Why I Chose Paratactic Cataphora

My friend called me up to catch up, and in the course of the conversation, we started talking about how he wants to branch his business off by himself, and he's getting a website set up for himself and how this was all going. He ran into the trouble of picking a domain name for his site. He had wanted to use his name originally, but feared that due to his long, relatively uncommon surname (359,000 hits on Google, I consider mine uncommon and I have 4.6 million), people might not be able to remember it. On top of that, he has an uncommon (in spelling) consonant cluster in his name, an unusual vowel dipthong (also for spelling), and a tap, so I can see it getting mixed up a bit, even if they perfectly remembered his name's pronunciation. We had a discussion about different elements that he might want to incorporate into his name, and while he has several good ideas and bases of names, it shows the reason why you hand over a $50,000 check to a naming firm employee who comes up with a new catchy brand name (it also reminded me of the good old days trying to come up with a good band name). Makes me want to get into the business though.

One point that came up that I found interesting was that a lot of names he came across and produced during his efforts followed a simple format:

simple color/adjective + simple noun + (simple job related word)

Which you can see in names like Bluetooth and Redhat (and a few better ones he found). Several of his suggestions though were already taken, and many others were very similar to names in use for similar services. Maybe we are approaching that top of the curve.