The naming of products is a fast-developing area of linguistic innovation. Long gone are the days when you named a company after the founder and then appended a descriptive name to the item to be sold. While a few reminders of this practice remain, Wright’s Coal Tar soap being one example, in general, products now seemed to be named after some beast (mythical or real) Egyptian god, exotic place, dance, pseudo-scientific tosh, or often just a string of letters and numbers. Many product names are also simply nonsense.

One of the first to lead in this trend was Kodak. Founded by George Eastman in 1888, the company name was a complete invention, its rationale being that the made up name should be short, easy to pronounce and not be associated with anything else. This last prerequisite turns out to be important. Various companies have found themselves in difficulty because their product name, while sounding grand in the originators native tongue, can have very different associations to overseas markets. Vauxhall had to rename their Cavalier car model for European export because ‘Cavalier’ is the name of a leading brand of condom on the continent. It seems the only people who want be seen driving around in cavaliers are us Brits.

There are other darker stories, albeit apocryphal. Apparently the name of one brand of detergent, even though completely fabricated on the Kodak principle, nevertheless translated in one of the more obscure African dialects, into an insult something along the lines of: ‘your mother has a face like a horsefly sucking lemons’ (I’m afraid I can’t remember the product or the actual insult, but maybe this is just as well). Needless to say though, the product did not do well in the part of the planet.

As a result of these problems, many software development companies and researchers now work on computer programs and services that can produce words which have no meaning in any language. I think this should be recognised as one of the great achievements of our global community.