How the West was named

The story of America is written in the names that knit the land together.

Once, from eastern ocean to western shore, the land stretched away without names. Nameless headlands split the surf; nameless lakes reflected mountains; and nameless rivers flowed through nameless valleys into nameless bays.

Men came at last, tribe following tribe, speaking different languages and thinking different thoughts. According to their ways of speech and thought they gave names, and in their generations laid their bones by the streams they had named.

Names soon lay thickly on the land, and the Americans spoke them, great and little, easily and carelessly – Virginia, Susquehanna, Rio Grande, Deadman Creek, Sugarloaf Hill, Detroit, Wall Street – scarce thinking how they had come to be.

Yet the names had grown out of life, and the lifeblood, of all those who had gone before.

*    *    *

On the evening of Saturday, April 2, 1513 Juan Ponce de Leon laid anchor along the coastline of an unidentified stretch of land. The Spanish explorer had set sail from Puerto Rico a week earlier with three ships “to win honor and increase estate”.  Don Juan had tracked the coast all afternoon, and still he saw the land stretching far off, a low plain broken by groves of trees, green with April.

It was the custom of those who discovered new lands to name rivers, capes, mountains or the land itself, and to Don Juan one particular name was twice suitable for this new land.

It was April, and the season was still that of Our Lord’s Resurrection, only six days after the Easter of Flowers. He also thought the land he gazed upon was at this season a flowered land. Thus, he named it Florida (Flowering Easter).

*    *     *

Names sprang up across the new land between two oceans. From them it might be known how here one man hoped and struggled, how there another dreamed, or died, or sought fortune – Battle Mountain, Hardscrabble, Troy Smackover, Troy, Pasadena, Troublesome Creek, Cape Fear. Even Nameless.

While the name might suggest otherwise, the early inhabitants of Nameless, Texas were thoroughly invested in finding a name for their community. Located in northwest Travis County, Nameless was settled in 1869. Residents grew cotton or produced cedar posts and rails to make a living. By 1880 the townsfolk were ready to make their town official and applied for a U.S. post office.

The postal department rejected the names they suggested not once, but six times. Finally, in an act of frustration, the residents replied in writing, “Let the post office be nameless and be damned!”

Their bluff was called: The post office called Nameless was established in 1880. Although it survived well into the 20th century, all that remains in Nameless today is a historical marker, a cemetery and an abandoned schoolhouse, although the community without a name remains on state maps.

References:

Names on the land, by George R. Stewart (NYRB)

A Texas Town By Any Other Name: http://tinyurl.com/6p4c7ms

A corporate naming story straight out of the movies

Paramount, MGM, Fox, Pixar – iconic studio industry names that invoke all the romance, adventure and thrills of the movies they produce.

How about oil industry – do any of these names spring to mind in association with that unglamorous business?

No, very likely not.

Paramount - the peak of arrogance.

But the disconnect has not deterred Paramount Resources, a Calgary, Alberta oil and gas company that seems to have an odd infatuation with Hollywood. Apart from its corporate name, Paramount has a subsidiary named Fox Drilling and has a significant investment in a Canadian energy company called MGM Energy Corp.

And just to prove the nomenclature strategy is really no coincidence, Paramount recently created a new subsidiary and has named it, quite brazenly, Pixar Petroleum Corp.

This latest piece of naming plagiarism by Paramount crosses the line from the curious to the incomprehensibly bizarre. According to the Wall Street Journal, Paramount’s obsession with Hollywood is a long-running mystery for people who follow the company.

The Journal reports:

Stock analyst Jim Byrne, who covers Paramount Resources for BMO Nesbitt Burns, says he was incredulous when he heard the oil company was naming a new subsidiary Pixar. “How do they get away with it?” Mr. Byrne recalls asking himself.

Intellectual-property lawyers say it isn’t clear that the oil company’s use of the Pixar name could be considered trademark infringement because it is in such a different business, selling such different products.

Disney owns Pixar trademarks, according to filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, for “entertainment services in the field of film and television, namely, the creation, production and distribution of films, videos, animation and computer-generated images.”

“In an infringement claim, the issue is whether…the relevant consuming public is likely to be confused,” said Gloria Phares, an attorney with Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP who specializes in intellectual property. “But just because you have a mark in one area, like in animation, doesn’t mean you have a monopoly on a mark.”

Every naming consultant knows this and counts on it. It is getting harder to find good, original names that are not encumbered to some degree, as Blackberry-maker Research In Motion has discovered to its further embarrassment after naming its new operating system BBX.

A good name is a linguistic phenomenon that helps to create the very thing it identifies. Namers labor long and hard to find names that strategically suit the long-term business ambitions of a client company in all relevant USPTO classifications and celebrate when a name candidate appears to be reasonably free and clear.

Yet here is a public company merrily co-opting another company’s name and trading on its recognition in full knowledge of the fact. It is hard to comprehend what can be in the mind of the CEO in condoning this lazy, arrogant and most egregious practice.

Related articles

• Walt Disney Stakes Claim After Oil Firm Adopts Famous Name (online.wsj.com)
• Disney Goes After Pixar Petroleum for Trademark Infringement (tacticalip.com)

Another brand disconnect from Verizon and AT&T

You’ve probably seen the ads for something called 4G LTE. They are hard to miss.

Do you have any idea what 4G LTE is? More to the point, do AT&T and Verizon care that you don’t?

That last question is rhetorical: of course they don’t, or they wouldn’t be using these obscure initialisms.

In spite of the revolution sweeping the telecommunications industry it is startling just how customer unfriendly the big telecom providers continue to be with their branding practices.

In telecommunications parlance, 4G is simply the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards and, logically, a successor to the 3G and 2G families of standards.

LTE stands for Long Term Evolution, and what that is is anyone’s guess.  Something is presumably in the process of evolving over the long-term. As far as I can sensibly ascertain, LTE is a mobile broadband technology that allows people to stream music and watch videos on their smart phones and iPads anywhere, and download it quicker. So LTE is basically the same as 4G, and 4G LTE is saying the same thing twice.

In the world of telecommunications the future is undeniably digital. While high-quality wireless access has become a critical competitive necessity for cable, satellite TV, telecommunications and Internet service providers it is hard to understand what a company like Verizon is thinking with its inscrutable techno-babble acronyms. Educating people to be loyal to incremental generations of technology is very shortsighted. Today’s breakthrough is tomorrow’s obsolete technology, as 1-800 Flowers, Tower Records, Hollywood Video and American Telephone & Telegraph evidence.

If they are to have any differentiating relevance in the future, telecom companies have to get the engineers out of the marketing department, put few more marketers in the c-suite, move beyond the technology acronyms and discover a different, deeper way to connect with people.