The Name Game (1999)

Wait is this Salon or the Onion?

> It seems that when Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don't know what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."

Seriously, I can't stop giggling at this whole article, especially gems like this!

Note that this article is from 1999, which was probably the all-time peak for corporate identity consultants like this.

Quoteth the article "Naseem Javed, president of ABC Namebank in New York, speculates that someday, historians will look back on the late '90s as a low point in the annals of naming."

Yup, sounds about right.

I like HP better than Agilent. HP reminds me of playing with dusty and obsolete but once-really-expensive electronics, like atomic clocks and multimeters accurate to 10 decimal places (I have one in my apartment!). Agilent reminds me of white people wearing white bunnysuits in white clean rooms playing with brand-new overpriced (and off-white) electronic devices, developing weapons of mass destruction to wipe out humanity once and for all.

But hey, that's just me. I can't afford their products anyway.

When Ford decided to make a new division decades ago, they had to give it a name (alongside the low-end "Ford", middling "Mercury", and high end "Lincoln"). The first suggestion was old Henry's son Edsel's name. No one liked that so they brainstormed endless names, and brought executives into dark rooms with projectors, flashing one name after another. Eventually they flashed, "BUICK" to see if anyone was awake. Nobody was.

Then they asked poet Marianne Moore for suggestions. She came up with such names as "Utopian Turtletop", "Pastelogram", "Turcotinga" and "Mongoose Civique".

Eventually they just went with Edsel.

I bought the domain iCapsule.com for an idea I had a few years ago but never pursued. This post reminds me that someone could use this without paying squatter fees. Ping me if you're interested...

So funny, there is a real tech company called JamCracker -- we used them on a project years ago. I don't think these companies should recommend names if the domain is taken.

(1999)