A number of years ago―by which I mean the year almost certainly started with "19"―I was reading a library copy of Writer's Digest. For some reason. And there was an article about company names. Some companies had been named after their founders, of course. Other times the founders had been going for a certain image or certain sound. There may have been mention of George Eastman getting the name "Kodak" from an Anagrams kit.
But what the author really wanted to get across was that if you were starting a business now, you couldn't use any of these principles or your own intuition to name it. You needed to go to a professional business name consultant. And hey, guess what his profession was?
Somehow this seems symbolic of a lot of things now.
2 comments:
It's kind of funny to think that any year beginning with '19' is considered so last century. I lived the best part of my life in years that began with that number, and although the years since then haven't been that bad I have a hard time convincing myself things continued to get better.
Yes, scammers have been proliferating, figuring out ever more creative ways to make money without having to do any actual labor. Providing company names to those who've already gone through the procedures involved in starting a unique business sounds to be pretty low on the imaginative ladder. You'd be forgiven for believing naming the company would be the easy part.
A favorite complaint of mine has to do with those using well-known sci-fi terms to name their products: AI (that isn't anything other that a large language model); Tesla (named after a real genius); Clone (a marionette rather than a new living being made from cell cultures; the Stargate Project (not a magical opening to an alien world - or is it?).
The Cheech link (it's a big one so we hope it works)...
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At the end of the twentieth century there seemed to be two competing assumptions about what would be coming in the 2000s: either everything would steadily get better, however you wanted to define that; or some great catastrophe would be coming so soon that there effectively wouldn't be a 21st century. What we got instead was something different from both. At least we live to fight another day.
It's an occupation of very questionable necessity to be sure. But my educated guess is that consultants like that have gotten a lot of business, not necessarily for the better overall. If you look around there are hundreds--at least--of corporations with anonymous names and bland logos.
I'm not really familiar with Clone. The others I recognize. The common factor may be gullibility. Yes, AI is just a large language model. But yes, countless executives seem to believe they can use it as a creative brain. Probably because they don't understand what creativity is. As for the Stargate Project, I look forward to finding out just what level of embezzling has been part of it.
The Cheech Wizard cartoon is something else. It's like if Alphonse Mucha or one of the other Art Nouveau illustrators got into underground comix. And the figure in the second-to-last panel is what Vaughn Bode actually looked like.
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