquartered in the Netherlands, Bellingcat has researchers in more than 70 countries; it uses “publicly available data and citizen journalist analysis” to advance “narratives of conflict, crime, and human rights abuses.” Geolocation tags, radar data, and satellite images are among the tools that Bellingcat researchers have employed in investigations from Syria to Yemen to Eastern Europe.
Bellingcat’s elegant wordmark
You can learn more about Bellingcat from its excellent website and Twitter feed; from a March 2021 interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air”; from a February 27, 2022, CBC story about Russian disinformation,; from a February 1, 2022, PBS interview with Eliot Higgins; and from a March 8, 2022, story in the Atlantic headlined “The Information War Isn’t Over Yet.” Higgins has also published a book, We Are Belllingcat (2021); when The Guardian reviewed it in February 2021, it called the book “a manifesto for optimism in a dark age”:
It argues that “cyber-miserabilism” – the doomy belief that big tech and bad actors have permanently screwed our democracy – is wrong. Instead, Higgins hails the internet as an “extraordinary gift”. In his view, facts still matter, accountability is possible, and people still care about the difference between truth and lies.
(I wrote about “miserabilism” in 2016. “Cyber-miserabilism” is a nice new twist.)
My focus here, however, is the Bellingcat name, which I’ve admired for years. I' regret only that it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to prompt me to finally write about it.
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“The Internet Is Rotting,” reads the headline, and it’s no overstatement. The article beneath the hed, published in The Atlantic on June 30, 2021, was written by Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who has spent a lot of time thinking about the World Wide Web and its discontents. He’s worried, as we all should be, about the alarming impermanence of our digital artifacts. And he’s proposing solutions.
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It’s not often that I have a chance to write about the intersection of naming and swimming, two of my primary interests. But in the last seven days I’ve seen two swim-related names that caught my eye, for better and for worse.
I remember reading about Swimply—“a marketplace that connects owners of underutilized swimming pools with people seeking to gather, swim and escape locally”—not long after the company launched in June 2018. “That’s a really bad name,” I thought back then. “But hey—the founder is only 20 years old. Of course he’ll change it!” Right? Wrong.
It’s still Swimply—a portmanteau* of swim and simply—and it’s still bad.
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Ads for erectile-dysfunction drugs are so ubiquitous on cable-news channels that I rarely give them more than a glance. But a few months ago I saw an ad for an ED service whose name caught my attention: Roman. Nice, I thought: A classical allusion with man embedded in the name.
I no longer remember exactly which ad I saw, but this long-form spot should give you the idea of Roman’s cocky positioning. Yes, I said cocky.
I was interested enough to do some research. And then I was even more interested.
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Women’s-wear retailer Anthropologie is launching a new “inclusively sized” (women’s 16 to 26) collection today. The collection’s name is clear, simple, and elegant: APlus.
Anthropologie’s last foray into fashion sub-branding was the misbegotten BHLDN, which I wrote about in 2011. I am happy to report that APlus is a vast improvement: The capital A evokes the parent brand, and the “plus” in this context is positive rather than pejorative. My favorite label for this category remains Alexander McCall Smith’s “traditionally sized,” but APlus gets a high grade from me, too.
(For more on the use of “plus” in retail – you may be interested to know that at one time in U.S. history the category was called “stout” – see my 2015 post “Plus Is Equal.”)
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Where do you find a brand name? More specifically, where do you find a powerful, memorable, lasting brand name?
The answer, in one famous instance: outside the window.
In 1982, computer scientists John Warnock and Charles Geschke were working in Warnock’s garage in Los Altos, California, on a page description language for controlling printing. The product would end up being called PostScript; in 1985, Warnock and Geschke would license it to Apple.
PostScript is a solid product name. But Warnock and Geschke, who had been colleagues at Xerox PARC, had bigger plans. They needed a company name that wasn’t defined by, or limited to, a single product.
They found that name when they looked outside the garage window and saw Adobe Creek.
A fallen redwood in Adobe Creek. (Wikipedia)
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Years ago, I named the world’s first “bidirectional” condom, so this story really spoke to me:
Diverse & Resilient, an LGBTQ organization in Milwaukee, decided to do something about the bland branding of free condoms. So it partnered with a local marekting agency, Cramer Krasselt, to create Naughty Bags, condoms designed by teens for teens. According to Adweek, the condoms are made “to be sex-positive, humorous, and cool” and feature “witty names like Pork Parka, Pelvic Poncho, Scuba Gear, Surge Protector and—our favorite—Papa Stopper.” Brilliant – in every sense.
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What’s so special about “Gateway”? Not much, at first appraisal. The word appears in more than 600 trademarks, including that of a pioneering U.S. computer company founded in 1985 in Sioux City, Iowa. (That company, whose original name was Gateway 2000, used a Holstein cow as its mascot; it was bought in 2007 by Taiwan-based Acer, which also acquired Gateway.com and which now produces computers under the Gateway brand.)
“Gateway” names abound in the San Francisco Bay Area thanks to the region’s association with the Golden Gate and the bridge that spans it. There are Gateway apartments, a Gateway Bank, a Golden Gateway hotel, and a long-planned Gateway Park at the foot of (confusingly) the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.
But the Gateway I want to praise here is Oakland-based Gateway Incubator, which is named for a different sort of gateway.
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It’s hard to stay clean when you’re sleeping on the streets. A new San Francisco nonprofit, Lava Mae, has an ingenious remedy: transforming old Muni buses into mobile bathrooms, complete with stall showers and toilets, that travel to neighborhoods with the greatest need.
Lave Mae and its founder, former public-relations executive Doniece Sandoval, were featured in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week on the occasion of the unveiling of Bus No. 2. Sandoval’s plans include expansion throughout California.
According to the Chronicle story:
Lava Mae’s simple solution of providing homeless people with showers and toilets has captured the attention of people around the world, many of whom have asked Sandoval to help them create a similar program.
To deal with the huge interest, Sandoval is working with the International Centre for Social Franchising, which is based in London but also has an office in San Francisco. It seeks to help organizations with a social benefit replicate their work in other places around the world.
Sandoval has decided to focus on serving 30,000 homeless people around California by 2020 — and recently met with state Sen. Holly Mitchell of Los Angeles to discuss a Lava Mae-type program there.
There’s a feel-good story behind the Lava Mae name, too. Here’s how the organization’s website tells it (verbatim):
In Spanish, “lavame” means “wash me”
In our culture, we refer to vehicles in the feminine as in, “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
In the South, (where our founder grew up), it’s not uncommon for people to have two first names e.g Billy Bob, Peggy Sue. Putting it all together gave birth to the name Lava Mae
OK, the copy needs some, um, cleaning up. If you want to be picky about it – hey, it’s in my job description! – it’s “lávame,” with an acute accent to mark the stress on the first syllable. And I cringed a little at the bio that reads “Brett is the principle and founder of StudioTerpeluk.”
I’ll stop quibbling now and instead reaffirm that I like the Lava Mae name: it’s friendly, personal, down-home, clever, and bilingual. (The echoes of Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae, which also aim to help people in need, may be intentional.) And I applaud the work Lava Mae is doing. In a region dominated by whiz-kid techpreneurs whose idea of “making the world a better place” is selling an app that does stuff your mom used to do for you, this is a truly creative and, yes, disruptive initiative.
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Related: Pee wall.
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