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Waterluvian

I've always wondered what would happen if you gave a popular product an impossible name.

Can you name a company with Unicode symbols?

My guess is that a popular made up name by the user base would emerge.

Which makes me guess that a bad name is worse than no name. Gnuplot misleads.

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There must be other examples, but you're right in the famous case of Prince changing his name to an abstract symbol to get round a contractual issue he was having with his record label. Apparently journalists started saying "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" though apparently it didn't stick? Unfortunately I'm not enough of a Prince fan to know what his fans did?

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/featu...

There is also a band named , or something to that effect. I used to have quite a nice album from them but I can't find it now (I'm not even sure if those are the correct Unicode block symbols).

I think intentionally being obscure is kind of the point for a lot of these things.

It stuck enough. I'm not really a Prince fan, but "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" is what people called him for pretty much my whole childhood. He didn't use the name "Prince" 1993-2000, but it's my recollection that a lot of people kept calling him "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" well in to the mid 200x's. Sure, eventually people went back to calling him just "Prince" once he was using that name again, but "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" absolutely did stick for a number of years.

A good example of a product with impossible name is the 1726 book "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships". Everyone just calls it Gulliver's Travels.

Prince changed his name to a symbol.

“ After the change, Warner Bros. had to mail out floppy disks to news organizations featuring a font that allowed for reproduction of the new Prince symbol, because the symbol itself cannot be replicated in the fonts most publications use.”

https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11481686/prince-name-change-sy...

/. was done in this vein.

fp!

Yes, the page with the famous URL http colon slash slash slash dot dot com

org

FWIW, it took me about 10 years to understand this joke, as a non-native speaker who would read "dot" as "punto".

For a very long time I thought it was a play on "./" in the unix sense.

I the old Presto Opera browser if you entered just /. in the URL bar it would go to slashdot.org

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