Let’s raise a glass to Tequila

When it comes to dreaming up weird names for children, American celebrities have raised it to an art form.

They have blessed us with Banjo, Pilot Inspektor, Moxie CrimeFighter, Audio Science, Blanket and Prince Michael II.

Sweden is a nation that frowns on these excesses. Names, the Swedes believe, should dignify children. In fact, they have a law to protect children from the more egregious inventions of their parents.

Enacted in 1982, the Naming Law in Sweden was originally created to prevent non-noble families from giving their children noble names.

A few changes have been made since then to broaden its remit. The part of the law referencing first names now states: “First names shall not be approved if they can cause offense or can be supposed to cause discomfort for the one using it, or names which for some obvious reason are not suitable as a first name.”

On this basis, Metallica, Superman, Veranda, Ikea and Elvis have been officially rejected. So too has Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb111163 (pronounced Albin, naturally) which submitted by a child’s parents in protest of the Naming Law. They tried again with ‘A’ (also pronounced Albin) for the child’s name. It, too, bit the dust.

Now comes news of Tequila, an 8th grade girl who has triumphed over the system through spirited perseverance.

Tequila Wikinghielm from Motala, central Sweden, has had a problem with her name since she was born in August 1997.

The Swedish authorities simply refused to recognize her name as legitimate. Her family took the case all the way to the Supreme Administrative Court which also rejected their bid to name the girl after a Mexican alcoholic beverage.

She took the name Quila instead but was always Tequila to her friends and family.

As she was never baptized as a child, Quila decided to take another shot at getting the Tax Agency, the authority that administers the naming law, to approve her name. She sent her own personal plea explaining how she has grown into the name and that she wanted it to be official before her baptism.

They relented. She is now officially Tequila.

Presumably she’ll have to wait until she’s 21, or whatever the legal age is in Sweden, before she negotiates sponsorship deals with Don Julio.

Asics – a brand name with legs?

More than half the participants in the 2011 New York marathon are believed to have worn a particular brand of running shoe distinguished by a crossed “tiger stripes” pattern.

As popular and recognizable as the shoe seems to be, the dilemma for the company that makes them (and this is according to the company itself) is that few of those runners would be able to tell you the correct brand name of the shoes.

They were known originally as “Onitsuka Tiger”, Onitsuka being a reference to Kihachiro Onitsuka, the man who founded the Onitsuka Company in Kobe, Japan in 1949.

According to this remarkable video in which he tells the story of the company, Onitsuka’s inspiration for making sports shoes came from a piece of octopus he found stuck to the bottom of a dish. The suction pad design would be ideal for athletes, he thought, such as basketball players who need soles that grip.

The first Onitsuka basketball shoes in Japan had a tiger face design on the arch of the foot and this became the company’s trademark. Onitsuka Tiger shoes, as they became known, were put on the international map in the 1960s with the introduction of the Mexico 66 – the shoe that featured the now famous crossed stripes design for the first time.

In 1977, Onitsuka merged his company with fishing and sporting goods company GTO and athletic uniform maker JELENK to form “ASICS” – an acronym of Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, a Latin phrase which reputedly expresses the ancient ideal of “a sound mind in a sound body”.

This somewhat esoteric acronym has been formalized over the last few years into the name “Asics” and the Latin phrase upon which it was based has been boiled down to “Sound Mind, Sound Body”.

The problem for Asics is that the name is little known and less understood. The company is much smaller than rivals Nike and Adidas. For 2011, Asics had sales of about $3.03 billion; Nike and Adidas have sales of $20.86 billion and $15.82 billion, respectively.

Then there’s the name issue: the pronunciation of Asics differs in the U.S.—where the A is stressed, as in ‘AY-sics’. The rest of the world says ‘AH-sics”.

Nice shoe, what’s the brand name?

Asics intends to correct its awareness problem with an advertising campaign in Europe this Olympic year. The advertising campaign aims to stress Asics’ credentials as the footwear for serious sports performance, rather than trying to embrace both the serious sports market and the broader lifestyle sector. Asics has quietly resurrected the Onitsuka Tiger brand for the lifestyle market with original models of Onitsuka shoes and added a clothing and bags line of products.

A “Made of Sport” media campaign will target sports fanatics with the Asics brand.

I can’t help thinking that Asics is missing something: awareness is just part of the problem. Asics needs a brand story. The “Made of Sport” campaign is uniquely uninspiring and does nothing to build the Asics brand. Given the company’s limited resources, the rich heritage of the Onitsuka Tiger brand and the beautiful story of Kihachiro Onitsuka and his vision, I know where I’d put my money.

The naming genius of Charles Dickens

It was Sam Weller who first made Charles Dickens famous.

Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was written in serial form and, by all accounts, the early installments weren’t doing so well.

Weller arrives on the scene in chapter 10 and transforms the story. The relationship between the idealistic and unworldly Pickwick and the astute Weller has been likened to that between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The book went on to become the first modern publishing phenomenon, spawning bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books, and other merchandize that today would be regarded as classic branding.

This extraordinary ability to characterize was Dickens’ real genius. Sharp depiction of the eccentricities and characteristic traits of people was distilled into caricature and given names so perfectly apposite they have become defining personality terms. We all know what a Scrooge is.

Dickens is reckoned to have created and named 989 such characters during his career. In honor of his two-hundredth birthday today here’s a few personal favorites.

Gradgrind (Hard Times)

Thomas Gradgrind is the notorious headmaster who is dedicated to the pursuit of profitable enterprise. His name is now used to refer to someone who is hard and only concerned with cold facts and numbers.

Bounderby (Hard Times)

Josiah Bounderby is a business associate of Gradgrind. Given to boasting about being a self-made man, he is loud, obnoxious, completely self-centered, and the novel’s most snobby and status-obsessed character. He marries Mr. Gradgrind’s daughter Louisa, some 30 years his junior, in what turns out to be a loveless marriage. They have no children. Bounderby is callous, self-centred and ultimately revealed to be a liar and fraud. An utter bounder.

Dick Swiveller (The Old Curiosity Shop)

Though the name sounds a little sinister, Dick Swiveller is not a villain. Swiveller wants to marry the lovely Nell Trent but ends up with the Marchioness instead. He and the Marchioness expose the evil Brasses, Swiveller inherits money from his aunt, and the couple live happily ever after.

Harold Skimpole (Bleak House)

The obnoxious and manipulative Skimpole presents himself as a naïve man of childlike innocence. He claims he knows nothing about money management and uses it as an excuse to never pay for anything. Some claim Dickens modeled him after Leigh Hunt, another writer of the time, which, not surprisingly, caused a bit of animosity.

Sloppy (Our Mutual Friend)

One of Dickens’s many orphan characters, Sloppy lives with Betty Higden and is taken in by the Boffin family. The noble Sloppy later has a hand in exposing nasty Silas Wegg.

Wopsle (Great Expectations)

Wopsle is a parish clerk when we meet him in this classic story, but he doesn’t stay one for long. Choosing to become an actor, he changes his name to Waldengarver.

Polly Toodle (Dombey and Son)

Polly Toodle is Little Paul Dombey’s nurse who gets fired after taking him to visit her dingy apartment in London’s poorest area. Polly is a ray of hope in the face of poverty and hardship.

The Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby)

Wackford Squeers is the patriarch of this conniving, weasel-like pack. The Squeers run Dotheboys Hall, an orphanage for unwanted boys whom they mistreat horribly. Daughter Fanny, son Wackford, Jr., and the missus are each more cruel than the last.

Luke Honeythunder (The Mystery of Edwin Drood)

Here’s a name to conjure with. Luke Honeythunder is the boisterous and overbearing philanthropist and the guardian of Neville and Helena Landless.

Tulkinghorn (Bleak House)

This unscrupulous lawyer to the Dedlock family learns of Lady Dedlock’s secret past and tries to take advantage of it. It doesn’t end well for him — he is eventually murdered by her maid.

Bumble (Oliver Twist)

A petty parish beadle in the workhouse where Oliver spends much of his time, Bumble symbolizes Dickens’s contempt for the workhouse system.

Paul Sweedlepipe (Martin Chuzzlewit)

An eccentric barber, landlord, and bird lover, this character later inspired A Christmas Carol. Themes of greed and false honor run through Martin Chuzzlewit and also appear in the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, published the following year.

Smike (Nicholas Nickleby)

Smike is rescued by Nicholas Nickleby from the evil Squeers. Smike turns out to be Nickleby’s cousin, unfortunately a discovery made after Smike dies from the Squeers’ cruelty.

Mr. Sowerberry (Oliver Twist)

As his name sounds, Sowerberry is a bitter and cruel undertaker who mistreats young Oliver before he escapes and runs away to London.

Uriah Heep (David Copperfield)

Uriah Heep, the ‘humble’ antagonist of this novel, is one of literature’s most celebrated villains. Scheming and hypocritical, he plans to ruin Copperfield’s friend Agnes Wickfield but is ultimately undone by Mr. Micawber.

Pumblechook (Great Expectations)

The great expectations of Pip, the main character and another Dickensian orphan, come from this rotund, loud-breathing guardian who takes Pip to wealthy and eccentric spinster Miss Havisham.

John Podsnap (Our Mutual Friend)

Dickens coined the term “podsnappery” to describe middle-class pomp and complacency. John Podsnap embodied this undesirable trait. Apparently, he was modeled after Dickens’s first biographer, John Forster.

A list of Dickensian characters is provided in the indispensable Wikipedia.