Greece takes the Euro title for longest names

Greece’s national soccer team may have valiantly exited Euro 2012 at the hands of Germany but the players leave unbeaten in one respect.

It has been calculated that, on average, they have the longest surnames of any team competing in the Euro, at 8.77 letters per man. The Greek roster includes eight players with last names that include 10 or more letters.

Poland, led by Jakub Blaszczykowski (14 letters), finished second at 8.43 letters per player, followed by Roman Pavlyuchenko and Russia at 8.13 letters per player.

Greece’s Sokratis Papastathopoulos takes the title of player with the longest non-hyphenated name for any player in the field. As his last name won’t fit on the back of his shirt he has to make do with Sokratis, which must rank him as the friendliest player as well.

Just call me Sokratis

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Are we running out of names (again)?

Just as the dust was settling around Abbvie and Mondelez (sorry, still can’t find the macron e key), along comes another tricky little teaser of a name to stir things up again.

Say hello to Zoetis from Pfizer. Contrary to what you might expect from pharmaceutical company Zoetis is not a drug, it’s the name for the company’s $4.2 billion animal health unit that will be spun-off later this year.

Why Zoetis? Pfizer explains that the name “has its root in zo, which is familiar in commonly known words such as zoo and zoology.” It also derives from the word zoetic, which means “pertaining to life.” Obscure, but plausible enough. The real problem with Zoetis is how you are supposed to say it*. Care to take a guess?

Abbvie? Mondelez? Zoetis? The question has to be asked: In the naming business, are we beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel?

It’s a legitimate question that deserves an answer. The really interesting thing about the question is that it was first asked more than 14 years ago when consultant Tony Spaeth raised an eyebrow at Visteon, Miravant and Diageo.

In a word, yes, was his conclusion: we are running out of names.  He wrote: “There is a numeric limit to the universe of names, the combinations of letters of five syllables or less that are pronounceable, avoid offense in principal languages, and are not someone else’s property. A population explosion of business entities, on top of product proliferation, means we are rapidly depleting the supply. And as more companies think “global,” more seek global name protection, vastly increasing the pool of possible conflicts.”

He concluded: “Expect more strange new names like Diageo, distinctive yet functional, that take some getting used to. We really are scraping the linguistic barrel and have to reach further beyond our comfort zones to make names that work.”

He was right on that last point, but the barrel seems to be a lot deeper than he thought. Fourteen years later we have added tens of thousands of names to the corporate roster and our capacity for the acceptance of the linguistically exotic has shown encouraging elasticity; Google rules the Internet, a lot of people use Twitter, Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, we read books on Kindle, Hyundai is the cool car on the road and, for the time being, there’s a President named Obama in the White House.

Shakespeare would have been proud of us. He invented over 1700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original. Just like the namers of today do. The point being that the English language is infinitely fungible. What we are running out of, if anything, is imagination and a capacity to accept linguistic invention.

There’s still the atavistic reflex to the unfamiliar and what are referred to as  ‘meaningless’ corporate names, yet the truth is there is really no such thing as a meaningless name. For better or worse, “Mondelez” (pronounced mohn-dah-LEEZ, please) will be the name of a $31 billion global snacks business.

Yes, if you need one it has a clunky provenance as a word – monde means “world” in French, and delez is a play on “delish” – but why does it have to mean anything other than what it is: the name of a company? In spite of the disdain heaped at its door the Mondelez will be as accepted as Diageo is today. What is Diageo? It’s the world’s leading premium drinks business. That’s its meaning (please spare me the day/world etymology).

Poor Abbvie is just an unfortunate child with a speech impediment whose parents, Abbott Laboratories, don’t seem to care too much about her fate. The drug and medical-device company plans to spinoff its pharmaceutical business with the name AbbVie by the end of the year. Pronounced “Abb-VEE,” the name is derived from Abbott, its parent company, as well as “vi,” the Latin root for “life”. This one is scraping the barrel.

As for Zoetis, the world of animal health is tightly knit. The people who need to know about the company and what it does will be very familiar with the name, and Zoetis will be rolling off their tongues as easily as Nike (that’s ni-KEE, as we all had to be educated to say).

*BTW, Zoetis is pronounced zo-EH-tis, according to Pfizer.

.law, .coke, .nyc? Not Yet

Next week, we should get the first look at the proposed list of new Web domains in the largest-ever expansion of the Internet’s naming system.

A major expansion of “generic top-level domains,” will eventually clear the way for new offerings like .law, .coke or .nyc, says CNNMoneyTechm, but don’t expect to be clicking on then anytime soon.

There were huge delays launching the adult-themed .xxx domain in December and the expectations are the timeline will slip again.  Expanding the Internet’s domains is a slow, wildly complicated process.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit organization that manages this piece of the Internet’s infrastructure, has been preparing for this almost-anything-goes domain name expansion for nearly a decade.

Last June, it formally approved the expansion and started planning the application process for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) — the “.com” part of website addresses.

The current system has 22 gTLDs — not including geographic domains — like .com, .net and .org. ICANN has added a handful over the past decade, sprinkling in additions like .biz, .info and .xxx. This new expansion is by far the organization’s biggest move.

But the process quickly devolved into a bug-plagued mess.

Bugs and bungling slow major Internet name expansion

Sarah Lee chooses Hillshire Brands name for spin off

Sarah Lee Corp. chose Hillshire Brands Co. as the new name for its North American business that will be spun off later this month.

The food and beverage company said Hillshire Brands will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol HSH..

Sara Lee, which acquired the Hillshire Farm brand in 1971, said the Hillshire Brands name represents its strong heritage and its “ambitions for growing our portfolio of iconic brands in the future.”

After the spinoff, Hillshire Brands’ food-service division will continue to be known as Sara Lee Foodservice.

Once a hodgepodge of household products and food brands, Sara Lee has been selling off businesses and narrowing its focus over the past few years.

On June 28, the company will separate into two publicly traded companies: an international coffee and tea company to be named D.E. Master Blenders 1753 and a North American business that includes the Jimmy Dean and Hillshire Farm brands.

The Wall Street Journal.

Business Insider: Turning Sara Lee Into Hillshire Brands Is A Perfect Example Of How Not To Name A Company

Dog Bless Amercia

Mitt Romney’s newest campaign tactic is a smartphone app that allows users to upload their own pictures against ‘I’m With Mitt’ text.

Unfortunately for Mitt there was a small spell-check error: one of the pre-made layouts misspelled the name of the country that the Republican contender is hoping to lead.

The template read: ‘A Better Amercia.’

As The Daily Beast points out, the flub was quickly noticed and spread across the Internet. It was soon corrected by the Romney camp, but not before creative versions were posted on Twitter. The app had even inspired its own Tumblr, #Facepalm.

Web-aggregating site BuzzFeed cleverly incorporated Romney’s misspelling into the sign for Good Morning America. The four smiling hosts stand proudly above their talk-show desk.

As Stephen Colbert said: SUA! SUA! SUA!