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D. Murali

STEVE Rivkin and Fraser Sutherland tell us `the inside story of the brands we buy' in The Making of a Name, from Oxford University Press (www.oup.com) . "Each name belongs to a family," write the authors in a chapter on `typology of names.' Thus, names can be initialised such as BBC or BMW, be syllabic acronyms like Nabisco (of the National Biscuit Company), comprise numbers as, for example, 7 Up, and so on.

On the origin of Pakistan, you'd learn how in the early 1930s, Geoffrey Moorhouse coined the name "for a hypothetical nation that might emerge from the Muslim people of northern India and adjacent lands." And this is how he formed the name: `P' and `a' from Punjab, `a' and `k' from Kashmir, `i' and `s' from Sind, and `stan' from Afghanistan and Baluchistan.

There are stories behind abbreviations. "A list of acronyms published by the Raytheon Company in the 1960s was aptly titled ABRACADABRA for ABbreviations and Related ACronyms Associated with Defence, Aeronautics, Business and RAdio-electronics)." The authors caution that, at times, your brand may lend itself to `disgruntled' descriptions, such as: SABENA may be explained as `Such A Bad Experience Never Again,' MACINTOSH as `Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs,' and WINDOWS as `Will Install Needless Data On Whole System.'

Coined names add words to the language, and there're four different levels. One, compounds of two words such as ThinkPad and Band-Aid; two, altered form of a recognised word, as for instance, Compaq and Humana; three, foreign words, often for car names; thus a luxury model from Mitsubishi is Diamante (`diamond' in Spanish), and there's the Audi Avantissimo, meaning `most out in front' in Italian. And level four has "no immediately apparent origins or linkages, examples of which are Amirage (a perfume) and Zostrix (a pain-reliever cream).

Namers let their fingers walk and do some walking too, for "a leisurely stroll around the block or in a mall may reveal the inventive and evocative names local retailers come up with." Examples are: "One Night Stand (a women's boutique that rents high-priced designer clothing for special occasions), and Creature Comforts (a pet groomer)." Therefore, tap the Net; and also poke around "the shelves of a public library or used-book shop" to encounter serendipity.

There's the tragic story of Isuzu, which in Japanese means `fifty bells.' The problem was that in English "the name sounded more like a social disease than an automobile." When introduced in the US in the 1970s, sales of Opel Isuzus sank to less than 8,000 from nearly 40,000 in the previous year. Solution emerged when the company dropped its car line and started making trucks and 4x4 vehicles "sub-branded Trooper and Rodeo."

Pay attention to cultural differences. In Thailand, "Leo Burnett alerted a client that their proposed name for a motor oil phonetically read as Tight Virgin." Another instance, cited in the book is of Gulf Oil that wanted to use its No-Nox name to brand its gasoline in Indonesia. In the US, it was understood as `no knocks' to the engine. "However, after Gulf started using the name in Indonesia, it found that No-Nox sounded like the Bahasa Indonesia word nonok, slang for female genitals."

Well, that may make you ask, "Do names have a future?" The authors answer the question in the after-word. There's hope because we keep adding 5,000-6,000 words to English, mostly drawing from other words. So, there's little fear of running out of names. "The making of names will most certainly go on — extending the balancing act between business strategy and common sense, between marketing art and everyday science, between linguistic skill and legal competency," write Steve and Fraser, hopeful that "the future of names and naming is limited only by the ingenuity of the human mind."

Company and product names will not look the same after you read this, unless you tamely concur with Shakespeare's Juliet and ask, "What's in a name."

BookMark@thehindu.co.in

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