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Why Such Unimaginative Nomenclature?
apoplectic asks: "Pick a word. A noun would be nice, but not required. Now, imagine a potentially meaningful adjective or other nebbish modifier, select the first letter, and append this to either the beginning or the end of the noun you originally chose. Some examples, include: JBoss, WebL, GStreamer, eMachine, iPod, and of course the XBox. I realize that the exceptions greatly outweigh this rule, but this does seem to be a disproportionately invoked naming standard that lacks a little 'je ne sais quoi'. Why is this so common? Do you really like this 'standard', or is this like something touched on by an episode of Futurama? Have, we have run out of names that have yet to be copyrighted, and all we are left with is Poppler -- or some hideous cryptic name from the aforementioned 'UName' naming standard. Why does it seem as if quite a few applications, along with many a geeky item, follow such unimaginative naming conventions?"
iDunno
Isn't Ogg Vorbis original enough?
Pick a noun. Is it a trade mark ? You bet.
Pick a verb. Is it a trade mark ? You bet.
Pick a proper name. Does it sound dumb as a product name ? Yep.
Repeat as required.
So yes, all the good ones are chosen. The formula allows you to pick something more or less intelligible without handing your soul and wallet to the rebranding dickheads (Centrica anyone ?).
It's just getting a little stale that's all... we need a new formula.
Although now I think about it, maybe Susan isn't such a bad name for a product. Hmm...
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Name the application with an easily recognizable and appropriate name that briefly describes what the product does. That's good naming.
Coming up with obscure references to geeky things is not good naming practice.
I have been pwned because my
Make some new ones up. It doesn't matter.
... but humans interact in entirely arbitrary ways so ... just make up new words, people. Its easy!
I made up 'ampfea', and among our little group it has come to mean 'any meeting place for electronic artists'... we've had 8 meets since we started getting together for jam sessions, and 'ampfea' has started to take hold as a word in common use among our little crowd.
This whole iThing is just Madison Avenue counting on the memetic nature of human interaction
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It has the (supposed) advantage that it increases the brand value: i- meaning intelligent or interactive, e- meaning electronic, m- meaning mobile, x- meaning experience or extended... Of course, since it's so common it's not valuable anymore. It's supposed to sound intelligent but it's just plain dumb!
Even the free software community lacks imagination in its own way. Think about the recursive naming convention - e.g. GNU==GNU's Not Unix and children - or the Yet Another... paradigm.
The difference is that OSS names are actually smart and funny, since nobody's doing commercial marketing.
My Stack Overflow user
Brand names have been unimaginative for as long I can remember. Dogfood names like 'Pal' and 'Chappi' or 'Frolic' - when you think of it, it's awful! But they stick. They are associated with the target audience and therefore need to be geared to them. Geeks love XSomething. It's new, it's funky.
Trainee BOFH -- Just give me your username & password
Tedhnology simply has to appear to move with the times. Having out of date looking names makes the software appear out of date. This is not what marketing people want, so they follow the conventions. The naming schemes change, but the policy is consistent.
We started off with strings off abbreviations. MS-DOS, VAX, VIC-20. This was probably due to the dominance of IBM, PS/2. Computers were powerful technical devices at the time. They needed a technical sounding name.
When VisiCalc became popular. We had a whole new era of naming conventions (There was an overlap. It takes a couple of years for the convention to become popular). Hence we have products with names that are simply 2 words strung together. Like WordPerfect. In the mid 80's, and early 90's we had computers that were meant to be friendly, so fairly simple relevent names were in vogue, gradually becoming more whimsical., e.g, you know Word is a word processor, can guess lightwave is a ray tracing package, but it would be hard to guess that Opera is a web browser if you didn't already know. Now computers are "cool" accesories, so products have to have suitably cool names. A quick and easy way to do this is to string an initial and a semi-related noun together. Everyone does this. For marketing people, it must be the thing to do.
Owen Densmore covered this in his O'Reilly blog last year - he checked /usr/dict/words against DNS, to see how many words werent taken. There were only 43 4-letter words left from the .com namespace, junk like "frib", and "odso".
There were a few thousand 5- and 6- letter words left, but again, all pretty uncommon words: "upwaft.com" or "bepity.com" anyone? Most 'real' words are claimed by someone, somewhere, and the only option for making a name that uses words people know is to make one up by sticking words together, or letters and words together.
-Baz
Wonder what J. Lo thinks?
As the availability of simple, catchy, unique names that are real words is drying up I wonder if in the future we will start to see more of the "entire sentence as product name" category - such as I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.
How about "It's An Even Better Word Processor" or "What A Great Graphics Card" as product names?
(Of course, some people are already doing this in the form of recursive names - someone already pointed out GNU for instance!)
A little planning goes a long way...
We'll go back to simply using the Social Security number.
These days it's apparently all about condensing everything into two syllables. I've been meaning to write about this for awhile now, as it's something which has been eating away at me. People are developing a disgusting (to me, at least) obsession with shortening names, and not just in technology.
The first I noticed this trend, at least as it swept the masses and thus caught my attention, was Jennifer Lopez. Sheeple were apparently too lazy to make it all the way through five syllables, so they started calling her "J-Lo." It takes one second to say "J-Lo," two at most to say "Jennifer Lopez," I don't understand why an abbreviation is needed. But society must understand, because it's commonplace.
The trend snowballed from there, and has really taken off in sports, more so than it has in tech or consumer products. Jason Williams is "J-Will," Alex Rodriguez is "A-Rod," etc. It seems like every athlete who's anyone now has his or her own "First Initial - First Syllable of Last Name" abbreviation (the sole exception being Anna Kournikova... I'm the only one who's allowed to call her A-Korn).
Why don't we call George Bush "G-Bu" or Dick Cheney "D-Chay?" Why isn't Black and Decker "B-Deck?" On the flip side, Why did WorldCom do all those commercials about "Generation D" - oops, pardon me, it was all hip lowercase, "generation d" - instead of just saying "The Digital Generaton?" Why does AT&T have to market their service as "mLife" - there's that hip lowercase letter again - instead of just calling it "Mobile Life?"
I don't know who decides which names can be cut down, or why. I don't know which parts of society are responsible for dumbing down proper human names - much less product names - or why anyone would continue to encourage such. But I really am getting tired of the disyllabic reduction.
Yours,
"Mo-Shit"
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
The thing that takes the most time is picking a name that doesn't suck.
It's much more efficient to just go with the flow. Creativity is better spent on the design of the app.
This is, of course, why there are so many projects in the "vision" stage on sourceforge and freshmeat. Most people focus on things like a cool name and web site before actually producing something.
Maybe there's something to choosing a dull name...
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
If I were going to have kids, I think I'd take any potential "abbreviations" into account before naming them. Imagine naming your kid something like:
Terrence Baggart (T-Bag)
Alan Holden (A-Hole)
Vance Ginsburg (Va-G...ahh, fuck it)
In all seriousness, it's interesting how the trend towards vocal laziness causes all sorts of new implications...
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
OneWordJavaNamingConvention
I propose we rename GNU/Linux to "I can't believe it's not Microsoft."
_______
2B1ASK1
when will we just drop the apostrophe altogether? probably because it still has meaning. dLink and eMachine and mLife have implied meaning. that first letter stands for something but contracts the label and makes it stand out from normal sentence fragments you might see in everday situations.
How about when law firms and accounting firms just string together the senior partner's names? Ernst, Young, Jacoby and Myers anyone? It still has meaning but would you do the same thing with a technology company or a dry cleaner or a chemical company? well maybe a chemical company (Johnson and Johnson) but when you see those four names together, most people assume it's either a law firm or accounting firm. Tradition and cultural context... they never cease to amaze me.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
eDiot.
And it's guaranteed to bite you in the end if you go that route!
GTRacer
- Go MG!
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
All the computer guys that have been around long enough to produce commercial release stuff grew up in a world of eight character filenames.
Which is a better product name:
XBox
Incred~1
The second one is 'Incredible Game Box' but old school computer guys automagically trunc that to Incred~1.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
You get something cool-sounding/looking with a slightly creative twist to it, next thing you know everything and its mother are copying the formula to cash in on the success. In fact, future naming trends may very well look to pop culture for inspiration. (For real, dogg, this new iPizzle's off the hizzle f'shizzle!)
The next person to write an app with a gratuitous G, K, or X at the beginning (gPornViewer, kFlamewriter, XBitTwiddler) wins scorn, derision, and a swift kick in the ass, absolutely free of charge. Moreso if you use a name that's already taken.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Oh wait, you don't know if you weren't told?
How about MP3? Remember when it was new?
Jesus christ, don't you people understand it doesn't matter? Frankly I like "vorbis". Don't call them OGGs, that's like calling DivX "AVIs", which sounds equally retarded.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Huh. Two syllables, whaddya know?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
When I was in college, I joked about starting up a band with some friends, and calling ourselves [b]iDunno[/b].
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
There are english geeks who understand how to create new pleasing word in the english language, but they don't reside among us computer geeks in great numbers. Part of the reason has to do with laziness, and another part is famiarity. This is why companies have both an engineering dept and marketting dept, rather than one group that does it all.
When engineers are given a spec, they don't have a name for it. Eventually, in order to ease communication, shortcuts are created which bear some resemblance to what the project is or does, or is just a pet name. Mozilla was one such name in the development cycle of netscape early on. If the engineers were in charge of naming, because it was so familiar to them, they would choose the pet name regardless of market perception. By default is not generally the best way to name a product.
Furthermore, it's hard to come up with a name which is both easy (and obvious) to pronounce, and produces a pleasing effect.
"Tlorg" is a bad name because you do not start an english word with the TL combination. Battle is a word where TL is used, so it's not a bad combination, it's simply not acceptable at the beginning.
"Blarg" is easy and fairly obvious to pronounce. But the effect of the word is not something you'd associate with a succesful, useful, and powerful product.
-Adam
For the same reason user interfaces generaly suck, geeks are not artsy. They don't know somehting sounds stupid, because they don't think like the rest of the world.
Pretty Pictures!
Words have meaning; like ampfea, they have purpose and value and associative and connotative meaning.
Making up words is easy, but not the point. It's the actually conveyance of the idea that's difficult.
Ampfea is easy to explain: Any meeting place for electronic artists, but *arbitrary* words are not.
I suspect you use arbitrary when you really mean flexible, adaptive, creative, and fluid. Human interaction isn't arbitrary at all ^^
GPL Deconstructed
Remember when the iMac came out? And when they came out with five different "flavors"? How about when every single company that made a device encased in plastic, from the Nintendo 64 to the George Foreman Grill, decided that their products should be available in a variety of colors?
...and even if they don't, the english language only has 26 letters ... right?
Most successful companies (and some that aren't) know how to copy a successful idea that someone else had, and Apple (at least while under the leadership of Steve Jobs) is a great source of original ideas.
Fortunately, the five flavors trend has died down (personally, I think the flower power iMac killed it). Unfortunately, names don't become obsolete as quickly as the technology they are applied to (blame the version numbers). Look at Safari and Garage Band, Apple is toning it back, and most of the others will likely follow suit. So, iNames and the similarly meaningless (how is an MP3 player an "internet pod"?) naming conventions are a trend that caught on more slowly than the colors, and will die out the same way...
I was offered a penny for my thoughts, so I gave my two cents... I got ripped off!
Remember, the doctrine of transubstantiation depends on the distinction between "substance" and "accident" in Aristotelian/Scholastic philosophy. The accidents are all the properties which inhere in the substance (the Ur-stuff); we would normally expect something which has all the properties of bread to be bread substantially but in literal transubstantiation the accidents of bread are retained while the substance is changed to that of the flesh of Christ. So presumably "carb-ness" is an accident and thus retained in the wafer after transubstantiation.
I have a lot of respect for Catholics (More and Erasmus beat Luther and Calvin any day BTW), but I fail to see why anyone would maintain the doctrine of literal transubstantiation, which is primarily founded not on the Bible (which in the case of "Take, eat; this is my flesh" cries out for a less literal interpretation as much as in any parable) but on a merely human philosophical framework long out of fashion.
No, I mean arbitrary.
... you're right.
... but words, themselves, are completely arbitrary.
Making up a word is just like composing a song. It doesn't mean -anything- until someone else has heard it and derived some meaning from it
The conveyance of the idea behind ampfea wouldn't have happened unless there were a group of people who were willing to agree on the nature of the meaning of that word, and at that point the 'arbitrary' nature ends
Its up to humans - groups of them, preferrably - to make anything matter...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
In that case, I coin "ateoo" At the Expensive of Others. I think ateoo can make it into the vernacular since it's the way most people act now.
..Xerox
IANATmL, IANAIPL
Intel chose Pentium instead of 586 because numbers are not trademarkable. I think the same applies to plain words, thus Office is not the trademark, Windows Office.
If this is correct (and remember, IANATmL), then your examples are bogus, and the reason for bizarre names is to get something trademarkable. Would you rather xyzzy and plugh?
Infuriate left and right
Agilent?
My other sig is extremely clever...
And Jennifer Lopez is a meteorologist.
I created a perl CGI-script some years ago for leeching pron (it basically copies the sequence and range parts of cURLs functionality).
The name isn't really fully related to what it does (in Danish it means hacker/cheater), but it has since come to mean generating or downloading lists of images that are sequentially named. At least in a handful of communities that I know of.
So yeah, my point is that even for arbitrarily named items, it doesn't really matter, because the name will end up meaning what it does, so to speak.
(fusker.com is not my version, my version is defunct, but code is available upon request)
Our first choice is Uranus-Hertz.
Litigious bastards
What about the programs named after their window manager - like Kthis and Gthat or Xother?! The whole Apple "i" obsession (iMac, iPod, iBook...) well, just don't get me started!
#include <sig.h>
Think McDonald's - or, MickyD's. Not two syllables, but still a radical shortening of the name...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Maay of you are probably not familiar with Xaraya, but here's the story of where the name came from.
"Project X", as we were calling ourselves in the early days, decided to conduct a name contest among the development team. Entries were submitted, and the voting commenced. Not happy with any of the entries, I decided to come up with something new based of 3 criteria:
I also felt the name should be a little exotic according to US/European tastes. So, I trolled through a database of Australian place names, entering various short combinations of letters. After a while I had a list of seven possibilities... then I started swapping letters (mostly vowels).
I presented these in IRC, and a couple of them (including Xaraya) caught on. So well, in fact, that the name voting had to be reset to include the new entries. One of our devs who lives in Spain said Xaraya reminded him of the Spanish word for Manta Ray ("raya", literally "blanket"), so I went looking for manta images to create a logo which supported this concept. "Xaraya" won the name contest, and evenually a Manta logo was also adopted.
Of course, this name has nothing to to with what Xaraya does. Making that connection is the realm of the marketing and branding people.
Good idea, but english didn't evolve like that.
Here's an example of a perfectly "arbitrary" word that's not arbitrary at all: Snow
Snow is the word for that white fluffy stuff that falls from the sky. Snow, linguistically, is traced back to indo-european (that weird, abstract language that it was), and is related to Nix (latin) and Niphes (greek). It's also related to lots of other IE language words for the same thing.
Could you just make up words with no meaning and assign them to any old thing? Sure. But if you compose words from existing bases, prefixes, and suffixes in the language, you convey a sense of meaning without people even knowing what the word really means.
Want a great example? Read "The Jabberwocky". Here's the text. Without being able to readily define many of these words, I bet you can tell me what happened:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vocal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vocal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.
The poem about the Jabberwock isn't "The Jabberwocky", it's just "Jabberwocky" and it's a vorpal sword/blade.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
taepoe. :-\
that, and not realizing it had no article. =P
Could you just make up words with no meaning and assign them to any old thing? Sure. But if you compose words from existing bases, prefixes, and suffixes in the language, you convey a sense of meaning without people even knowing what the word really means.
... but ... but ... the words in that language were arbitrary too.
...
Okay, so English is derived from some old language
Its only when humans -agree- to something that the arbitrary nature of the universe goes away, and even then only for a little while
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
An acronym is a form of word, duh.
:-)
I acknowledged that, duh.
Um...wouldn't that be an acronym? While words, those aren't too hard to create.
"Why does it seem as if quite a few applications, along with many a geeky item, follow such unimaginative naming conventions?"
Beside they are marketed by people with more money than brains or imagination. And often to people with more money than brains or imagination. Sad
"With our snazzy new product the iTeam, now there most certainly is an 'i' in your team!"
or.. "we put the 'i' in team"
or.. "You got your 'i' in my team. You got your team in my 'i'!" Hey it worked for Reese's
you get the idea.
But even that language had patterns.
Whoever first picked them (the culture) might have originally picked those patterns based on many different things they saw in their environment or heard around them. It isn't simply arbitrary that "plop" and "tweet" and "crash" sound so much like the things they try to represent(ONOMATOPOEIA). It wasn't a random or arbitrary process.
It wasn't a random or arbitrary process.
Sure it was. Completely arbitrary. Could've gone in any direction at any juncture.
And yes, there was some -planning- going on with languages over time (de-germinification of english, perhaps?), but this is my point... the word itself doesn't do anything. The people who agree to its meaning do.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Mod parent up
That episode of "The Vicar of Dibley" was on BBC Prime last night! ;-)
A little planning goes a long way...
For starters, if Ogg Vorbis's fault is being "non-descriptive", let's think of the format that's more used than Ogg, WMA and iTunes's format put together: MP3.
Exactly in which way is "MP3" descriptive? Well, it isn't. It's just an abbreviation. Didn't stop it from being a success.
Think of "Zip". Right. It's about as non-descriptive as it gets. It's not called "iCompress" or "eSqueeze" or some other descriptive crap. Neverheless, people now routinely speak of "(un)zipping the files". (You could even argue that the "Zip drive" was named like that to ride piggy-back on the success of the compression format.)
Think of "Google". It's not called something stupid like "iSearch" or "eFind". Yet it's so used, that it even became a verb. Enough people actually say things like "You googled it up, right?"
Think "Amazon". It's not called "iBooks" nor "eBookstore."
Think "Dell" or "Apple". One is the owner's last name, the other is just a fruit. Yet everyone's at least heard about them. Or speaking of their products, "Macintosh" itself wasn't descriptive in any way, but it doesn't stop it from being a big thing.
Heck, even "eBay", in spite of having the mandatory "e", is actually non-descriptive. It doesn't really mention buying or auctions.
Etc, etc, etc.
Think of non-computer products. "Walkman" does mention walking, but doesn't feel a need to describe that it's a tape cassette player.
So it seems to me like to succeed you need more like a good product and good timing. Then people will learn whatever short imaginative name you've put on your product.
Just putting a copycat "iSomething" or "eThingie" on a "me too" effort, won't magically turn it into gold. Au contraire, to people like me it will just make it _scream_ "unimaginative copycat!"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Your post reminds me of an old SNL skit with Nicolas Cage. His wife (don't remember who played her) was pregnant, and they were trying to decide on names for the baby. Almost anything she suggested, he shot down because it could somehow be contorted into a taunt-- he was hypersensitive about it to the extreme.
Then the doorbell rings and delivery guy (Rob Schneider) asks for "Asswipe [lastname]." The husband tells him the correct pronunciation is "oz-WEE-pay"
Pause here for a few seconds to simulate me Googling for SNL "Nicolas Cage" +Asswipe
Ah, here is a transcript of the skit. God bless the Internet.
~Philly