Category: Wordlab
The Great Recession of 2008-09 has so scarred us all, it seems fitting to process it culturally through the Stages of Grief. Inspired by this Wordlab Forum punnery that moved me from “quant” to “can’t”, I started thinking of songs whose titles include the word “can’t”, as in Can’t Buy Me Love, in terms of finance and the recent economic meltdown.
So to make all this cant even campier, let’s process our collective trauma over the Great Recession through the Sages of Grief in songs of “can’t”, leading off with an extra stage that sets-up our cultural addiction to the dream of spectacular profits:
1. Addiction — Show me the money!
You Can’t Resist It
Money Can’t Buy It
I Can’t Wait
I Can’t Decide
Can’t Say No
Can’t Stay Away
Can’t Take My Eyes Off You
Can’t Fight This Feeling
Can’t Slow Down
Just Can’t Get Enough
I Can’t Help Myself
I Can’t Quit You Baby
Can’t Live Without You
I Just Can’t Help Believing
I Just Can’t Wait to Be King
2. Shock and disbelief — Housing prices can’t go down!
I Can’t Be Bothered
Can’t Believe It
Can’t Take It In
Can’t Happen Here
I Can’t Tell You Why
I Can’t Explain
3. Denial — It’s just a blip on the way to greater market value.
It Can’t Rain All the Time
Can’t Stop Me
Can’t Tell Me Nothing
You Can’t Take Me
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Rudie Can’t Fail
I Can’t Go For That
Can’t Give Up Now
You Can’t Catch Me
You Can’t Bring Me Down
They Can’t Take That Away From Me
4. Anger — Bernie Madoff did what with my pension?!!!
I Can’t Stand the Rain
Can’t Stand You
U Can’t Touch This
(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
I Can’t Outrun You
You Can’t Win
Can’t Stand It
I Can’t Stand It No More
5. Bargaining — Mr. Banker, will you renegotiate my mortgage?
Why Can’t You See
I Can’t Do It Alone
Why Can’t I?
6. Depression — We’re fucked, and soon we’ll be living in mud huts again.
Can’t Get You out of My Head
Can’t Keep It In
Can’t Stand Losing You
Can’t Get Over You
Can’t Cry Anymore
Can’t Go Back
Can’t Go On
Can’t Get There From Here
Can’t Let Go
Can’t Shake It
Can’t Find the Words
Can’t Get It Out of My Head
Can’t Sleep At Night
Can’t Finish What You Started
Can’t Get Out of What I’m Into
I Can’t Do This
Can’t Stop This Thing We Started
Can’t Stop This
Can’t Go Back Now
Can’t Stop the World
Can’t Let Go
Can’t Get Away
A Fire I Can’t Put Out
7. Acceptance — I don’t really even need a house, now that I have an iPad!
This Can’t Be Healthy
Can’t Deny It
I Can’t Deny
Can’t Have It All
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
You Can’t Turn the Tide
You Can’t Stop the Rain
We Can’t Help You
Can’t Be A Cowboy Forever
Read more: music
Wordlab’s legendary suite of name generators is back! Making the trip here to the new Wordlab are the Name Builder, the Band Name Generator, the Drug-O-Matic, the Morpheme Machine and the ACME Namemaker. Throttle away your creative blocks with these amazing naming tools, which you can find over on the new Name Generators page.
Posted: March 30th, 2010 |
Category:
Wordlab
Our sister site Wordlab, created by one of Igor’s founders (me), just re-launched today in a big way. I completely re-designed and re-coded the site, changing it 100% from the old Wordlab that had remained largely unchanged since it launched in 1998.
The new Wordlab is a full-fledged social network for naming and wordplay, collaboration and creative thinking. As such it is structured a bit differently than what you are used to if you were a user of the old Wordlab and its Wordboard forum, but the opportunities for interaction and collaboration are much greater and more powerful.
Check it out, sign up for a free membership, and join in the fun, either as someone looking for naming help, someone who can lend suggestions and advice to other users, or both.
Are your company or product name brainstorming attempts long on storm and short on brains? Wordlab is ready to help you name whatever needs naming -- most have very low mileage, are hardly ever driven during the week, and are used only sparingly on weekends to scan refrigerator contents and such. Our collection of brains can be picked through in the forums belonging to the Wordlab Groups, where you'll find lots of free for naming and branding brainstorming fun. Jump in and pick the brains!
Tips for picking a brain:
1. Do not pick if the skin is too green–it’s not ripe yet.
2. The brain should be viscous and phlegmatic, yet hold up to a good thumping. Not too firm, not too soft.
3. The end that was twisted from the brain stem should be pliable when you poke your thumb through the outer membrane. If you can’t break the membrane with your fingernail, the brain was picked prematurely.
4. Smell is the most reliable indicator of freshness.
5. Have fun with it, but keep it platonic.
Are your company or product name brainstorming attempts long on storm and short on brains? Wordlab is ready to help you name whatever needs naming — most have very low mileage, are hardly ever driven during the week, and are used only sparingly on weekends to scan refrigerator contents and such. Our collection of brains can be picked through in the forums belonging to the Wordlab Groups, where you’ll find lots of free for naming and branding brainstorming fun. Jump in and pick the brains!
Tips for picking a brain:
1. Do not pick if the skin is too green–it’s not ripe yet.
2. The brain should be viscous and phlegmatic, yet hold up to a good thumping. Not too firm, not too soft.
3. The end that was twisted from the brain stem should be pliable when you poke your thumb through the outer membrane. If you can’t break the membrane with your fingernail, the brain was picked prematurely.
4. Smell is the most reliable indicator of freshness.
5. Have fun with it, but keep it platonic.
[ More posts about company names ]
"The wordsmiths at Lake Superior State University are giving back to English speakers everywhere with their 33rd annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness."
You read that right: Lake Superior State University, baby, has done what Harvard, Stanford and The Wharton School don't have the guts to do: put out a list of idiotic (mostly) bizspeak words and phrases that if used any longer should get students tossed out of MBA programs and cubicle-wads sacked from their consultant jobs.
Check out the 2008 list of Banished Words, which includes the word that most makes me want to seek out fingernails scratching a blackboard for relief: webinar.
Here's a discussion thread that should be of interest to the Wordlab community:
Words that sound dirty, but they're not. A sampling of the gems to be found here:
Aer Lingus
Ashram
assonance
buttress
cumin
cummerbund
Dick Butkus
diction
dongle
fluctuate
gherkin
kumquat
masticate
rectify
titmouse
vibrato
Wankel Rotary Engine
This looks like a natural thread to pick up at
Wordlab, if someone would like to start one.
There's an interesting article in today's New York Times –
Putting Innovation in the Hands of a Crowd – about a new startup called
Kluster, "the newest in a lineup of companies using the Web to channel the collective wisdom of strangers into meaningful business strategies." That has been the Wordlab philosophy for a decade now, minus that bit about having a meaningful business strategy.
The mention in the article of ideas "proudly found elsewhere" taps right into the ethos of Wordlab and our free community forum, the
Wordboard:
Don Tapscott, the business strategy consultant and co-author of the book “Wikinomics,” said executives were quickly warming to the strategic value of “P.F.E.” ideas, or those “proudly found elsewhere.”
“Throughout the 20th century, we’ve had this view that talent is inside the company,” Mr. Tapscott said. “But with the Web, collaboration costs are dropping outside the boundaries of companies, so the world can become your talent.”
Mr. Tapscott, who credited Procter & Gamble with the P.F.E. concept, said executives can go overboard with the idea of outsourcing innovation if, in seeking such help, they expose too much of a company’s trade secrets. But so far, he knows of no business that has done so.
“They always err on the other side,” he said. “They don’t do enough.”
So, if you are in need of free or incentive-lubricated naming help for your company, product or goldfish, check us out. The
Wordboard is up to nearly 10,000 registered users waiting to chime in with advice.
Posted: March 3rd, 2008 |
Category:
Wordlab
Great little article about word coinage and naming by Steven Pinker in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times,
How do we come up with words? Here is a morsel, about the viral nature of
baby names and the human tendency to want to be different, but not
too different:
Many people assume these fads are inspired by celebrities (Marilyn Monroe made Marilyn popular) or social trends (biblical names are popular during religious revivals; androgynous names are a legacy of feminism). But sociologist Stanley Lieberson has pored through naming data and disproved every one of these hypotheses. The cause of baby names is other baby names. Parents have an ear for names that are a bit distinctive (as if to follow Sam Goldwyn's advice not to name your son William because every Tom, Dick and Harry is named William) without being too distinctive (only celebrities can get away with naming their children Moon Unit or Banjo). The trends arise when everyone tries to be moderately distinctive and ends up being moderately distinctive in the same way.
I love that advice from Sam Goldwyn. And that bit about everyone trying to be distinctive but ending up being "moderately distinctive in the same way" reminds me of the clusters of like names we see in nearly every industry. Take
SUV names, for instance, where all the automakers tend to promote a "rugged individualist" theme, then serve up the same kind of names for their vehicles, often named to evoke either the idea of exploration -- Blazer, Discovery, Expedition, Navigator, Safari, Scout, Tracker, Trooper -- or of a mythically rugged western pioneer landscape -- Montana, Rainier, Santa Fe, Sequoia, Sonoma, Tacoma, Tahoe, Yukon. So all of you rugged individualists out there looking express your distinctiveness through your choice of ride, these big beasts of cars are betraying that ideal by blending their names in with each other.
Also fascinating in this article is the idea that naming trends cannot be reliably predicted or engineered, because they are dependent upon the behavior of the masses, and that behavior is chaotic:
Pundits often treat a culture as if it were a superorganism that pursues goals and finds meaning, just like a person. But the fortunes of words, a cultural practice par excellence, don't fit that model. Names change with the times, yet they don't fulfill needs, don't reflect other social trends and aren't driven by role models or Madison Avenue. A "trend" is shorthand for the aggregate effects of millions of people making decisions while anticipating and reacting to the decisions made by others, and these dynamics can be stubbornly chaotic.
This unpredictability holds a lesson for our understanding of culture more generally. Like the words in a language, the practices in a culture -- every fashion, ritual, common belief -- must originate with an innovator, must then appeal to the innovator's acquaintances and then to the acquaintance's acquaintances, until it becomes endemic to a community. The caprice in names suggests we should be skeptical of most explanations for other mores and customs.
Yes. Beware of "expert" opinion that labors to convince you that "scientific" explanations -- linguistics, focus groups, trend analysis -- trumps good old fashioned meaning, story, history, mythology, poetry, rhythm, and shared knowledge when considering names for companies, products, or services. Anything else is just putting ketchup on a potato bug.
Wordlab got some good press the other day, in the Lifestyle section of the Hartford Courant. Here’s an excerpt that talks about the excellent ideas for names of bars and clubs generated by some of the creative minds that lurk in the semantic cesspool we call the Wordlab Forums.
Some club owners look for name advice online. The website www.wordlab.com offers a forum for entrepreneurs seeking monikers for everything from hot-dog carts to big-city nightclubs.
“I am opening a new club in Ohio, and I can’t come up with a catchy name. … It will be mostly Top 40 dance music with some older stuff thrown in, and of course requests! Can you help?” a seeker with the Web handle TamaraLynn wrote.
Responses included “Shut Up And Dance,” “Galaxy Club” and “Frequency.”
Sixtoemoe wanted a name for a club focused on soul music. Responses included “Soul Survivor,” “Bought and Souled,” “Souled Out” and “Soul Beneficiary.”
Posters on the site have to weed through some attempted humor. To a person seeking a name for a restaurant and bar in Portland, Maine’s art district, for example, a responder offered “Chez Snooty.” Another regular on the site has repeatedly offered “Alcohol & Archery” as a name for a variety of clubs and bars.
Some people do get solutions from the site. The owner of a small bar near a cemetery in Portland, Ore., was offered “The Dead End,” “Dead Zone,” “Plotz” and “Spirits,” among other names. The owner wrote back, “Thanks, we went with Spirits! Great idea.”
Several responders urged owners and managers seeking names to keep them simple. A poster with the web handle Intellishag sought suggestions for a martini bar that would play “chill-out and sexy music” for “sexy young people.”
A poster with the forum name, Elemental, responded, “Think `short and sweet,’ ” and suggested several signposts, including “Clean,” “Steel,” “Chrome,” “Velvet” and “Mink.”
Logos and illustrations paired with a name add another layer of style and statement. One of Connecticut’s best known music spots, Toad’s Place in New Haven, uses the image of the well-dressed Victorian Mr. Toad from “Wind in the Willows.”
Toad’s Place owner Brian Phelps says the name was derived from a restaurant “named after a toad or a frog that matched with the French restaurant theme” the original partners envisioned for the place in 1975. The Mr. Toad logo was added later, Phelps says.
Manning, the naming consultant, cites Toad’s Place as a name that stands out amid a crowd of bars and club names that sound like perfume labels.
“There are thousands and thousands of clubs that have edgy, in-your-face names like ‘Ecstasy’ and ‘Opium’ – something sexually suggestive,” he says. “You actually tend not to notice. That’s not pushing the envelope. Something like Toad’s is in the other direction. You actually remember it.”
Remember, Wordlab is the best free naming and branding site on the web, bar none, and we challenge anyone to do better for less.
Posted: June 11th, 2007 |
Category:
Wordlab
