The trouble with naming things

It's hard to think up a good name.

In many "primitive" cultures, naming is a magical act. To name is to define. Knowing the true name of a person or thing confers power over it.

Maybe we're more primitive than we'd like to think. Years ago, when I heard about a guy running for mayor in Austin, Texas, I thought "That guy was born to go into politics." His name is Will Wynn, and he did win.

But when you're on the spot and you need to name something - a business, a product - it's hard to think up a good name.

Part of what makes it hard is that a name may mean something you didn't mean it to. I know of a company that designed a new high-tech product and planned to call it the model 420. (If that is not a funny statement to you, go to Wikipedia and enter 4:20 in the search box.)

Complicating matters is the fact that a set of sounds may mean nothing in your language but might have a meaning in some other language. Another company I know of once planned to introduce a new product as the "VQ", until a French person explained that they had best call it something else. ("Vieux queue" is not a phrase normally uttered in a business context.)

Then too, no matter how innocuous and straightforward the name, some people are going to mess with it if they possibly can. My daughter shops at a store called Grocery Outlet. Being a wise-acre college student, she shortens the name to "Groce-Out".

Even the pros goof up some of the time. In one of those two bad-product-name anecdotes, a product naming consultant was paid a huge amount of money and still ended up presenting an unusably bad product name.

I don't have a good answer to the problem of coming up with a good name, other than trying it out on as big and diverse a collection of people as possible. So I'll just hope I don't end up the subject of a story about a poorly chosen name.