Got a company or a product or a website you need to name? Well, be wary of the potential pitfalls: trademark disputes; pronounceability; being mistaken for a dead body...
Name developer Nancy Friedman explains how she helps companies find the right names, and why so many currently end in '-ify'.
Plus: The Allusionist's origin story, with Roman Mars.
READIFY:
Nancy's blog Fritinancy is essential reading about the language of commerce and naming trends.
Learn a bit more about Nancy's job of developing names in this Wordnik interview.
Nancy's colleague Chris Johnson, aka The Name Inspector, has been tracking the -ify name trend for quite a while.
There already IS a Word Detective, and here they are on the history of 'trend'.
You know Roman Mars loves naming things since he appeared on the Eponyms I episode. There's also a 99% Invisible episode about name development, and he talks about naming his children on The Longest Shortest Time.
The transcript of this episode is at theallusionist.org/transcripts/brand.
P.S. Nancy's verdict is in on 'The Allusionist' as a name.
RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
xeric
CREDITS:
Nancy Friedman is a name developer. Find out more about her work at wordworking.com; read her blog about naming and the language of commerce, Fritinancy; read her pieces about words on Visual Thesaurus and Rude Words on Strong Language, and follow her on Twitter @fritinancy. TL;DR: if you're interested in words, you should be all over Nancy's work.
Roman Mars hosts 99% Invisible. It's alright, I suppose.
Martin Austwick composed the theme for this show, and the rest of the music that wasn't by Extreme, Boyzone or melodium.
This episode was produced by Devon Taylor, Cheeka Eyers and me, Helen Zaltzman.
Goodbyify!
