January 26, 2015
You may have heard about the trademark controversy that bubbled up between Lagunitas and Sierra Nevada. Lagunitas sued Sierra Nevada, alleging that the placement and size of “IPA” on the bottle of the newest Sierra Nevada offering was too similar to the classic Lagunitas style. See for yourself: The frothy public outcry that erupted led […]
July 3, 2014
As a naming specialist, I’m not a big fan of acronym brand names. Or initialisms either, for that matter. (For the record, an acronym is a word formed from the initial letter or letters of a series of words and pronounced as one word—think NASA. An initialism is formed in the same way, but the […]
October 14, 2013
On my desk sits the Compact version of the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most amazing publications ever put together by humans. It is the definitive record of the English language, featuring 600,000 words and 3 million quotations; each word features a list of citations for usage, going all the way back to the […]
January 22, 2008
I enjoyed Douglas Quenqua’s piece in Thursday’s NYT on the UNCF “name change”. Very interesting dilemma. (For those of you who don’t want to read the article, the United Negro College Fund just announced it was changing its name, at Landor’s suggestion, to UNCF.) Of course, as a guy who runs a naming company I […]
October 8, 2007
That’s what I’m asking myself, after hearing about the new “Nazi collection” of bedspreads being offered in India by home furnishings entrepreneur Kapil Kumar Todi. Todi claims the name Nazi “just came to him” and is meant to be an acronym for “New Arrival Zone of India” (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean). Todi’s […]