Names Articles

Dave Barry

Naming Remorse

• What's in a name? Everything. That's why baby-naming books fuel a tireless sector of the publishing industry and why 8 percent of new parents wake up with night sweats fearing they've made the wrong choice.
  
  A new poll, conducted by yourdomainename.com, found that almost one tenth of parents regret the name they've given their child. That's up from 3 percent compared to polls conducted in recent years.
  
  So what's with all the remorse? Two words: Peer pressure.
  
  More than half of the regretful parents surveyed said they opted for names that were trendy or fashionable (Apple, anyone?) in the moment. Thirty-two percent said their child's name ended up being more common then they first imagined.
  
  "Just as our desire for interesting names is rising, so too is our obsession with choosing the right name," Laura Wattenburg, author of "The Baby Name Wizard" tells The Guardian. "Parents willing to go out and change a name is becoming more common because they are conscious they are sending their child out into a competitive landscape, so branding them for success makes sense. If the brand name doesn't work in the first instance, change it."
  
  A baby isn't a brand, but sometimes, a little focus grouping can make parents rethink their gut impulses. "I first got an inkling that we had given our baby the wrong name when another mother peered into his pram and said loudly, 'So, do you pronounce it Ralph or Raef?' It wasn't the mispronunciation that made me cringe but how horrible she made the word sound; all hoity-toity with ugly, drawn-out vowels," writes Lena Corner, a UK-based mom who changed her son's name from Ralph to Huxley after weeks of agonizing over the decision she made on her son's birth certificate.
  
  For moms of multiples, there's also concern over how kids' names sound together. One mom wrote about her remorse on a parenting forum after she named her twin daughters Rosalie and Violet. "We realized that we didnt like the two-flower thing," she writes. "Within weeks we were becoming more and more embarrassed to even say the name that we had originally chosen for Rosalie, and always found ourselves introducing baby Violet first, since we both loved that name. Silly. I know. But true."
  
  Because naming your child is one of those things you can "prepare for" before birth, a lot of parents find themselves rethinking their decision once they meet the little stranger.
  
  After adopting baby Gabriella, one mom who shared her story on a fertility forum decided her daughter was more of an Abigail. "I had always said I would keep one of the names her mother gave her... But after about a month it wasn't working." So they nicknamed her Abby and kept her legal birth name the same. "Sometimes the name just doesn't fit the child and we have to do what's best for the everyone in the long run."
  
  For parents who want to make a name change official, the process can be arduous. According to experts, a child doesn't recognize his or her name for about five months. But the legal system can take a lot longer than that. Depending on your state, the process involves a petition, a court order and anywhere from $65 to $150 in application fees. That's not accounting for additional legal fees if you hire a lawyer. (Check your state's requirements here.)
  
  But for some parents all the paperwork is worth the reward. "Huxley is now 15 months old and "Ralph" just a far-off bad memory," writes Corner in The Guardian. "It was a difficult thing to do, but at least he's got the right name now."

How to choose a literary name for your baby

Here is a scene that has played out countless times in American bedrooms and living rooms:

HUSBAND: I like Chandler.
WIFE: I am not naming my son after a "Friends" character.
H: My uncle was named Chandler.
W: Yeah, and I was always creeped out by his lazy eye.
H: Jesus...fine. What name do you want?
W: Let's call him Izzy.
H: Too close to lizard. No way.
W: I want a divorce.
H: Me too.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. But only very slight. Finding a fitting name is among the most difficult tasks faced by expectant parents. I should know — my wife and I are expecting in June.

Not surprisingly, there are plenty of books to help out harried parents-to-be, from "The New Jewish Baby Book" to "Beyond Ava and Aiden." There are also websites for every conceivable type of name, from hipster baby names to Republican baby names, with a hipster Republican baby name site floating around somewhere, I am sure.

But my wife and I were teachers when we met and had our first serious conversation at a spelling competition. We spent our second date reading poetry in a Brooklyn bar. We needed a bookish name. There's a book for that. Two, in fact.

Our first foray into bookish baby names was Grace Hamlin's "The Penguin Classic Baby Name Book: 2,000 Names from the World's Great Literature," thinking this might steer us in the right direction. But while I learned plenty about the origin of Millicent (Old German, used by Anne Bronte in "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall") and Donald (Gaelic, used by Thomas Hardy in "The Mayor of Casterbridge"), the lesson did not prove terribly useful. Hamlin writes with a detached, academic quality — there is no mention of names popularity today. I mean, if you're thinking of calling your kid Oedipus, you have problems.

Far more helpful has been Lorilee Craker's "A is for Atticus: Baby Names from Great Books." For example, she notes that "the main Daisies — Daisy Miller, the title character of Henry James's novella, and Daisy Buchanan, the Paris Hilton-like lady from 'The Great Gatsby' both met bleak endings," which you might certainly want to consider. She warns even more strongly about Iago: "Othello's ultra-creepy, sinister, nasty piece of work. . . has unfortunately tainted this name — perhaps until the end of civilization." Meanwhile, Whitman gets unqualified praise: "it's hip to be square with an old coot such as Whitman." Especially if you're raising your kid in Walt's own Brooklyn, as we are.

From here we ventured further afield, to "Rock and Roll Baby Names: Over 2,000 Music-Inspired Names, from Alison to Ziggy" by Margaret Eby, in hopes of finding a hip name not yet claimed by half of Park Slope. Entries include Fela, which Eby explains belonged to Afrobeat trailblazer Fela Kuti, born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, married twenty-seven women at once...he later adopted a rotation system, keeping only twelve wives simultaneously.

Meanwhile, you can name your girl Gold, for Goldie Raven of Goldie and the Gingerbreads. If you want your child rummaging through the last record shop on Bleecker St., this book might be for you.

So what did we settle on in the end? Not Chandler, that's for sure.

Album Names

A valuable rock’n’roll lesson was learnt this week. No matter how visionary an album title sounds, it’s best to live with it a while before inflicting it upon the world.

Coldplay have questioned their decision to give their most recent LP the made-up name Mylo Xyloto. “It’s just something that we thought looked really good, but everywhere we go around the world people pronounce it in the most crazy ways,” Chris Martin said. “We’re beginning to regret it now.”

The band have history here — when naming their previous album, they couldn’t decide between two titles (both of them pretty ropey) so they used both: Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. But even with that track record, they have a long way to go to match these atrocities.

Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (2000) by Limp Bizkit The press thought Fred Durst was joking when he announced the name of his band’s third album. A nadir for fratboy toilet humour.

/\/\/\Y/\ (2012) by M.I.A. A feeble attempt to spell out her first name (Maya) in slashes and back slashes. The bane of sub-editors.

Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (1988) by Alanis Morissette She doesn’t know what irony means, and nor can she recognise a decent album title.

Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age (1994) by Public Enemy Wins the prize for most tortured pun in history (it’s meant to be a play on “Music and our Message”).

Purpendicular (1996) by Deep Purple To think, they were approaching, or in, their fifties when they came up with this.

Zenyattà Mondatta (1980) by the Police Means “Top of the World” in Sanskrit. Pretentious, moi? Kisses on the Bottom (2012) by Paul McCartney A mental image one should avoid conjuring when one is 69.

Children

Bob Geldof has admitted that he thinks his daughter Peaches has chosen a “rubbish” name for her son. “I can’t bring myself to say it,” he told Lorraine Kelly on breakfast TV. Poor Bob. I can see his point, Astala is a pretty bad name. He’s not alone, we’ve all come across grandparents befuddled by their grandchildren’s names, and it’s no surprise because the number of new ones has gone up by nearly 50 per cent in 15 years.

I’ve created an online tool that collates data from the Office for National Statistics, which provides 15 years of name data (darkgreener.com/ baby-name-data), and it has revealed a marked spike in new names. One of the fastest-rising girl’s names is Nevaeh, which is “heaven” spelt backwards. It didn’t exist in 2000, but was invented in 2001, and by 2010 there were 324 babies with that name. One of the fastest-rising new boy’s names is Kayden. In 1996 there were just five of them, and in 2010 there were 671. You also see it spelt “Kaiden” and “Kaden”, and it’s now the 99th most popular name for boys.

Hyphenated first names are getting more popular; in fact they’ve trebled in popularity since 1996, and now account for about 1.5 per cent of new names. Ellie-May currently tops the charts, with 243 babies so named in 2010.

I’ve been able to go only as far back as 1996, but the American site babynamewizard.com has more than 100 years of data. Its founder, Laura Wattenberg, has been able to see that this explosion of unique names first began in the 1960s. Her view is that it’s to do with the rise of individuality in society. I guess people just want their babies to be unique.

Unfortunately for Peaches, that’s not really possible. Whatever celebrities call their baby, others will copy. Thus Rocco (Madonna’s son), and Lyla (a derivation of Lila, Kate Moss’s daughter) both appear on the top ten fastest-rising names. Brooklyn (Beckham) was the fastest-rising boy’s name in the first five years of the period between 1996 and 2001, and is still on the up.

Product Names

Before it was the BlackBerry, it was a lump of plastic and microchips that was difficult to name. Its Canadian developers wanted to call it ProMail. They knew something was missing. So they went to Sausalito, California, where an elite group of linguists, poets and advertising veterans spend their days naming some of the world’s most successful products.

The staff at Lexicon Branding — which invented “Pentium” for Intel, “Dasani” for Coca-Cola, and “Openreach” for BT — started brainstorming. After two weeks they had arrived at “Strawberry”. A doctor of linguistics scrawled “too slow” above the word “straw”. The name was refined to another fruit that is now a global telecoms brand.

Indeed, the brand value of the BlackBerry — in many places shorthand for all smartphone products, as Kleenex is for tissues — is one of the soundest assets that Research in Motion, the ailing parent company, owns.

Product naming has become more scientific since Lexicon opened 30 years ago, says David Placek, the company’s founder. The first challenge is conceptual: to find something that is unusual but suggestive. The name should not overpromise — such as the Orange/T-Mobile venture “Everything Everywhere” — and it should not sound random or bizarre.

Naming a handheld e-mail device after a fruit was not random, Mr Placek emphasises. Lexicon determined in the late 1990s that the word “e-mail” made people anxious. Their focus group was passengers disembarking from the Sausalito ferry, outside San Francisco. “So the conceptual path we went down was: what things lower people’s blood pressure?” Summer activities were a common theme. “From there, we went down the tangent of summer fruits. They’re fresh.”

If BlackBerry is an unusual and good name, what is a random and bad name? “Mondelez” is a test case. This eightletter invention — the last syllable pronounced “ease” — is the new name for Kraft Foods’ snacks business. Monde and delez are meant to evoke “world” and “delicious”. Mr Placek dismisses the name like a medieval guild member inspecting the craft of an amateur. “Mondelez . . . you hear ‘eaze’ like ‘sleaze’. I’m getting nothing from it. Maybe it would work for a restaurant.”

The formula of Lexicon, which invented the air-freshener brand Febreze, is evoking pleasant associations without describing what the product does. “It’s about taking something that’s relevant and spinning it in an unexpected way,” Mr Placek says. “Unpredictable words get more attention by consumers in the marketplace. They begin to tell a story and tell it faster.”

Literal-minded names such as ProMail are terrible, he says, because “the story-telling ends there. “It’s mail. It’s nothing else.” Procter & Gamble, the American consumer products giant, retained Lexicon to name a new mop. Lexicon avoided the word “mop” and instead focused on four words that evoke pleasant aspects of mopping: sweep, swipe, swish and swift. The result was the P&G brand Swiffer. A name such as Swiffer is increasingly a product of analysis as much as creativity. Staff fiddle with databases of prefixes and suffixes or databases of sounds easy to pronounce in Japanese. Before names are submitted to the client, a global network of linguists tests them to ensure that no part of the word carries negative connotations in foreign languages. This can be an important exercise: manda-leez sounds roughly like a sex act in Russian.

Individual letters are tweaked to make a name seem fast — such as the “v” in Viagra — or advanced, such as the “x” in Xbox or Xstrata. “‘B’ is a letter that conveys reliability,” Mr Placek says, explaining one reason for choosing blackberry rather than another fruit.“Our linguists did sound-symbolism research and this is one of the things they discovered. We don’t know why ‘b’ feels reliable or safe — maybe because of the word ‘bank’.”

Every car company has a cheap, entry-level vehicle whose name attempts to transcend the car’s limitations. Which is the best of the brands Picanto, Picasso, Yaris, Atos and Panda? “Picasso,” Mr Placek says firmly. “It says, ‘I’m creative’. Product names are about form, function and behaviour. In the case of these cars, you don’t want to dwell on the form, which is small, cheap, plastic. It’s all about behaviour. The behaviour in ‘Picasso’ is bidirectional. It says something about your behaviour: you have respect for art. It also says something about the car’s behaviour. Picasso was a free spirit. He had wives and girlfriends. He was modern. The car is not called a Van Gogh. Van Gogh was depressed. He cut his ear off.”

Lexicon’s 27 members of staff work in teams of two, throwing ideas back and forth. As fun as it sounds, it is clear that the lawyer rules over the linguist. “Eighty to ninety per cent of the time we have to abandon the name because of legal or trademark issues,” Mr Placek says. Two people work full-time to cross-check all names against international trademarks. An exact match will disqualify the name. But near-sounding matches such as “Blockberry” would also disqualify it. The effort to find unclaimed words pushes product-namers toward a dangerous boundary between clever-sounding and hopelessly random names. “It’s important to have the name be believable,” Mr Placek says. He refers again to the Citroën Picasso. “There has to be something in the car that’s consistent with what his art is about.”

Parents may look at names such as BlackBerry and think that their child could come up with it. But such names are the product of $100,000, three-month exercises that blend concept and language within the confines of the law. Not all of it requires a doctorate in linguistics. “The keys of the BlackBerry,” Mr Placek confides. “They look like little blackberry seeds.”

Renaming The Company

IN December 2008, Georgette Kaplan and her two daughters, Stephanie and Jamie, felt as if they were receiving a wonderful holiday gift.

Products from their personal-care company, Ms. & Mrs., were going to be showcased on “The View,” the ABC talk show, as part of its seasonal gift guide. Giddy with anticipation, the women huddled around a television in their Chicago office on the day of the broadcast as heavy snow fell outside.

Then it happened: their company, which makes cleverly packaged items like the Shemergency Kit, a brightly colored pouch containing breath freshener, earring backs, blotting tissues and other “emergency essentials” — was misidentified as Mr. & Mrs. on national television.

“It was kind of like, ‘Ugh,’ ” said Stephanie Kaplan, the company’s creative director. “It was one of those moments when you realize, ‘Wow, this is really a problem.’”

Indeed. The company’s name has been so serially mispronounced since mother and daughters came up with it in 2003 that they were recently able to assemble enough material for a blooper reel. So, last month, the Kaplans rebaptized Ms. & Mrs. as Pinch Provisions.

There are various reasons to rename a business. Beyond making the name easier to pronounce, they include new ownership or a desire to rejuvenate a brand or to do away with negative associations.

The private security contractor Blackwater Worldwide, for instance, has changed its name twice in the last three years. After five Blackwater guards were indicted in 2008 on manslaughter and weapons charges in connection with the killing and injuring of unarmed civilians in Iraq, the company changed its name to Xe Services. (The case was dismissed, but an appeals court reopened it against four of the guards, and the Justice Department is now seeking an indictment of them.) In 2010, Xe Services became Academi when it changed ownership.

Sports news spurred a name change at Pujols 5, a restaurant outside of St. Louis that was named after the baseball star Albert Pujols. The name was fine as long as he played for the St. Louis Cardinals, but last December he joined the Los Angeles Angels.

Immediately after the news was announced, “We started getting phone calls and cancellations,” said the restaurant’s owner, Patrick Hanon. Guards were stationed around a statue of Mr. Pujols outside the restaurant because “People were throwing stuff at it — it was crazy,” Mr. Hanon said. Sales dropped 75 percent.

In February, Mr. Hanon changed his restaurant’s name to the St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame Bar and Grill, but that didn’t work, either. “People thought we were a museum,” he said.

Now, the restaurant is known as Patrick’s Restaurant & Sports Bar, which is what it was called before it became Pujols 5 in 2006. Business is back and customers are no longer confused, Mr. Hanon said.

More famous corporate name changes include Datsun to Nissan; the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company to the International Business Machines Corporation, or I.B.M.; and BackRub, the precursor to Google.

Big or small, companies always face the challenge of telegraphing a new name in a way that doesn’t alienate loyal customers. Ira Kalb, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, said the change shouldn’t “destroy all the positive brand equity that has been built up over years.”

As a smaller company with limited resources, Pinch Provisions relied more on creativity than extravagance to announce its new identity. To explain the motivation for the change, the Kaplans worked with a video company to assemble footage for a video that was posted on YouTube and distributed via e-mail and social media. The new name was selected in a brainstorming session with the design and branding firm Beardwood&Co., which offered 16 possibilities. The name was catchy and appropriate — bringing to mind the phrase “in a pinch.” Oh, and it was easy to pronounce.

“We actually had someone on our staff collect clips of people mispronouncing our name,” said Stephanie Kaplan. “It was funny, because once we decided to change the name, we started rooting people on, because we wanted more material. We’d say, ‘Oh, I hope they mispronounce it, because we want another clip.’”

In addition, a “Pinch Proof” video showed a stylish young woman brushing aside headaches, coffee stains and drooping hemlines — this time to announce the new brand. Behind-the-scenes photographs from the video appeared on Facebook and Instagram, and blog items on Tumblr completed the narrative.

Looking ahead, is she confident that a new faux pas on national TV can be avoided? Ms. Kaplan laughed. “That actually wasn’t so bad,” she said. “Right after the mispronunciation, our Web site crashed” because of heavy traffic. Despite the spoken error, the company’s name was spelled correctly at the bottom of the screen, allowing viewers to find the Web site.“It was back up shortly. Up until that day, it was the biggest day our company ever had.”

Animal Names

It all began with the naming of the Attenborosaurus, a majestic plesiosaur at the top of the dinosaur food chain. Naming it after a majestic presenter at the top of the television food chain seemed somehow appropriate.

Shortly after came Sir David’s long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi). This also had a certain aptness. After all, not only is Sir David Attenborough a mammal (if not, to our knowledge, an egg-laying one), but his kind of presenting sometimes feels on the verge of extinction too.

Then, yesterday, came the latest discovery to be added to the Attenborough menagerie. “It is careful in its judgment,” Sir David explained of Prethopalpus attenboroughi, also known as Attenborough’s goblin spider. It also has big fangs and eight orange legs.

Of course, he is not alone. From the Beyoncé horse fly (named for the “unique dense golden hairs on the fly’s abdomen”) to the Bob Marley crustacean (“this species is as uniquely Caribbean as was Marley”), to the delightfully convoluted Agra katewinsletae (“Her character did not go down with the ship, but we will not be able to say the same for this elegant canopy species, if all the rainforest is converted to pastures”), you can’t call yourself a celebrity without at least one Ecuadorean beetle to your name.

The simple reason for this is that there are just so many animals yet to be named. More than a million species are known to science. There are, however, an estimated seven million species that remain unknown and unrecorded — and which when discovered will need names.

To see how far zoologists have to look for a name to use, you need only consider the existence of the Donald Rumsfeld slime mold beetle. “One has to be creative with names,” the scientist responsible explained — somehow missing the opportunity of describing the discovery of a new species whose existence had been posited as a perfect example of the former US Secretary of Defence’s theory about known unknowns becoming known knowns.

Lest Rumsfeld’s conservative compatriots feel left out though, it is worth noting that there are also beetles bearing the names George Bush, Dick Cheney, and — a 1933 addition — Adolf Hitler.

Most Embarrassing Place Name

The village of Shitterton in Dorset’s Piddle Valley has Britain’s most embarrassing place name, according to a survey in which its neighbour, Scratchy Bottom, came second.

Third place went to Brokenwind in Aberdeenshire with Crapstone, on the edge of Dartmoor, fourth. The survey was carried out by the family history website findmypast.co.uk.

It may be known locally as “the village that dare not speak its name” but residents recently paid for a 1.5-tonne slab of marble carved with the name Shitterton that stands on the roadside at the entrance to the hamlet. This replaced more conventional metal signs that were repeatedly stolen by souvenir hunters.

The origins of the name are uncertain, but one theory has it that it means simply “the village on the stream that is used as an open sewer”.

Ian Ventham, chairman of the parish council, said the name was nothing to be ashamed of. “The name doesn’t bother us in the slightest.”

Rich Kids Names

In a world in which every Tom, Dick and Harry is called Jack, in a world in which rock stars have cornered the market in unusual names by calling their children Moon Unit, or Dweezil, or Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, and where desperate parents are naming their sons Tom_713 to ensure his being able to get an untaken gmail address, how do the rich make their offspring stand out from the crowd? How do they give a hint that they may not have a title, but they have plenty of cash?

Maybe by naming them after a tax haven.

Monaco-based Christian Candy — half of the fraternal Candy & Candy property empire — and his wife, Emily, have named their twins Isabella Monaco Evanthia and Cayman Charles Wolf. It is the ultimate designer label. Short of branding Louis Vuitton’s iconic LV logo or Chanel’s interlocking Cs on your forehead there may be no surer way of alerting the world to your bank balance.

The trend is bound to spread. You can now imagine the morning register being called at a school in Monte Carlo, or Zug, in a few years’ time: “Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman — are you present, Cayman? — Curaçao, Jersey, Luxembourg — sit up straight, Luxembourg! — Panama — have you remembered your football kit today Panama?”

Here lie the contours of a new divide between rich and poor. It threatens to spawn an underclass of mere Davids and Alices and Jims. Socially ambitious parents will scour the atlas for inspiration. They may name their own son with a little modesty — Turks & Caicos Jackson, perhaps — while dreaming of a day when the family’s fortunes swell to the point where (please God!) a Jackson grandchild might, and without provoking mirth, finally merit being named . . . Liechtenstein.

Scottish Kid's Names

THE fashion for lumbering children with unusual names, made popular by David Bowie and Frank Zappa, is continuing in Scotland where a new list has revealed that 2012 was time for Tea — and Thistle and Tiger.

The list of first names from the General Register Office for Scotland does not include a boy named Sue but does feature a girl named William and boys called Cash and Good-Luck.

Perhaps reflecting a taste for alcohol, the only girl named Chardonnay will grow up at the same time as Macallan, a boy who shares his name with that of one of the country’s most popular whiskies.

While choosing an outlandish name may be fun for the parents, it can cause problems for their children. At 18, Zowie Bowie decided to become known as simply Duncan.

Psychologists say unusual names can make children vulnerable to harassment and bullying.

“You have to ask who is getting the benefit out of these names,” said Dr Roy Bailey, a child psychologist who suggested it might be better for parents to reserve novel names for their pets instead.

Julia Cresswell, author of the Chambers Dictionary of First Names, agrees that parents should think hard about the long-term effect of a name on a child.

She said calling a girl William is an unusual example of a common trend. “There are plenty of female Billies; Shirley was originally masculine, likewise Leslie, Jordan, Beverley and Lindsay.”

More Unusual Names

In We Are All Weird, I argued that many factors are pushing us to get ever less normal, at least when it comes to cultural choices and what we buy, what we do and who we do it with. The bell curve that for so long defined mass is melting, with the outliers gaining in number, credibility and impact.

When you give people a choice, they will take it.

One big reason: the web lets us see what the other weird folks are doing, pushing us to get weirder still.

Recent data on naming released by the Social Security Administration puts this into sharp relief. The top 1000 baby names include go-to standards like Zylin, Zymari, Zyrin, Zyrus and Zytaevius. That's not surprising, because, after all, 1,000 names is a lot of names.

What's surprising is that over the last ten years, the percentage of names that don't fall within the top 1,000 keep rising. That means that more and more people are opting out of the popular naming regime, forging their own path. It used to be weird to name your kid Elvis. Now, Zyrin isn't weird enough, because we're ever more aware of where the edges lie.

Same is true with the shows we watch, the books we read and the foods we eat.

(From Seth Godin here)

Edwardian Names 

Thanks to the intervention of celebrities, which is not always welcome, the vogue for Edwardian names has got bigger and weirder. Ethel (child of Lily Cooper, née Allen), Mabel (Bruce Willis’s daughter) and Stanley (son of Dido) are now blinking, twinkling, 21st-century children, even if they sound like extras from Downton Abbey, which is apparently now the only significant cultural reference of our time. (Downstairs extras, that is, the kind always covered in flour and dung; these are poor people’s names.)

Marks & Spencer has announced that it will soon sell Downton Abbey-themed make-up, which is fine if you wish to theme your face after a drama series, which I do not. I would never walk into a beauty salon and say, “Give me a Spooks face.”

Fashions in names are often amusing. I await the resurrection of 17th-century Puritan favourites with particular glee, because they include such showstoppers as Fly-fornication, Sin-deny, Free-gifts, The-Lord-is-near, More-fruit and, my eternal favourite, Dust. My name is Dust — what a byline! Puritan children’s stories must have been truly intense.

Few names — except those that are considered lewd or offensive — are prohibited in British law and so, since 1984, we have had two Supermans, six Gandalfs and 36 Arsenals (of both sexes).

There is also fun to be had with names that foreign countries deem too crazy to be allowed, the best of which are sadly unpublishable, because they are dirty. (I want to tell you what they are. I cannot.)

New Zealanders are particularly good at terrible names. Registered ones have included Violence, Number 16 Bus Shelter, and Benson and Hedges, for twins, although Full Stop, — spelt “.” — was rejected by a judge, no doubt saving poor “.” terrible psychological trauma, because every time the child’s name was written down mid-sentence a grammatical error would occur. (Sex Fruit and Fish and Chips — also for twins — were banned, too.)

The Edwardian resurrection, however, depresses me, because it is bunting gilding misfortune. Is it an accident that a revival of interest in Edwardian life, with its undeniable social inequality, mirrors the revival of a similar phenomenon a century later?

You might say I am melodramatic, a terrible thing in a columnist, but I have met the Earl of Carnarvon, who owns Downton Abbey. (Actually, the house where it is filmed is called Highclere Castle, but this matters little in the age of television.)

Carnarvon believes the series is popular because “it has touched a nerve of order and structure that people seem to associate with, on whatever level they are looking at, whether it is the people working in the kitchen or the footman, the butler or the chauffeur”. I suspect he is right and, if so, the whole Edwardiana shtick is depraved.

We make culture about our societal failures, but instead of making critical culture that improves us, we make Downton Abbey. Or we make babies called Ethel, a kind of gurgling hello to a new age of inequality; and, when they grow, they can gild their faces in Downton slap.

“Give me the face of an economically insecure kitchen maid,” they might say, “but with Made in Chelsea hair.” And — gah! — it will be done.      

Puritan Names  

Puritanism has its roots in the late sixteenth century, after Henry VIII broke ties with the Catholic Church. The Puritans believed that reforms had not gone far enough and advocated for a church entirely divorced from Catholic ceremonies. For over a century, Puritans argued amongst themselves, schismed, predicted the end of the world, and still found time to fight the English Civil War and start colonies in the Northeastern United States.

Perhaps their greatest gift to history, however, is their wonderfully strange taste in names. A wide variety of Hebrew names came into common usage beginning in 1560, when the first readily accessible English Bible was published. But by the late 16th century many Puritan communities in Southern Britain saw common names as too worldly, and opted instead to name children after virtues or with religious slogans as a way of setting the community apart from non-Puritan neighbors. Often, Puritan parents chose names that served to remind the child about sin and pain.

Many Puritan names started to die out after 1662, when the newly restored monarch, Charles II, introduced new laws that cracked down on nonconformist religions and consolidated the power of the Anglican Church. Despite this, some of the names have remained in common use in Anglophone countries.

I’ve collected some of the best, worst, and strangest names the English Puritans came up with. Most of these are courtesy of the 1888 book by Charles Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature (seen here on the Public Domain Review’s website), which includes Parish records with details about some of the people who had these names. To show that some of these names are still in use, I've referred to 2012 statistics on names in the UK from the Guardian's interactive chart of baby names.

20 Puritan Names That Are Utterly Strange

Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar. Son of Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar, born 1676.
Praise-God. Full name, Praise-God Barebone. The Barebones were a rich source of crazy names. This one was a leather-worker, member of a particularly odd Puritan group and an MP. He gave his name to the Barebones Parliament, which ruled Britain in 1653.
If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned. Praise-God's son, he made a name for himself as an economist. But, for some inexplicable reason, he decided to go by the name Nicolas Barbon.
Fear-God. Also a Barebone.
Job-raked-out-of-the-ashes
Has-descendents
Wrestling
Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith
Fly-fornication
Jesus-Christ-came-into-the-world- to-save. Brother of "Damned Barebone". I can only imagine this name shortened to "Save."
Thanks
What-God-will
Joy-in-sorrow. A name attached to many stories of difficult births.
Remember
Fear-not. His/her surname was "Helly", born 1589.
Experience
Anger
Abuse-not
Die-Well. A brother of Farewell Sykes, who died in 1865. We can assume they had rather pessimistic parents.
Continent. Continent Walker was born in 1594 in Sussex.

12 of the Cruelest Puritan Names (meant to remind children of the pain of the world)

Humiliation. Humiliation Hynde had two sons in the 1620s; he called them both Humiliation Hynde.
Fly-debate
No-merit. NoMerit Vynall was born in Warbleton in Sussex, a fount of beautiful names.
Helpless
Reformation
Abstinence
More-triale
Handmaid
Obedience
Forsaken
Sorry-for-sin. Sorry-for-sin Coupard was another resident of Warbleton.
Lament

12 Strangely Pleasant Puritan Names

Silence
Creedence
Dust
Diffidence
Desire. In the UK, seven babies were named this in 2012.
Make-peace. This name was in use at least until 1863; see William Makepeace Thackeray, the novelist.
Ashes
Tace. It's another word for silence, and is of course a female name.
Placidia
Kill-sin. Kill-sin Pimple did Jury service in the 1650s.
Freegift
Vanity

10 of the Sweetest Puritan Names

Jolly
Liberty. 129 were born in the UK in 2012.
Tenacious
Happy
Felicity. 302 babies got this name in 2012.
Hope. 416 babies took this name in 2012.
Prudence. 13 babies got this name in 2012.
Amity. 5 babies got this name in 2012.
Verity. 131 babies were born with this name in 2012.
Trinity. 69 Trinities were born in 2012. The name saw a burst in popularity in 1999—due to a particular film, I suppose.

Despite their eccentricities, the Puritans did leave us some beautifully resonant names. Names like Verity, Felicity, and Hope more than make up for the Humiliations, Die-wells, and Kill-sins.

Kill-sin Pimple probably wouldn't have agreed. But, to be fair, his first name was only half of his problem.      

Names of Storms 

A lobbying group in the US is asking for hurricanes to be named after politicians who are known for denying that climate change is man-made. The idea is to shame the politicians by linking them to destructive storms, and the campaign, ClimateNameChange.org, has petitioned the World Meteorological Organisation, which is responsible for naming hurricanes.

Even though the campaign is unlikely to succeed, this is not the first attempt at naming tropical storms after politicians to embarrass them.

The idea was first started by a Victorian meteorologist, Clement Wragge. Born in England in 1852, Wragge was a determined character and in his early career climbed to the top of Ben Nevis, Britain’s tallest summit, every day from June to October 1881, to take weather measurements, even in gales, rain and snow. His heroic endeavour gave a unique insight into the weather of mountains and the higher reaches of the atmosphere, which were both something of a mystery at the time.

Wragge emigrated to Australia where he continued working on mountain weather and also set up the country’s first national storm warning service. He was outspoken, however, and made enemies easily, especially politicians, for whom he expressed his contempt by naming tropical cyclones after them — the first time that peoples’ names were used to identify weather systems. This caught the public imagination but did not enhance his career and he later emigrated to New Zealand.

There was, though, a need to name tropical cyclones to avoid confusing one storm with another, especially when more than one was raging at the same time. During the Second World War meteorologists in the US military began using the names of their wives or girlfriends, and in 1953 the US weather service started to give tropical storms female names. In time this became controversial and in 1979 both male and female names were used alternately. Six lists of names are now used, but if a storm is particularly destructive its name is retired and a substitute chosen.      

Kings and Princes Rule  

A failure to find success in life is sometimes put down to squandered opportunity or lack of ambition — but, for some at least, it could simply be a case of having the wrong name.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have suggested that, if your surname is King or Prince, you are more likely to find yourself in a managerial position, while those with more “common” names are more likely to end up in blue-collar jobs.

Their study, of 222,924 German workers, found that those with surnames that evoked nobility, such as Kaiser (Emperor), König (King), and Fürst (Prince), more frequently held managerial positions than those with names derived from everyday occupations such as Koch (Cook), Bauer (Farmer), and Becker (Baker).

The authors said that “associative cognition”, in which the status linked to a name influences its bearer, could explain the findings, but could not say whether these people were more likely to be promoted or if they were more likely to judge themselves more favourably and therefore put themselves forward.

The results, published in the journal Psychological Science, were based on a trawl through the networking website Xing, the German equivalent of LinkedIn. The researchers collected data on individuals with the 100 most common last names, and ranked them according to whether they were noble-sounding, linked to everyday jobs, or neutral.

Previous studies have found that people are more likely to be attracted to jobs that sound like their name; many dentists, for example, are called Dennis or Denise. Another study indicated that people were more likely to marry someone whose first or last name resembled their own.

There are many examples, too, of people whose names are eerily apt, such as the Belgian footballer Mark De Man, the former Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, the gardener Bob Flowerdew, the former Barclays banker Rich Ricci, and the head of the Central Bank of Cyprus, Panicos Demetriades.      

The Road to Zyzzyx  

For the many of us who've travelled I-15 between Vegas and LA, the most notable sign could be this one: Zyzzyx Road.

A Zyzzyx, as anyone knows, is a species of sand wasp. It's also the last word in the dictionary, and it's for this reason the road is named. If you follow the road, you'll end up in Zyzzyx, California. Zyzzyx was named by Curtis Howe Springer, who filed a mining claim on the area in 1944. Though the area had been used for mining since pre-hisotry, Springer created a bit of a tourist-trap, selling water from the hot springs and charging admission to see his collection of exotic animals.

In 1974, federal marshalls raided the area and took the land back citing a distinct lack of mining. Today, the land is used for research into the interesting flora and fauna in the area by the Desert Studies Center, with government permission.      

Names Dying Out  

Every Prime Minister needs a Willie, as Margaret Thatcher once said of her deputy, but not every parent. The name, in its shortened form anyway, has become extinct, with no Willies listed on recent birth certificates.

Cecil, Rowland, Bertha, Blodwen, Fanny, Gertrude, Gladys, Muriel and Margery or Marjorie are also names that were very popular a century ago but are now believed effectively to be extinct, according to analysis by the genealogy website Ancestry.co.uk.

Perhaps Bertha is the most surprising name to have died out given that those who are now having children will have grown up in the 1980s watching an animated television series of that name, but perhaps no one wants to name the apple of their eye after a temperamental factory machine.

Big Bertha is also a popular make of golf club but one can understand why women would not be too keen on their husbands wanting to name a daughter after his driver.

Fanny was once a staple of Enid Blyton books. The rot over that name may have set in eight years ago when the publishers of Blyton’s Faraway Tree books changed it to Frannie out of a sensitivity that it was best known as coarse slang.

Other names that appeared among the top 100 for children born in 1905 are now on an endangered list, having fallen in popularity by 99 per cent. They include Norman, Horace, Edna and Marion, while the likes of Bernard, Ann, Janet and Trevor are “at risk”.

Many popular names from the early 20th century have become popular in a shorter form, the so-called Alfie Effect. This has seen Freddie become more popular than Frederick, Archie overtaking Archibald and far more Charlies than babies named Charles. For girls, Lexi and Ellie have become more popular than Alexandra and Eleanor. Willies, however, seem to buck the trend, although William remains very popular, perhaps in connection with the Duke of Cambridge.

The research showed that girls’ names were more at risk of disappearing than boys’, thought to be as a result of male names being passed from father to son. Mothers’ names are more likely to be handed down as middle names. Many of the top 100 names from 1905 remain common, however, with one in three new parents wanting to honour an ancestor in their choice of name. Lily, Hannah, Lydia, Alan, Patrick and Joe have retained their popularity over more than a century.

Other seemingly archaic names are now more popular than they were even in 1905. These include Oliver, Jacob, Amelia, Charlotte and Grace.

Miriam Silverman, the UK content manager for Ancestry.co.uk, said: “No first name can truly become extinct, but it’s fascinating to look at the list from 1905 and see which have thrived and which have faded into obscurity. People appreciate a rare name in their family tree and we believe endangered names will be protected by descendants.”      

The Science of Naming 

The announcement came in November with two names attached: one famous, one not, or at least not yet. The famous name was Paul McCartney. Anyone who wanted to try a virtual-reality experience starring the former Beatle — replicating the sensation of standing center stage with him as he sang “Live and Let Die” to 70,000 screaming fans — had only to download a special video file, put the file into an app for their Android phone and slip the phone into a cardboard headset designed by Google. The not-yet-famous name was of the virtual-reality production process that created this experience. Reviewers said it was mind-blowingly cool” and an “exciting preview of the future,” but it was also so novel that it had been hard to think of a word to label it. Its inventors had wanted a name that would lodge in the public consciousness the same way Dolby and Imax and Blu-ray had. A name that could become a verb as well as a noun. An iconic name. A name for the ages.

Finding such a name wasn’t easy. Starting in April 2013, the production process itself went through what has become a fairly standard development story for tech start-ups: The three founders — Tom Annau, Jens Christensen and Arthur van Hoff, all computer scientists and “resident entrepreneurs” at a venture-capital firm called Redpoint — began with a flash of insight, then wrote code for the software, then assembled a hardware prototype, then raised more than $34 million from investors, including Google. But initially, they couldn’t come up with a name. The three batted around a few possibilities, Christensen says, but it “very quickly became apparent we weren’t going anywhere. We really needed help.” They had already hired a San Francisco-based branding and design agency called Character to help shepherd their production process to the marketplace, and it was Character that took them to Anthony Shore.

Shore, 47, is what is known in the arcane world of corporate branding as a namer. He is boyish, ebullient and voluble, which is only natural for someone who makes his living from words. As a child, Shore found himself entranced by language, and when he received the American Heritage Dictionary as a birthday present, he pored over a supplement on the roots of Indo-European words in much the manner that other kids memorized batting averages. (He still has the book on a shelf in his office in Oakland, Calif.) He studied linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and wrote a senior thesis on Latin and moraic theory. There wasn’t a lot of work for linguists, so he fell back on another preoccupation, fonts, and became a typesetter for a real estate magazine. Typesetting led him to graphic design, graphic design led him briefly to advertising and advertising led him to naming, beginning with cocktails at Hotel De Anza in San Jose. Shore spent 13 years at one of the oldest and largest branding firms, Landor Associates, and a year at the branding behemoth Lexicon before deciding in 2009 to open his own one-man naming agency, Operative Words.

Now he met the three entrepreneurs at their office in Menlo Park. They showed him their 32-lens camera — “something that looked like Sputnik,” Shore says — then he put on a headset, and they fired up a standard-issue V.R. demo. He was immediately teleported to a computer-generated Tuscan villa. Shore was impressed. But still, it looked like a computer game.

The engineers then loaded a new file, and when Shore looked around the room through the headset, he saw the three inventors tossing a Nerf ball. Only they weren’t. Shore was watching a virtual-reality movie of them tossing a Nerf ball. This time Shore was astonished. “It was completely real,” he says. “It was transportive.”

Shore had named everything from companies to products to websites to ingredients to colors. He was responsible for some 160 distinct names in all, including SoyJoy (the health bar), Lytro (the camera) and Yum! (the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell), as well as lesser-known names like Avaya, Enormo, Fanhattan, Freescale, Homestyler, Kixx, Mylo, Pause, Rig, Scribe, Spontania, Valchemy, Wanderful and Zact. But the new V.R. production process posed a particular challenge. It was manifestly different, Shore told himself. It could have a profound influence on entertainment culture and on how people connect with one another. He needed a name that would convey its magnitude — a great name.

For decades, corporations have turned to creative people for their naming needs, with varying results. In 1955, a Ford Motor marketing executive recruited the modernist poet Marianne Moore to name the company’s new car. The marketing department had already created a list of 300 candidates, all of which, the executive confessed, were “characterized by an embarrassing pedestrianism.” Could the poet help? In a series of letters, Moore proposed dozens of notably nonpedestrian names — Intelligent Whale, Pastelogram, Mongoose Civique, Utopian Turtletop, Varsity Stroke — but the marketing team rejected them all, instead naming the new car (in one of the great disasters, naming and otherwise, in corporate history) after Henry Ford’s son, Edsel.

Today roughly 500,000 businesses open each month in the United States, and every one needs a name. From Dickens with his bitter Gradgrind to J. K. Rowling with her sour Voldemort, authors have long understood that names help establish character. Politicians know that calling a bill the USA Patriot Act makes it a little harder to vote against. The effects of strategic naming are all around us, once we begin to look for them. “You go to a restaurant, and you don’t order ‘dolphin fish,' ” Shore points out. “You order ‘mahi-mahi.’ You don’t order ‘Patagonian toothfish.’ You order ‘Chilean sea bass.’ You don’t buy ‘prunes’ anymore; they’re now called ‘dried plums.' ” Maria Cypher, the founder and director of the naming agency Catchword, which named the McDonald’s McBistro sandwich line, will tell you that names “give us a shared understanding of what something is.” Paola Norambuena, the executive director of verbal identity at Interbrand, says they give us a “shortcut to a good decision.”

Most people assume that companies name themselves and their products. True, Steve Jobs came up with the name for Apple and stuck with it despite the threat of a lawsuit from the Beatles, who had already claimed the name for their record label. Likewise, Richard Branson chose the name Virgin, and namers venerate him for it. “Virgin gets a reaction,” says Eli Altman, the head of A Hundred Monkeys, a naming agency. There is no “way that would get through a boardroom.” Most executives aren’t as imaginative as Jobs or Branson. And that’s where namers come in. Some work within larger branding agencies, like Landor or Interbrand. Others work within boutiques, like Catchword, A Hundred Monkeys (put 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters, and eventually they’ll write a Shakespearean tragedy, or a name), Namebase and Zinzin (French for “whatchama­callit”). Some, like Shore, are lone operators.

For the process that leads to a single name, companies can pay anywhere from $3,000 to $75,000. If that name becomes the foundation of a branding campaign, they can pay tens of millions of dollars more to establish its presence in the commercial firmament. The results can be inspired, but they can also be laughable. When Stephen Wolf took over USAir in the late 1990s, he concluded that the name sounded like that of a regional carrier, and he hired the branding firm Luxon Carra to find him a new name that fit his larger aspirations. The new name was unveiled in February 1997 to great fanfare. USAir was now . . . US Airways. The process of rebranding, from reprinting the stationery to repainting the planes, took nine months and, by one account, eventually cost the company nearly $40 million.

The namer’s craft may attain its highest expression in the pharmaceutical industry, in large part because namers have to work within so many government restrictions. Every drug name must be analyzed by the F.D.A.’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research to make sure that it doesn’t make extravagant claims — the hair restoring medication Rogaine was originally named Regain, until the F.D.A. nixed it — and that it cannot be mistaken for any other medication, which is how Losec, a heartburn treatment, became Prilosec, so as not to be confused with Lasix, a diuretic. (The F.D.A.’s guide on Best Practices in Developing Propriety Names for Drugs is a dense 33 pages.) The F.D.A. even runs handwriting tests on potential names to see if pharmacists might mistake one scribbled drug name on a prescription for another.

The oddity is that for all the weight a company places on choosing names, the decisions arise from a process that couldn’t be less corporate. There are no naming metrics, no real way to know if a new name helps or hinders. The field attracts people who are comfortable with such ambiguity. Jay Jurisich, the founder of Zinzin, is a painter with an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Jim Singer, who founded Namebase, was a jingle writer, and Margaret Wolfson, who now runs naming at Namebase, still splits her time between naming and performing one-woman shows around the world in which she recites classical myths. The renowned pharma namer Arlene Teck (coiner of Viagra, from “vigorous” and “Niagara”) writes haiku. Maria Cypher of Catchword fronts a rock band. Other namers are stand-up comics, photographers, rappers, linguists and poets. “A good name has the potency of any piece of art,” says Martin McMurray, a partner at Zinzin. Wolfson’s friend Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has told her that she is engaged in creating “practical poetry,” an assessment that Wolfson embraces, though she says she doesn’t use the term with all her clients.

What namers share is a love of words and a sensitivity to them, and they will tell you that that sensitivity is what separates them from amateurs. At Interbrand, they administer a test to aspiring namers. One question asks candidates to choose from a short list of names for a new margarine. Many select “Margi-Gras,” because it is festive and different. But, Norambuena says, a professional namer would see the negative associations with Fat Tuesday and reject it.

After Shore had his virtual-reality encounter, he got to work. The first thing he wanted to know was how the inventors defined the most salient characteristics of their production process: What made it new, different, amazing? In the naming business, this sort of interrogation is known as the brief. When namers ask these questions, companies often respond by giving them hundreds of pages of research or even slickly produced videos. But too often the executives struggle to articulate what makes their companies or products distinctive, and so namers must draw it out of them — which is why Jay Jurisich of Zinzin calls this first phase “corporate group therapy.” Shore learned that the inventors wanted something short, preferably one word. It needed to convey the idea of transport and also seem hip and consumer-­friendly, in a manner that suggested advanced technology. The founders wanted it to have a science-fiction feel to it. When Shore asked them about names they liked, Christensen said Tesla and Imax.

That was enough to get started. Shore settled into his home office in the hills above Oakland and considered his naming objectives, or what the name ought to do. Taking off from the inventors’ comments, he kept returning to the idea of transport: “It puts you somewhere else.” Shore says he always starts with a simple, concrete idea and then tries to “elevate it to some overriding, overarching idea that is much more abstract.” So he began riffing. Change of place elevated to motion, then motion elevated to speed, then speed elevated to physical space, then physical space elevated to just plain space. “So now I’m thinking about space and location.”

Eventually, he settled on six elements that would serve as the basis of his names. He calls these concepts his creative directions, though other namers call them buckets, places they can dump names that they associate with a given concept. Shore’s were: change (in location and time), entertainment, experience, immersion, presence and reality and, finally, WOW!

With his creative directions established, he set out to find names that gestured in those directions. He asked himself: What would be the sound of going from one place to another instantly? He began mapping the concept of instant travel to the sounds he decided upon. He knew that speed could be conveyed by what linguists call fricatives, which are consonants produced by forcing air through the narrow channel between tongue and front teeth or tongue and upper palate or tongue and molars: f, s, v, z. And he knew that the point of arrival could be conveyed by stops or plosives, which are consonants in which the air flow is blocked: b, d, p, t. The exercise produced names like Slide or Slyde.

The techniques Shore was using are a relatively recent innovation — one that makes the messy process seem more scientific. Will Leben was a linguistics professor at Stanford in 1988 when he got a call from Lexicon asking if its partners could visit him. At the time, Leben was teaching a course on the structure of English words, and Lexicon recruited him for a project: to create a list of morphemes, those parts of words that contain meaning. Using a thesaurus, Leben generated a long list of morphemes and the meanings of each — “pages and pages of morphemes,” Leben says, which Lexicon could then draw upon to create names that would express the nature of a particular product.

A few years later, David Placek, Lexicon’s founder, asked Leben what he thought of a name they had conjured, Triples, for a new cereal from General Mills that contained three different grains. “It sounds like something that’s light and crunchy,” Leben recalls telling them. He says their jaws dropped. Could the sound of a word say as much as its content? The idea of sound symbolism went back to at least Plato’s “Cratylus,” in which he associated sounds with physical characteristics, but linguists tended to discredit it. It had long been a fundamental tenet of linguistics, Leben says, that “the association between the meaning of the word and its pronunciation is an arbitrary one. The reason why we call a piano a piano has nothing to do with the sounds p-i-a-n-o.”

But Placek was intrigued, and he asked Leben to conduct a study to determine whether sounds did indeed convey physical properties. Leben called his study Sounder. He administered a questionnaire to 150 Stanford and Berkeley students, asking them questions like: Which sounds faster, “fip” or “fop”? Leben found a consensus. “Fip” was faster than “fop.” Why? Because of the way the sounds were generated in the mouth, Leben says. “Fip” feels lighter and faster because the vocal tract is open only a small amount. There is less acoustic substance for “fip” than there is for “fop,” the pronunciation of which causes the jaw to drop and the tongue to lower, creating a heavier, more powerful sound. There were many similar discoveries among fricatives and plosives, leading Leben to conclude that “the physical characteristics of sound are what determine associations.” Significantly, Leben got the same results when the study was conducted overseas. Lexicon took the idea and ran with it. “Pentium” began with a plosive that signified energy, power and dynamism. The “S” of the Swiffer mop made it sound fast and easy. The “D” of Dasani water made it sound heavier. Leben says: “It doesn’t say ‘refreshing.’ It says ‘slow down,’ ‘cool off,’ ‘relax.' ”

Next, Placek asked Leben if he could conduct a study to see if there might be an association between sounds and emotional states. That was Sounder II, conducted in 2002. “The results came out so clean, it was hard to believe,” Leben says. Certain sounds, for example, were associated with daring or liveliness or sadness or insecurity. But Sounder I and II concentrated exclusively on the initial sounds of a word — its first consonant or vowel or both. Sounder III, just concluded last summer, asked whether consonants and vowels in other positions in a word might have a similar or additive effect. They did.

Among the discoveries Leben made: Fricatives convey “faster” and “smaller” — as do vowels that are voiced near the front of the mouth, like the a in “bat” or the i in “hid.” Plosives, or stops, convey “slower” and “bigger” — as do vowels that are voiced at the back of the throat, like the o in “token” or the double o’s in “food.” So-called voiceless stops like k, p, and t are more alive and daring than voiced stops like b, d and g, while the voiceless convey less luxury than the voiced. And all sound-symbolic effects manifest differently depending on context. They take on properties of the product being named.

In his search for just the right sounds, Shore used an app, called Universal Text Combination Generator, to create a list of 7,500 names combining fricatives and stops. Getting some help from computers has become de rigueur among namers, who — perhaps in part to reassure their corporate clients — have devised proprietary and often highly confidential software to assist in the naming process. Some of these programs mash together roots of words to form new words. Some find rhymes. Some focus on speech. One company, Idiom, promotes a system it calls Lingtwistics, which, according to its website, is an algorithm that “deconstructs these naming ingredients, then reassembles them in unexpected ways.” (The name Lingtwistics was itself generated by the algorithm.)

Like most namers, though, Shore doesn’t believe that computers can replace human creativity. For Shore, sound symbolism was only the beginning. He didn’t just want words that sounded right. Shore liked “natural words,” words that carried semantic and even historic meaning.

He kept coming back to the notion that this invention was like something out of science fiction. Looking for inspiration, he watched the movie “Jumper,” which is about teleportation, and began examining a website called the Glossary of Science Fiction Ideas, Technology and Inventions. There were 2,400 entries, and Shore studied them all. Two, however, popped out. One was “Jumpdoor,” which referred to a teleportation device, still Shore’s go-to idea. And the other was “Jaunte Stage,” described as a “little place to teleport,” first used in a 1956 novel, “The Stars My Destination,” by Alfred Bester, which served as inspiration for a Stephen King story titled “The Jaunt.”

This is the point in his search at which Shore sits at his computer and opens window after window, making lists of words and then trying to make connections among the words on those lists and then putting potential candidates for the final name on a master list. It is an act of computerized mind meld, and it goes on for hours every day for days at a time. If the search seems chaotic, that is the point. The idea is to do everything — to leave no word unturned. He visits the website onelook.com, which shows how words work with other words, or sketchengine.co.uk, which combs texts and concordances, flags parts of speech and shows how a specific word appears in billions of words of text. He visits rhymezone.com to find all the words that rhyme with a word. That is how he came up with the name for an ideation application for the Palm Pilot — he began with “brain,” looked for rhyming words and concluded with BrainForest. For this project, he thought of words about travel, but also about entertainment, the sense of engagement, connection, energy, even spheres. And he laid them all out on an Excel spreadsheet — 1,200 names in all by the time he had finished.

For a single project, namers can come up with as many as 6,500 names. Big naming companies will do anywhere from 40 to 50 projects a year, and smaller ones 15 to 20, which adds up to a lot of names. Of course, only one name will be chosen for each project, and that is the only one the client will own. The rest, however, won’t necessarily go to waste. Every naming agency keeps a list of its discards in a computer program. These are then classified by message (at Catchword); by distinctiveness, appeal, memorability and concept (at Interbrand); or by whatever other way the namers might want to retrieve them. Catchword has 650 of these categorized lists. And many of the names will be recycled, which suggests that there is a kind of Platonic ideal of good names, independent of products good or bad — a name so good that it could work, if not on anything, than at least on many things.

Three weeks after he first experienced the results of the new virtual-reality production process, Shore paid a second visit to Menlo Park — this time with 61 names he had culled from his master list of 1,200. Using PowerPoint, he presented the names one by one with an explanation of the meaning of each. And he presented them in what amounted to a narrative, bunching all the names that connoted one characteristic and moving from that characteristic to the next in an arc that he thought had a strong beginning and a boffo ending.

The first name was Virch, for “virtual” reality. Then Amuzium (he thought the “ium” read “elemental”). Then Thrall, which was “emotive” but also had a negative suggestion of surrender. Then Thrillium. Howl. Mezmer. Joyager (the inventors immediately liked that one). Livit. Physic. Tactene. Tether (“tying one to an experience”). Lash. Splicefield. Velop. Engulf (“very direct”). Respace (another favorite). Skylume. Coil (“potential energy”). Midst (“I was interested in repurposing words from another era”). Zyde (from “reside”). Jaunt (“a short journey for pleasure”). Trav. Trave. Translo. Zonic (“sonic but faster”). Popover (“they loved this name”). When he was done, two hours later, Christensen, van Hoff and Annau listed their favorites, compared them and then handed the winners to Shore.

That was the end of Round 1.

Typically there are two rounds in each naming project, though larger clients and tougher jobs may require three or four. With the lists in hand, Shore retreated to his home to generate a revised set of 50 names, now that he knew what sorts of names the inventors seemed to like (Glidesight, Latch, Plasm, Sheen, Splicewire and Telescape, among others).

Getting clients to accept a name is the hardest part of a namer’s job. Shore calls it the brander’s paradox: Having asked for a whole new identity, the client is terrified to accept it. “We’re taxed with doing something different,” Shore says, “yet those are the very things that might be off-putting or scary.” This is one reason namers make a point of discussing the origins of their names; explaining the chain of reasoning behind an unfamiliar word can make it come to sound not just natural but inevitable. Even so, some of the best names wind up in the bin, which is why Paola Norambuena of Interbrand says she makes it a practice never to argue for a name or to fall in love with one. Naming will break your heart.

Then there is the issue of trademarks. Before any company or product name can be registered and legally protected, it must pass an evaluation by the Patent and Trademark Office to determine whether it has already been taken. Almost every naturally occurring word has been claimed, which is why namers so often arrive at portmanteaus (Accenture derives from “accent” and “future”) or drop vowels (Flickr and Tumblr) or change letters (Lyft). “Coming up with a good name is hard,” Margaret Wolfson says. “Coming up with a great name is even harder. Coming up with a name that passes trademark! . . . " There are roughly two million active trademarks in the United States, and 5,000 new applications are filed with the trademark office each week. At least half do not pass, often because they happen to be merely similar to another name. Shore’s Respace, which the inventors liked, would be deemed too close to a digital-services firm named Redspace, so the name eventually dropped out. A company can try to buy out another company that has a name it covets, but it can get messy. That is why Shore and other namers subject their candidates to a preliminary trademark screening before a client becomes attached to a name it cannot have. And trademarks don’t have to be cleared only in the United States. For companies and products overseas, they have to be cleared in each country.

Vetting names internationally means considering cultural issues as well. Lexicon has 84 linguists around the world who make sure names don’t ruffle local sensitivities. By one account, linguists rejected the drug name Soarus because it sounded like tsouris, Yiddish for “trouble.” Similarly, Wolfson once had to convince a client that a product named Care 4 would not sell in China because the number 4 signifies death. One American company, Good Characters, is devoted entirely to coming up with Chinese names for other American companies wanting to do business in China.

In pharmaceutical naming, the hurdles are, of course, even higher — which has led some pharma namers to abandon semantically grounded names altogether. At ixxéo, a naming firm based in Switzerland, Denis Ezingeard, the managing director, has devised a method that focuses entirely on visual and aural names, on the principle that the less semantic freight a word carries, the better. He says his process draws on jazz, nonrepresentational art, bird-watching and Darwinian evolution. His rationale is that the names don’t mean anything in linguistic terms, which makes it easier for them to pass regulation. Ezingeard may be onto something in a business in which companies are running out of words. The company’s own name, ixxéo, is a product of its method. It looks and sounds right, but it isn’t a real word. It is an impression — something Ezingeard made up.

With the prescreening completed late in August, Shore returned to the inventors’ office for the last time with his 50 final candidates. Once again, he projected the names on a screen in context and explained his reasoning for choosing each. But by this time, Christensen, van Hoff and Annau were seasoned evaluators. “The names were even better,” Christensen says.

After Shore left, they wrote the finalists on a whiteboard on their office wall and began deliberating. The contenders included Popover, FarAcross, Jaunt, Jumpdoor and Lunge. Christensen lobbied hard for Jaunt, which had grown on him because of its science-fiction origins. But one partner thought it was too high-toned, too British-sounding. Jumpdoor was still a favorite, and Respace hadn’t yet fallen out. For days, the partners debated the possibilities, and the weight of the decision was considerable. “It is kind of all or nothing,” Christensen says about their name choice.

What Shore didn’t tell them was that even if the name they chose received a tepid reception, the power of their production process could still overcome it. Most namers will tell you, as Paola Norambuena puts it, that a “great name can’t fix a bad product. A great product can fix a bad name.” Accenture was met with derision for reminding people of dentures. Gap was an empty space. Yelp was a dog in pain. The iPad was confused with a tampon. Now these names have no odd connotations at all, thanks to the success of the things they name.

So it may have been that after hours upon hours of brainstorming and hours more of deliberations and still hours more of trademark searches, and after the expenditure of tens of thousands of dollars, not as much was at stake as Christensen, van Hoff and Annau thought — at least not in commercial terms. Personal and emotional stakes were a different story. Christensen says selecting the name was a milestone, though he doesn’t remember exactly how or when they settled on their choice. Shore got the news via an email telling him that they had chosen a name and that it had been granted trademark approval. Now it was theirs.

It would be seven more months before the company was ready to come out to the public. In that time, the inventors moved their operations to Palo Alto. They formed a board of advisers, which included the chairman of Imax. They began making arrangements to record events like the McCartney concert and even make V.R. movies. And then, when they were ready, one afternoon last April, they invited the press to their unveiling. Reporters who entered the office were greeted by a large sign affixed to the wall with the company’s name in a futuristic-looking font. Of course, they had no idea what went into selecting the word on that sign. It simply said:

Jaunt.      

Random  

Ihave had a number of tweets and emails this week asking about my tax affairs, following all the stories about Lord Fink. I replied to them saying that I don’t mind in the slightest being confused with Stanley Fink, since, as it happens, he is among the kindest and most ethical people I know. And also thanking them for believing me capable of making a fortune in the financial markets.

But it has brought home to me how annoying it must be to have exactly the same name as someone who suddenly makes the news. It must drive The Times’s Phil Collins bonkers, for instance.

I once speculated that somewhere out there, there must be a woman called Sue Doku whose life had been made a misery. Someone called Susan Doku duly wrote to me, although to her credit she said she quite enjoyed it.

Stanley Fink and I had a lucky escape. His family was originally called Landau but, as with many Jews, the name was changed by an immigration officer. When Stanley’s ancestor arrived at immigration and was asked for a name, he thought he was being asked to identify the Jew who was sponsoring him. So he said “Finkelstein” and ended up being given that name himself.

A few years later the family shortened it to Fink. Otherwise we would have had the unlikely situation of two Lord Finkelsteins, one of Northwood, the other of next-door Pinner. A single Lord Finkelstein, frankly, is absurd enough.

The other day I opened Twitter to respond to some of the people who had tweeted about my column.

I found in my timeline (the stream of incoming tweets from people whose postings I follow), the following banal message. It was from Chelsea Football Club and read: “Morning all.” That’s it. The whole thing. Just “Morning all.” Nothing else. And this had been retweeted more than 600 times.

When I questioned this, someone wrote back that Harry Styles of the boy band One Direction had posted a picture of a plate of scrambled eggs on Instagram and it had been “liked” 990,514 times.

I am clearly taking too much trouble over my articles. Next week you are getting a salutation and a picture of my breakfast and that’s your lot. When writing about the Selma marches this week, I noted that the beatings endured by the demonstrators made a bigger impact on public opinion because they were shown on television in the middle of the Holocaust drama Judgment at Nuremberg.

When the play was first shown on television in the 1950s, it was as one of a series of productions sponsored by companies that included the American Gas Association. Every mention of the method of execution had therefore to be rendered simply as “chambers”. I’m not making this up.      

Beer Labels 

Columbia? Taken. Mississippi? Taken. Sacramento? El Niño? Marlin? Grizzly? Sorry, they're all taken.

Virtually every large city, notable landscape feature, creature and weather pattern of North America — as well as myriad other words, concepts and images — has been snapped up and trademarked as the name of either a brewery or a beer. For newcomers to the increasingly crowded industry of more than 3,000 breweries, finding names for beers, or even themselves, is increasingly hard to do without risking a legal fight.

Candace Moon, aka The Craft Beer Attorney, is a San Diego lawyer who specializes in helping brewers trademark ideas and also settle disputes. Moon tells The Salt she has never seen a brewery intentionally infringe upon another's trademarked name, image or font style. Yet, with tens of thousands of brands in the American beer market, it happens all the time.

"There are only so many words and names that make sense with beer, so it's not surprising that many people will come up with the same ideas," Moon says.

A frequently recurring issue, she says, is different breweries thinking they've coined the same hopcentric puns and catchphrases for their beers. A quick Google search reveals multiple beers named "Hopscotch," and at least three India Pale Ales with the name "Bitter End."

The brewers at Scratch Brewing Company add wild plants like spicebush, goldenseal, wild ginger, chanterelles and wild rose root to their beer to give it the flavor of the Illinois woods.

Name overlaps may not matter as long as the beers are sold in different regions, but in such cases, Moon says, would-be conflicts often go unresolved.

When two large breweries with broad distribution are involved, the matter is almost always settled, sometimes amicably.

For example, when the brewers at Avery in Colorado and Russian River in California discovered that they each had a beer named Salvation, they met at an annual Colorado beer festival to talk it out. Vinnie Cilurzo, co-owner and brewmaster of Russian River Brewing Co., says that neither he nor Adam Avery knew who had coined the name. Nor were they particularly worried about it. Still, they took the opportunity to come to a clever compromise. They combined their beers in a blend and named it Collaboration Not Litigation.

Other cases get ugly. In July 2013, Lagunitas Brewing Co.'s owner, Tony Magee, received a cease-and-desist order from SweetWater Brewing Co. in Atlanta demanding that the Northern California brewing giant stop using the marijuana code "420" in the cryptic artwork and messaging found on many Lagunitas beer labels. Since the 1990s, SweetWater had made a beer called 420 Extra Pale Ale. Magee, who responded to the demand with a volley of Twitter jabs at SweetWater, quickly agreed to the demand.

"I decided, 'You want to own 420, fine, you can have it,' " Magee says. "And it's true: They legitimately owned it."

Magee admits he has called out others — like Knee Deep Brewing Co. — when they have printed IPA labels too similar to his own. The Lagunitas IPA label features three stencil-style letters, bold and black, in a serif font and without periods in between.

"It's not that we trademarked the alphabet, but we trademarked the arch presentation of those letters," Magee explains. "From a design standpoint, I found the most elegant way to put 'IPA' on a label, so it's likely that others would have landed on the same design."

American trademark law lumps breweries together with wineries and distilleries, making the naming game even chancier. A widely circulating rumor has it that Yellow Tail Wines, of Australia, came after Ballast Point Brewing Co., in San Diego, for naming a beer "Yellowtail." Ballast Point's pale ale is now conspicuously lacking a fish-themed name (a signature, if not a trademark, of the brewery), though an image of a brightly colored yellowtail still resides plainly — and legally, it seems — on the label. A spokesperson for Ballast Point said the company could not discuss the matter.

Even imagery can be trademarked and protected in court. San Diego's Port Brewing Co., for instance, applied several years ago for a trademark to use Celtic cross-shaped tap handles at its brewpub, specifically for its Lost Abbey label. When Port, which first installed its stylized tap handles in 2008, discovered that Moylan's Brewery and Restaurant, near San Francisco, was serving beer with similar handles, Port sued Moylan's.

"I'd been using Celtic crosses for 16 years when [Port's owner] came after me," Brendan Moylan tells The Salt. Moylan says he lost time and money fighting the lawsuit — but not his crosses. He thumbed his nose at the San Diego brewery and kept his tap handles.

Moylan's has been involved in other trademark battles, too. Moylan says he was the first brewery to name a beer Kilt Lifter. However, he didn't trademark the two words. Over the years, other craft breweries put the same name on their own beers — often dark and malty Scotch-style ales. Moylan, who says he isn't a "trademarkey kind of guy," wasn't concerned.

Then, as Moylan tells it, a brewing company in Arizona called Four Peaks not only adopted the name but applied for a trademark on it. Foreseeing legal troubles, Moylan voluntarily took the name off bottles of his beer that were shipped to states where Four Peaks beers are sold. Four Peaks representatives could not be reached for comment.

Moylan says the owners of Four Peaks recently visited his brewpub with a peace offering: a Four Peaks T-shirt and some beer. Moylan drank the beer and has even worn the shirt. It might not have been the happiest ending for his Kilt Lifter, but it wasn't a, um, bitter end.      

Royal Street Names  

Buyers are willing to pay more for a home in a street with a regal sounding name, a survey suggests.

Nearly one in ten house-hunters is willing to pay up to £30,000 more for a home located in a street with Royal, Palace, Lord or Bishop, among others, in its name, according to a survey of 1,000 buyers by OnTheMarket.com, the property website.

Helen Whiteley, commercial director at the site, said: “There is no question that location is one of the most important elements when buying or renting a new home, but it is interesting that a prestigious sounding street name can help to influence a buyer or renter’s idea of price and worth.”

Forty per cent of respondents said they might pay up to £5,000 more for a property on such a street, while 3 per cent were willing to pay over £50,000.

The research showed that King, Queen and Crown were also popular.

Royal was the name that added the most prestige to a property, which is certainly true of the Royal Crescent in Bath.

Large regional disparities were also apparent, with 43 per cent of Londoners saying that they would consider paying more for a property in a street with a regal title, the highest proportion in the country. This compares with only 19 per cent in the northeast.      

Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms and Mx  

FOR the first time in decades there is a new title to join Mr, Mrs, Miss and Ms: the genderneutral “Mx” as an honorific for transgender people and anyone else who does not identify with a particular gender.

Government departments, councils, high street banks, some universities, Royal Mail and driving licences all now accept Mx.

Over the past two years the title has been quietly added to official forms and databases and is now being considered for inclusion in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Jonathan Dent, assistant editor on the OED, said it was the first addition to the accepted stable of honorifics in recent history and demonstrated how the English language is evolving to accommodate an ever–changing society.

“This is an example of how the English language adapts to people’s needs, with people using language in ways that suit them rather than letting language dictate identity to them,” Dent said.

“When you look at the usual drop-down options for titles, they tend to be quite formal and embrace traditional status such as the relationship between a man and wife, such as Mr and Mrs, or a profession such as Dr or even Lord. This is something new.”

Public sector organisations that now accept Mx include the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue & Customs, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the NHS.

Royal Mail said it had introduced Mx as an option for people registering on its website two years ago after a request from customers, adding: “We have been rolling it out since then across all of our online applications.”

Barclays Bank was among the first companies to introduce Mx and now allows existing account holders to add the title, on request, to their credit and debit cards, correspondence, cheques and online banking.

Royal Bank of Scotland, Halifax, Santander, NatWest and the Co-Operative Bank have also included the title as an option, while HSBC said it had introduced Mx for some customers and was considering offering it for all.

Last year Oxford University changed its systems to allow staff and students to use Mx as it is “now the most commonly used and recognised genderneutral title”.

Cambridge, Birmingham and Portsmouth universities also allow Mx while Ucas, the university admissions service, introduced Mx for prospective students last July.

The first recorded use of Mx was in Single Parent, the American magazine, in 1977. Dent said: “The early proponents of the term seem to have had gender politics as their central concern [and] saw the title as one which could sidestep the perceived sexism of the traditional ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’.”

In the late 1990s it became popular among people with “non-binary” gender identities, who do not see themselves as either male or female.

SJ Jacobs, from the UK’s Nonbinary Inclusion Project, welcomed the increasing acceptance of Mx as a “big step forward”.

“The more people have pushed for recognition and respect, the need for a title has followed suit. For some, seeing that Mx title that they’ve chosen on a letter or a bank statement will be very important and help them feel validated,” Jacobs said.

However, Jacobs claimed there was still “a long way to go”, with some organisations failing to embrace Mx because of IT issues or concerns over identity fraud.

One company The Sunday Times spoke to last week said that it was holding back from introducing the title because employees were unsure about how to pronounce it without offending.

“Most people say it as ‘Mux’ with a sort of ‘schwa’ sound in the middle, but a lot of people just spell out the letters,” Jacobs added.      

Why We Forget Names  

There is a very simple reason why it's so easy for the names of new acquaintances to slip right out of your head within moments of being introduced: Names are kind of meaningless. Memory experts say that the more pathways back to a memory you have, the easier it becomes to retrieve that memory, and this just doesn't often happen naturally with names. For example, even details as seemingly minor as what you were wearing on a particular day or what the weather happened to be doing can make it easier to recall other events that occurred that day, like the particulars of a conversation you had with a friend. But names, on the other hand, usually don't give your brain much information to grasp onto beyond the name itself.

Sure, there may be family history or a great deal of sentimental meaning behind a person's first name, but when you meet someone at a party, there's no readily apparent reason why this guy should be named Mike and that guy should be named Max. Names are "completely arbitrary, and hold no specific information in them," the narrator of a new AsapSCIENCE video on name-forgetting explains. "And if your brain can't make connections between multiple pieces of information ... then you're more likely to forget that information."

It's much easier, on the other hand, to remember a person's occupation, a phenomenon memory experts call the Baker-baker effect. (As in, it's easier to remember someone is a baker — perhaps because you've formed a mental image of your new acquaintance in a kitchen, covered in flour — than it is to remember that his or her last name is Baker.) In one study, researchers first showed participants photographs of strangers, including a couple of lines on the person's name and occupation, and asked them to recall that information a short time later, when presented with the picture again. The majority of the study volunteers got the person's job correctly, but struggled with the name.

Memory experts offer ideas to counteract this annoying and often embarrassing psychological quirk, some of which work better than others in practice. You can try repeating the person's name several times after the introduction, or invent associations between the name and some other piece of information — if her name is Cindy, picture her singing! — as the AsapSCIENCE guys suggest in an additional video offering tips.

Another recent study on the subject suggests that most people are overly confident when asked to predict how accurate they'll be at recalling new names. But when they realize that they're not as good at remembering names as they'd like to think they are, and subsequently spend more time consciously trying to commit the name to memory, it seems to improve their ability to recall new names. There are times when it is best to simply admit defeat and plan accordingly.      

Men taking their wives’ names 

Men taking their wives’ names has become a trend, and agencies that process name changes for bridegrooms say that it is taking up an increasing amount of their time. Under ancient English law, a woman can take her husband’s name automatically and simply present the marriage certificate as proof of her identity. Men, however, may have to pay £17 if they use an agency to register their new name.

Louise Bowers, of the UK Deed Poll Service, said that men taking their wives’ names, couples going doublebarrelled and the meshing of names to create a new one now form a significant proportion of the 60,000 deed polls the company issues each year, up from a fraction of that a few years ago.

“I suppose it is a sign of the times. We no longer expect women to stay at home and look after the house when they get married, I don’t think we expect them automatically to take their husband’s name either,” she said.

However, feminism does not appear to be the driving force for men taking on their wife’s name. “Many of the men appear to be doing it because they have embarrassing names they have always want to get rid of, or their future wife has refused to take it,” Ms Bowers said. “Names such as Cock, Dick, Bogey and Smelly are the ones most often being changed. People just don’t want their children to have them.”

However, for some couples it comes down to who is more attached to their family name. Emeka Njodi, a marketing executive from London, took his wife’s name — McQuade — when they married last year. “My wife is a milliner and her name is her business — Lizzie McQuade,” Mr McQuade said. “She is also very close to her family and I knew she was very emotionally attached to the name. We talked about both keeping our own names and giving the children whichever one suited. “Then she said she wanted us all to have the same name so she would take mine. I thought that was ridiculous. I am not that attached to my name particularly and it really isn’t part of my identity.”

For some it is too much for one to make the sacrifice so they mesh names. Dawn Porter, the writer and presenter, became Dawn O’Porter when she married Chris O’Dowd in 2012.

Ms Bowers said that this can be an entertaining part of her work. “The one that sticks in my mind was a Mr Pugh and a Miss Griffin who became the Puffins,” she said. However, the joining of names is probably the most common choice these days. The rapper and music producer Jay Z (real name Shawn Carter) combined his name with that of his wife, Beyoncé, and is now Shawn Knowles-Carter.

For David Byers, a journalist, the decision to go double-barrelled was an important act showing unity and equality. But there is a long-term practical problem for their children. “Our kids are known as Grace Byers-Grunwald and Jesse Byers-Grunwald. I do wonder what happens if they, God forbid, want to take the name of their own husband, or wife, when they’re older. Then they have three surnames. Or even four. They’ll end up sounding like German counts.”      

The Alphabet Bias 

Imagine the fuss if Britain decided to create a universal listing system across all schools, industries and professions, with blue-eyed people always listed first, and the darkest-eyed placed permanently at the bottom. Whether you were looking for a lawyer, plumber or rat-catcher, the palest blue-eyed people would be the ones you’d try first. Only if they were busy or inadequate would you move down the list. The chances of your ever calling on the woman with the jet-black eyes at the bottom would be zilch.

There would be uproar at such random discrimination. But we live with it, though it had never occurred to me until last week. It’s called the alphabet, and it routinely, unthinkingly, makes life easier for those with surnames closest to A.

I practise alphabetism almost every day, without noticing. Last Sunday, going through my Christmas card list but late for a party, I only got as far as E. Then it occurred to me that, in the Christmas rush, there are many years in which I don’t get beyond M or O by December 24. Friends called Adams and Arbuthnot are guaranteed to hear from me each December; equally beloved Wilsons and Williams only every third or second year.

I do the same with invitations. When I’m wondering who to ask to supper and who I haven’t seen for a while I screen through my address book. It’s the people at the top who get asked first. By the time four or five of them have said yes, I might not even have got to P or R.

Companies woke up to this years ago; it’s why firms are called AAA Cabs or A1 electricians. That’s no good to all the sole professionals listed by surname in directories. Accountants, dentists, therapists, yoga teachers, even actors; in any alphabetical listing, if a potential client starts hunting for someone suitable at A, they’re likely to have found what they want long before they get to Z.

The writers of fiction know that names can be either a bonus or an obstacle. Once browsers in bookshops have passed the paid-for and promoted piles on the tables, they start their search at the first set of shelves. At A. Whether they’re browsing for one book or five, they’ll stop looking when they have enough in their pile. Which makes it overwhelmingly probable that they’ll choose a B rather than a T.

The author Louisa Young, ruefully conscious of all the serendipitous purchases that she might have missed out on, switched positions joyfully when she and her daughter wrote a series of children’s books together. They had to pick a pseudonym — readers dislike double-authored books — and her agent and publisher were very firm; don’t go beyond D. Lionboy, a highly successful series, was published with Zizou Corder as the author. “Look at it,” Young says. “What pseudonyms do recent writers choose? Jonathan Freedland writes as Sam Bourne, Jim Grant as Lee Child, Martyn Waite as Tania Carey. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a strategy.”

In academia the alphabet effect can make or flatten careers. Ten years ago researchers at Stanford University discovered that economists with surnames earlier in the alphabet were more likely to succeed than those with surnames later on. That remained true even when accounting for country of origin, religion or ethnicity. The earlier names had more of the jobs at top universities, more of the prestigious fellowships, and won more Nobel prizes than their peers. Lower-ranked staff were much more likely to have surnames from N to Z.

The researchers attributed the difference to the economists’ convention of listing the contributors to jointly authored papers in alphabetical order. Many academic disciplines do the same. We expect readers to recognise; hey, this isn’t a ranking order! It’s just the alphabet! Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the way our minds work. In academia the phenomenon is magnified by repeated citations in other monographs or books. The first time a paper is mentioned, all the authors will be named, eg: Bond, Murdo, Wade. Cited again, it will be referred to as “Bond et al”. It’s apparently hard for us to avoid the conclusion that Bond was the chap or the woman who did all the important work.

The theory makes sense, but it seems that it could be an exaggerated version of the subtle confidence-building effect of being called first, listed first, let out to lunch first — let alone getting more Christmas cards and more lunch invitations — which those with early-alphabet names tend to experience. Some patterns do look like more than chance.

In my rapid, random survey of top sports yesterday, eight of the top ten Test cricketers have surnames in the first half. So do 15 of the 21 men in the England football squad this weekend and two-thirds of the last rugby squad. Or take British politics. Blair, Brown, Ashdown, Clegg, Cameron, Miliband, Corbyn. Of the 22 British prime ministers since 1900, 20 have had first-half names.

What’s to be done? Well, there’s always rotation. The Chinese have years of dogs and cats; maybe we could have alphabet cycles. Every other year, computers could be programmed to reverse all lists and credits, from addresses to Christmas card lists, and start with Z. M’s and N’s would be doomed to live for ever in the mediocre mid-list, but at least more Ts would get the chance to shine. Or we could take our own personal short cuts, and change our names. I’ve got my eye on one already. Aaronovitch seems like an unassailably good place to begin.      

Changing Names 

“What’s in a name?” as Juliet famously pondered. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” While that might be true for flowers, food or even scented candles, a record number of people in Britain are discovering that adopting more imaginative names will alter how they are treated.

Last year a record 85,000 people changed their names by deed poll, according to figures released by name-changing firms. While most of these changes were relatively mundane, some people chose titles betraying a bizarre imagination.

One man, formerly known as Simon Smith, decided he wanted to be known as Bacon Double Cheeseburger. “A name is the least important part of your personality,” he told the Sunday People. “It’s given to you by someone else.” The 33-year-old, from Muswell Hill, north London, changed his name by deed poll last year. “Bacon Double Cheesburger was the first name I came up with,” he said.

Other people have named themselves after their favourite football players, changing their legal names to Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo or Wayne Rooney. One father and son took their love of football one stage further, choosing to call themselves Queens Park Rangers.

Cartoon characters also made an appearance. One woman altered her middle name to Penelope Pitstop after the driver from the Hanna-Barbera racing series Wacky Races. Another preferred to be known as Bruce Wayne, Batman’s secret identity. Some people have taken on truly bizarre names, such as Sarge Metal-fatigue or Simply MyLove Poet. One couple have renamed themselves Mr and Mrs Amazing.

Despite these whimsical measures, there can be serious reasons to change a name. Some women can seek a new title to evade an abusive partner. Immigrants can apply to anglicise their names, while transgender people can seek a new identity in line with their adopted gender.

Louise Bowers, of the UK Deed Poll Service, in Witham, Essex, said: “One man changed his name to Happy Birthday. It gave us a chuckle but if that is what they want to do, it’s their choice. “We’ve noticed an increase in people who want to get married but cannot afford it, so change names. “Some people simply don’t like their original name — we’ve changed Cock to Cox and Smellie to Smiley.”

Figures released by the service, Britain’s largest name-changing company, show that it handled more than 60,000 applications last year. The process, which takes four working days, costs £33 for an adult and £35 for a child.      

The (Your Name) Club  

I NEVER MET many Mollys. Not in elementary school, or high school, or college, or since. As a child, I used to wish I was an Alyssa or a Jessica, to be one one of the kids who got to include the first letter of their last name to help distinguish them. You had a club with the other Amandas or Natashas, I imagined; what you shared may have been trivial, but it was also, at an age when you’re barely even a person, an integral part of who you are. But I was the only Molly. (With the exception of the many, many golden retrievers I’ve met with the name.)

Then, in my late twenties, thanks to Facebook, I found the other Mollys—or, rather, they found me. They were legion. They called themselves the Mollarmy, and they invited me into their club. We’re not the only ones, either. There are groups of Steves, of Lances, of Mirandas—all out there, finding each other, Facebook messaging constantly, sharing the only thing they have in common: a name.

Unlike (parts of) Weird Twitter, Damn Daniel remixes, and much of Tumblr, this isn’t just a product of teen internet. The impulse to be part of this is far more than just boredom and Facebook phenomena—it’s also the fact that we just really, really love our own names. How they sound, when they’re written on paper (or on a screen), when words look like them. But since the echo chamber of social media is maybe the happiest place on Earth for narcissists, it’s also just fun to talk to a lot of other Mollys.

“You Never Get Tired of People Online”

Late last year, Molly Brooks was bored sitting at home in Indiana. “I thought it was a funny idea to add a bunch of Mollys into a group chat,” the 16-year-old told me via Facebook Messenger. Like me, she didn’t know a lot of Mollys, so why not just find a bunch of them on the Internet? She typed ‘Molly’ into Messenger, and added everyone who came up. She had never made a group before, but her first attempt stuck: almost immediately, the gathered Mollys began rapid-fire chatting.

When I ask Molly why Facebook Messenger instead of a Group, or another social network, she says, “Messenger is the only decent part about Facebook now.” (From the mouths of teens to your ears, Facebook.)

Part of what makes it so special, I realize, is that none of us know each other. I’ve always felt both cameraderie and competition with among the few other Mollys I’ve met IRL—but something about finding these unknown, mysterious people who share my name is part of the easy rapport. Molly (Molly B., not Molly Me) says that while the different time zones can make things challenging, there is something about this online-only friendship that works. “You never really get tired of people online because you don’t see them every day,” she says. “They’re just fun to talk to.”

The Mollarmy is far from the only same-name group chat. It, and others like it, seem to trace back to random-Internet-weirdness site The LAD Bible, which included a photo of a chat among Nathans in a round-up. As the practice spread, confused invitees would screenshot the chat and tweet about it. (I was one of them.)

The Internet didn’t invent this whole friendships-based-on-names agenda, of course—just ask the Jim Smith Society, founded in 1969 by a New Jersey journalist named James H. Smith, Jr. (Motto: “We don’t shun fun!”) He simply decided, at a friend’s suggestion, to find other Jim Smiths and create a group. The organization still exists today. “Once a Jim has joined he is a member for life (and beyond),” says Suzie Smith, who handles public relations for the group. “Some of the wives continue to be active even after their Jim has died simply because of the attachment.” Once a year, the group hosts the Jim Smith Society Fun Fest—this year, it will be in Portland, Oregon. The only requirement to be a member is, of course, to be named Jim Smith.

But with only 25 active members, the Jim Smith Society can’t hold a candle to the Mollarmy, which includes about 150 Mollys and one rogue Marley who was allowed in. They’re mostly 15 to 18 years old, and I’m fairly certain I’m the oldest Molly of them. Most are British. I’m one of five Molly McHughs. Topics generally consist of self-promotion (“follow me on Insta, I follow back”), love lives, and complimenting the hell out of each other. Every once in awhile, after someone invites a spate of new Mollys, there’s a n’er-do-well who doesn’t understand what we’re doing. Bad Molly harasses us, we harass her back, she leaves, and the Mollarmy collectively shrugs because she clearly just doesn’t get it. Mollys share fun developments (“I got a new car today!”), talk about ruthless subtweeters, ask for hair advice, or just—and most commonly—ask “how’s all the mollys doing?”

When I was added to the group about three months ago, I tried to actively participate in the conversation, but there was a palpable disconnect. Some of that was age, some the UK-to-California time difference. I eventually had to mute the conversation because I was getting a flurry of notifications in the middle of the night. But I never left the group.

Sometimes the Mollarmy goes quiet for what feels like weeks, but then something simple gets it going again: someone needs help with boy or girl problems, or wants feedback on a new hair color. Whatever it is, the Mollys provide nothing but positivity and praise. There is no dissent: Every Molly is cheerleading every other Molly, because, as one Molly puts it, “Mollys are great.”

I’m inclined to agree.

The Power of Congruence

An oft-cited study found that the sound of your own name triggers brain activity, and you react to your name much differently than someone else’s. The middle frontal cortex, middle and superior temporal cortex, and cuneus, which are in the left hemisphere of your brain, are activated when someone says your name versus just another name. To be non-technical about it, though, we just really, really like hearing our own names.

Another study found that people were more attracted to people with similar names—Donalds and Donnas were likely to marry, as were Michaels and Michelles. This is called implicit-egotism. But some argue the theory doesn’t take into account how common some names are. “It’s been criticized because the researchers may not have done enough to make sure this wasn’t just a generational effect,” says Cleveland Evans, a professor at Bellevue University who specializes in onomastics and wrote The Great Big Book of Baby Names. “If you look at everyone in an entire country, most people marry within their generation, and oftentimes certain names are popular within a generation.” So if the names Michael and Michelle were popular for a period of time, it becomes more probable that a Michael and Michelle would marry—not because of narcissism, but because there were just a lot of them.

However, Evans says, other parts of the study make sense: people moving to cities that share their names (Louises in St. Louis, Georgias in Georgia), say, or even taking jobs that sound like their names (Dennis the dentist).

And there’s yet more research that says we simply like hearing and seeing our own names—this 2010 paper found that we’re more likely to reply to emails sent from someone with the same name. “It seems…people’s behavior can be influenced on the web by using the ‘name congruence’ technique,” the paper explains.” All of which makes the Mollarmy make complete sense: It’s an echo chamber that makes you want to participate, while also giving its Mollys a rush of acceptance. How many group chats full of strangers go on for months?

“If two people have shared the same name reactions their whole lives, that’s something subtle but profound they have in common,” says Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard, as well as founder of the site of the same name. “It’s almost like finding out you’re from the same town or went to the same school—but in this case, a little portable bubble of shared experience you carry with you wherever you go.” I think about whether the other Mollys get called Holly as often as I do, or if they feel infantilized by their name (probably not, since they’re mostly teens).

I asked Cleveland Evans if there were any interesting facts about the name that might help me understand what I have in common with my fellow Mollys. He told me Molly is a pet form of Mary, which I knew, but I didn’t know why: It has to do with baby talk, and how kids often pronounce “Rs” as “Ls.” The name really started becoming popular in the 60s, Evans says, and has maintained relevance since then—save for a recent “tsunami-like surge” a few years ago, after which it suddenly fell to its lowest popularity point since 1984.

“Perhaps you could ask the members of your group what they think of the statistic that Molly is a particularly ‘white’ name,” Evans suggested. “The authors of Freakonomics found about a decade ago that Molly was the ‘whitest’ name among fairly common girls’ names in California.” So I did exactly that.

“That doesn’t seem right,” a Molly wrote. “How can something be the whitest name?”

“i know a white dog named molly if that counts,” another Molly wrote.

And then we started talking about Hello Kitty t-shirts.      

Court Can Overrule Parent  

Court of Appeal
Published: May 30, 2016
In re C (Children) (Child in Care: Choice of Forename)

A local authority which had interim care of a child had the power to prevent the birth mother from registering a totally inappropriate name for the child, such as would cause significant harm in the child’s future, but should apply to the High Court to exercise its inherent jurisdiction to authorise such a move.

The Court of Appeal so held when dismissing an appeal by the mother against the decision of Judge Sharpe, sitting in the Swansea Family Court on June 25, 2015, granting a declaration that the local authority was permitted to prevent her from giving her twin babies, a boy and a girl, the forenames of, respectively, “Preacher” and “Cyanide” and an injunction restraining her from registering those forenames or referring to the children by those names during contact.

LADY JUSTICE KING said that the twin babies were said to have been conceived as a result of rape and there was no known father. The mother had a longstanding diagnosis of a psychotic disorder and of schizophrenia. Her three older children had been made the subject of care orders. The local authority had issued care proceedings the day after the birth of the twins and an interim care order had been made but the local authority was troubled about the mother’s proposal for naming the children “Preacher” and “Cyanide” and had brought it to the court’s attention at the interim care order hearing.

Her Ladyship noted that in circumstances where a baby could not be brought up by her parents, often the forename given to her was the only lasting gift she had from her birth mother. It might be the first, and only, act of parental responsibility by her birth mother. It was likely, therefore, to be of infinite value to that child as part of her identity. That remained the case, even if the name used in her new family, and thereafter throughout her life, was different from that given to her by her birth mother.

The naming of a child was not however merely a right or privilege, but also a responsibility; people, and particularly children, were capable of great unkindness and often were not accepting of the unusual or bizarre. A name which attracted ridicule, teasing, bullying or embarrassment would have a deleterious effect on a child’s self-esteem and self-confidence with potentially long-term consequences. The burden of such a name could also cause that child to feel considerable resentment towards the parent who had inflicted it upon her.

On behalf of the mother it was submitted that the naming and registration of the birth of a child was a statutory duty under the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 and not, therefore, an act of parental responsibility. That being so, the local authority and courts had no power to prevent the mother from giving her children the names of her choice. Her argument was reinforced, she submitted, by the fact that there was no provision within the 1953 Act for the General Registrar to decline to register a name considered to be offensive.

Her Ladyship concluded that having regard to the definition of “parental responsibility” in section 3(1) of the Children Act 1989 as “rights, duties, powers, responsibilities and authority which by law a parent of a child has in relation to a child”, both: (i) the choosing of a name (forename and surname) for a child and (ii) thereafter complying with the duty under section 2(1) of the 1953 Act, to give the particulars required to be registered concerning the birth and signing the register, were acts of parental responsibility.

By virtue of section 33(3) of the Children Act 1989 the effect of the making of a care order in relation to a child was to grant a local authority parental responsibility. Section 33(3)(b) went further, as it not only allowed a local authority to share parental responsibility with a parent, but gave it the power to: “determine the extent to which a parent may meet his parental responsibility for the child”.

However, it was submitted that a local authority was prohibited from interfering in the choice of forename by a mother by section 33(9) which provided: “The power in subsection (3)(b) is subject . . . to any right, duty, power, responsibility or authority which a person mentioned in that provision has in relation to the child and his property by virtue of any other enactment.”

Her Ladyship did not agree. Having determined that both the naming of a child, and the registration of a child’s birth by a mother, were acts of parental responsibility, neither of those acts would thereafter be caught by section 33(9); both acts fell squarely within the “rights, duties, powers, responsibilities and authority” as defined in section 3(1) of the 1989 Act, and were not, therefore, “by virtue of another enactment” (namely, the 1953 Act).

On the face of it, subject to the parents’ right to respect for their private and family life, guaranteed by article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the local authority had power to exercise its parental responsibility under section 33(3) of the 1989 Act in order to prevent a mother from giving her child the forenames of her choice.

However, the seriousness of the interference with the article 8 rights of the mother, consequent upon the local authority exercising that power, demanded that the course of action it proposed be brought before and approved by the court. In the highly unusual circumstance that a local authority believed that the forename chosen by the parent of a child in care, and by which he or she intended to register the child, went beyond the unusual, bizarre, extreme or plain foolish, and instead gave the authority reasonable cause to believe that by calling him or her that name the child was likely to be caused significant harm, the proper course was for the authority to put the matter before the High Court by way of an application under section 100(3) of the Children Act 1989 to invoke its inherent jurisdiction.

In the present case, giving the girl twin the forename “Cyanide” was capable, without more, of giving the court reasonable cause to believe that she would be likely to suffer significant emotional harm, in relation to her sense of identity and self-worth and to her day-today life as a child. Although “Preacher” in itself might not be an objectionable name, there was considerable benefit for the boy twin to be in the same position as his sister and for each of them to grow up knowing, as was proposed, that their half-siblings had chosen both of their names for them.      

English Names For Chinese Babies 

She may be only 16 years old and live on the other side of the planet, but there are getting on for a quarter of a million Chinese babies who have good reason to be very grateful for the British schoolgirl Beau Jessup.

Beau Jessup’s website Special Name has helped thousands of Chinese families to choose appropriate English names for their babies. She spends two hours a day updating it She has set up a website that helps their parents to choose British names for their children — and in the process has earned herself more than £48,000. Not bad for a girl who has only just started studying for her A levels.

Beau, a pupil at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, set up the website after a chance encounter over dinner while on a trip to China with her father, Paul, who has business interests there. “I was at a dinner with him and his work colleagues, and one of the ladies said, ‘Oh, what should I call my daughter? What English name should I give her?’ I was quite surprised — I did not feel qualified to give her daughter a name.

“They explained an English name is vital because you can’t use a Chinese name on an email or a university application to the UK. Your English name stays with you for life. “But I said what would you like your daughter to be like when she grows up? Because I did not just want to give her any old name. She said ‘ I want my daughter to surpass expectations and to surprise people with what she can achieve.’ So I said Eliza, because of Eliza Doolittle.”

The woman was delighted — not least because sometimes Chinese parents can get it wrong and choose names such as Gandalf, Cinderella or even Rolex.

“I heard lots of examples where people had chosen culturally inappropriate English names they’d heard from films or read online, and realised there was an opportunity to help Chinese people get it right from the start,” said Beau. Beau, whose mother is Lisa Maxwell, a former actress on the ITV police drama The Bill and a Loose Women panellist, then set about turning her idea into reality. Armed with a £1,500 loan from her father, who owns the Great British Teddy Bear Company, and with the help of a web developer, she tested it on a couple of Chinese websites before setting it up in May as a standalone website, Specialname.cn.

The site is illustrated with cartoons of two students on their graduation day, named William and Catherine.

Beau, who has a GCSE in Mandarin and has travelled to China several times in the past four years, said: “There’s a database with about 4,000 names, and I add in around 30 names a month.” Each name is assigned certain characteristics, usually based on British children’s books: John, for instance, is responsible and intelligent, while Grace is outgoing and generous. Parents, who pay the equivalent of 60p for the service, pick what characteristics they would like for their child — five out of a list of 12 — and are then given three names to choose from. The three chosen names are then shared with family and friends on WeChat, China’s messaging service equivalent to WhatsApp, to help make the final decision. Each suggestion is printed on a certificate with its meaning and an example of a famous person with that name. “It’s based on individual preference and what they personally want their child to be,” Beau said. “It’s nice to be a part of such a happy experience and be a part of those young stages in a baby’s life.” So far her website has helped to name more than 220,000 babies. “I was definitely surprised that it b became as successful as it did,” said Beau, who plans to use the money to pay for her university education. That success still means a lot of work, however. “I spend two hours a day just checking and reading the feedback from people who have purchased the service in order to develop it and improve it.”      

Other Resources

• Books About Names
• Anecdotes About Names
• Quotations About Names