Wordcraft The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business

When I arrived at nine in the morning, I found a low-ceilinged room that once had been a U.S. Navy vault. Its walls were covered with whiteboards and its center dominated by a large wooden table. I pulled up a chair and got out paper and pen. I joined a group that sat thinking and blurting out ideas, six of us trying to come up with a name for a new computer network. We hunkered around the table while a set of floor heaters crackled. It was my first day as a freelance namer, and we were making up a word. Our group of six, including an actress, a poet, a computer programmer, and me, a business journalist, spent the day naming a computer network that would be used by small businesses. We looked no different from corporate workers casually dressed in loose-fitting blouses, button-down shirts, and khakis. At first our task seemed mundane, basic. But as our leader goaded us to think about this new word in different ways, through different angles and filters, the task assumed great depth and importance. At the outset he asked us simply, "What does a computer network do?" The question hung in the air like a Zen koan . . . What is the sound of one hand clapping? By midday we recognized the almost tangible gravity and importance affixed to our naming project. We ran through dozens of exercises designed to tap the ideas we had in our heads, to get them out on paper, and to get us to keep things fresh, to avoid static thinking. The very idea of a new network twisted and morphed before usseen at one moment as a light-rail system, then as a steel girder infrastructure, briefly as a bible. We tossed out wordsEnsemble, Copernicus, Socket, Tango, Chainlink. We filled pages of butcher paper with words penned in many hues, tore pictures from magazines, wrote advertising slogans, and watched television commercials about the company selling the network. The task was not so much to come up with one single winning word, but to brainstorm hundreds of possibilitiesto get all the ideas out. Someone else would sift through them later. I went home that evening with a legal pad filled with scrawled esoteric notes: data river = information ecosystem, interfusing + Galapagos>braindock!!, ear to the ground, life versus company, the network that moves mountains. And even a few hastily jotted haikus: Rising from the dust / An unstoppable success / A chorus of one and The fabric of work / Gliding effortlessly fast / Zigging and zagging. Naming the network gave me a sudden glimpse into another world. It seemed strange and futuristic, weird that we were being paid $300 a day to create a nouna person, a place, or (in this case) a thing. As I began to look around with a more critical eye over the next few months, I saw a full-fledged language industry whose work was synthesizing words. And I met an array of people creating new words or reassigning existing ones to drive commerce forward by getting people to use certain words and change people's behavior. Like so many other things in our prepackaged world, it seemed, words, too, were being turned out with factorylike efficiency, crafted to fit into our vocabularies. But in the beginning, a word is just a word. The word might be scribbled in dry-erase marker on a whiteboard (like so many that day), uttered by an executive during a corporate brainstorm meeting, dreamed up by a naming consultant in the shower, or spewed out of a computer. It might be an existing word or a brand-new combination of characters. It might have specific connotations for a listener, or it might be totally foreign. At its outset, a brand name is just a string of letters without much meaning in relation to the product to which it is attached. But then it moves from being a word to being a name. And, finally, emerging like a butterfly into the world, it becomes a full-fledged brand name. Sometimes the word succeeds bFrankel, Alex is the author of 'Wordcraft The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400051045 and ISBN 1400051045.