Are your company or product name brainstorming attempts long on storm and short on brains? Igor has over 12,000 brains in stock, ready to help you name whatever needs naming — most have very low milage, 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 at the Wordlab Wordboard, our free naming and branding brainstorming forum. 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 on the
Wordboard, 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.
