(In the opening to the novel of Nightfall, I seem to recall a note decrying the practice, but the right ones make the story much richer.)

"Curses!" declared Lord Dosai. Neither Princess Restoril nor King Cialis could be found within the palace walls, although the emaciated body Grand Vizier Uthappam, Dosai's chief spy, had been found in the dungeons.

An enthusiasist (read: someone looking to distract themselves from actually writing) will build a language. Someone less enthusiastic might run a name generator three or four hundred times and pull out the interesting looking ones.

A well known fantasy author's first work has a major character apparently named after a support group for the spouses of alcoholics. Made it damn hard for me to suspend my disbelief.

". . . names of drugs . . ."

Of course, that could be a form of product placement.

My first novel has characters named after towns in New York's Southern Tier. It doesn't seem to have hurt the book any-my first reader loved it, and she's from that area. (Now watch. I'll get e-mails saying "Why didn't you just name someone Horseheads?" ;) )

Or Painted Post.

(Shameless self-promotion: The Only Thing You Need to Know About PublishAmerica.)

And sometimes you get nailed after the fact. When I named a character "Rogaine" in early 1983, there really wasn't a prescription med with that name, and indeed the drug was first announced as "Regaine." I think they decided there was too much implicit promise in that, but coulda been anything.

Or anagrams for lesbian.

A well known fantasy author's first work has a major character apparently named after a support group for the spouses of alcoholics

Which I completely missed until someone pointed it out. Guy Kay's Prince Aileron did bother me a little.

I also had a Lady Ciallis. Now I live in fear that some pharmaceutical company is going to co-opt Zyastra. (The ONLY google hit for her name right now is my journal. I've had the name forever, and it's now on the third, and hopefully final character. I'd say iterations, but the first two Zyastras are as different from Zy number three as they are from each other.)

(Query: Is it a sign of Mary-Sueism if you use your character's name to play World of Warcraft? Too much self-identity?)

Actually, in many overseas markets, it is sold as "Regaine". The FDA didn't like the implied promise, so it needed a different name in the US.

Larry, are you from around Steuben County, by any chance?

I've always wondered where authors get their new names. I mean, if you're Tolkien the language comes first, and then you just run the linguistics, but where do authors tend to find inspiration/ideas for names?

I've warped the names of fashion designers. Since I get Women's Wear Daily, there's always a copy near my computer. I also like my book of medieval poetry when I need a Latin sounding name.

My current favorite method (and very little work) involves listing the names of students who have left their sewing supplies after class since I'm picking up their rulers and such anyway. Of course, I still have to work on men's names.

Sometimes it's impossible to come up with anything. In a fit of frustration once, I named a mountain range The Nameless Ones since I couldn't think of anything.

Nope - I just used to drive from NYC to Rochester a lot, so goodly chunks of NY17 and I-390 are burned into my brain.

(please pretend I signed my name and email with bruces in place of all the kips, then chuckle politely)

Or something in another language you have no clue the meaning of.

EVA ACITU

because of the many times I rode the subway to high school, and saw UTICA AVE reflected in a window. Perhaps she has a sister, TIXE?

Eventually, I stared working on my multi-volume space opera. I grew up, travelled, learned a few things about the world, but I still have a hard time giving up my heroine's planet being named "Asgrow".

But thinking about it, what else would you expect - you've got these geeks and they're making up words....

The WASPy nerds at last present the highest ranking name at a Board meeting: [beat, beat]

DRECK!

There's also one in Dave Duncan's The Great Game. It didn't bother me there because it was a proper noun and so capitalized. Uncapitalized I think I would have had the same reaction as Teresa.

Royalty have Eastern European names (I impressed a Hungarian friend by naming a prince Laslo).

Servants are named after characters in literature (a variation on the Roman habit of naming slaves after Gods).

Clergy and Doctors have Arabic, Hebrew or Latinized names.

It seems to be working out fairly well, though I did accidentally name a long-dead princess Vespa. Luckily someone caught it.

Hey, even IKEA makes mistakes and they're the masters of Scandinavian-sounding nonce words. A few years ago, they named a children's bed frame "Gutvik". When it hit the market, heads exploded all over Germany.

I'll refrain from translating the pronounced version, but you can try it yourself, remembering that German "V" = English "F" and it does mean what it sounds like.

For creating and polishing fantasy names, I like to use online phone directories-- French, German, Hungarian, etc. Too many times, I've pretzelled my brain for hours on end trying to come up with the perfect gibberish name, only to find that 50,000 people in Albania have it as a surname.

The definitive article on the Corporate version of this is Ruth Shalit's The Name Game.

This works the other way too - I used to think 'Tarka Dal' meant Otter with Lentils.

Serge: I've lost count of the amount of bad sf I've read where "parsec" seems to be interpreted as roughly synonymous with "kilometre"...

Ursula LeGuin reports naming the city Omelas in the great short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by a similar method.

SALEM, OREGON

I think my vocabulary's a bit above average, but I honestly did not know when I wrote the book that "midden" was a word. Seriously. I do now, and this is at the very top of my list of things to correct (now that it's too late, of course).

Strange things happen.

At least, I _think_ that was the adjective. It was in a back-swing*/singularity novel so I am not going back in to check. I remember it was an unfortunate choice of words, given the use of Tool to mean a cyborg.

* "Gee, the world is so crowded that my hero is having trouble with his sword's back-swing. Better kill off a few billion people to give him more room."

My high school girlfriends and I had fun with that. "And ifh you REALLY gesh in trouble, you can break open the elfshtones and DRINK them!"

I think those islands off San Francisco are actually the Farallons, so Farrolon is not a bad name to consider.

I once read a self-published fantasy novel in which the military ranks were anagrams or near-anagrams of ours -- joram from major, for instance. (I don't habitually read self-published books; this was written by a friend's grandson, and showed potential, IMO; it was a fun read, no huge problems, a bit trite, but not unreadably so, to me. Similar to Deed of Paksennarrion.)

There's an NPR reporter named Martin Kaste (pronounced the same), and I shall ask LMB if she did that on purpose the very next time I see her.

Steve, I've been known to call the Republican party "a stinking midden where true conservatives smother in the effluvia of right-wing extremists." If your kingdom is nahhhsty, maybe it's not such a bad name.

About 'parsec' being used to mean 'kilometer'... Of course, there is the INfamous example of Han Solo using 'parsec' as a unit of time and that had lots of people mad at George Lucas (even more than his later cooking up the ewoks?). Anyway, I remember an interview with Mark Hammill where he pointed that lots of people had pointed to George the slight problem with that, but he kept it in anyway, to show that Han Solo doesn't always know what he's talking about, I think. A notion that's not really reassuring to a passenger of the Millenium Falcon.

Stef: I think I know which character you are referring to, since I hit those books right after the Very Important Sixth Grade Seminar on Drinking and Drugs, and choked on the same thing.

Exit 58 of the NYS Thruway is helpfully signed for the towns of "IRVING GOWANDA" , which I've always thought would make a wonderful character name. He practically writes himself.

The disconnect was too great for me to actually read the book.

Context is your friend. Be good to your context, it may save your backstory some day.

I've heard the laundry detergent story as European market: modelled after Tide, short snappy no unfortunate meanings clears trademark = DRAB so I suspect it's just another old urban legend along the lines of no va.

When I go hunting for names, I use this site or I go surfing through baby name sites. (To keep things consistent, I first pick the language base(s) for the various countries.)

DB: Sanibel? Sale bin? S. Blaine, in Basel?

JVP, the minute I saw Eva Acitu I'd have stopped to spell her name backward. Not everyone' wired to spot backward English, but if you are, it's very distracting.

While it's not quite suitable for a person, I've always enjoyed the sign on the Pulaski Skyway promising "Kearney So Kearney".

I ended up using Ilion, Olean, Avoca and
Sav(r)ona.

Oh, and on the same trip, for the same book, I used the laziest character naming method ever. I looked to where my little sister was sitting and said "Hey, what's a nice made-up boy's name?"

"Uh, Juliar."

And that was that. The funny thing is that when people read about this character, who's a choirboy, they ask if he was named after Juilliard. I wish I'd been that clever. ;)

Er, hmmm? Sorry, I am confused. IKEA does not generally use nonsense words to name their product lines. They're actual words, usually either place names or gerunds or adjectives that somehow bear on the nature or use of the product. Gutvik appears to be a place in Norway. But what's really not working for me is that "vik" is not any word I know in German, so I can't quite sort out why the concept of a good one would make a German speaker's head explode. Is it supposed to be slang?

I'm thinking of Poe, (and Dumas?) as examples here, to wit:
"our old acquaintance, Monsieur G -- -- , the Prefect of the Parisian police."
( The Puloined Letter)

Exactly the kind of thing that drove me up the wall as a 13 year old. I'm not sure if it was the age, or the sudden jump from pronounceable syllables to emptiness that got me. I recall reading other stories that had entire characters never referred to except by their initials, which at first seemed kind of snarky, but eventually got to be grating.

R.

At least until I looked at a map.

One of the early Man from UNCLE novels had a villain named Tixe Ylno, quite consciously.

A writer on another board admitted to naming an overweight character "Lor-etseloc" (or something similar, I can't find the reference now). I think that book has been published, and reasonably well received.

As for Lucas, I'm glad he stopped naming Darths by chopping the leading "in" off adjectives before we met Darth Sane, Darth Competent and Darth Dividualistic.

"Prepare to fire! No, not you, Darth Flammable!"

Meanwhile, this morning's newspaper had a large ad for some sort of all-natural male enhancement product called Procylon. I note in passing that the flensed remnants of the Pure Food and Drug Act no longer seem to require the makers of "nutritional supplements" to mention that their claimed effects have not been reviewed/approved by the FDA. (Also spotted today in the Asian megamart: a snack-pak of roasted Chinese apricot pits.)

I don't think there is much of anything
reassuring about the Millenium Falcon
if you're a passenger. The hyperdrive is
always breaking down, most of the
maintenence is done by a big monkey,
from the sound it makes when the hyperdrive
goes bad, one could guess that the things
been running without oil for a few parsecs,
and there's probably a silhouette pattern
of it on every Emperial Destroyer with
the note: pummel on sight.

Back to how drugs are named, I am reminded of Dilbert's clueless boss trying to name one of their crappy products by picking one name from astronomy and the other name from physics. The best he could come up with was Uranus/Hertz.

You could pop the hood, climb into the engine compartment (when the engine was cold) and close the hood behind you.

I was always futzing with the carbeurator to get it to idle right. new floats, new jets, new distributer.

That truck always made me think it was the terrestrial equivalent of the millenium falcon.

And other drivers often deferred the right of way to me. No wookie to tear someone's arms out of their sockets, but that grille was just plain menacing.

Then there was that episode where one of the humans got shot down and crash landed on a planet and wound up with a cylon robot with him. Somehow they became friends, figured out world peace, and then by the end of the episode, the robot protected the humans from his mean cylon buddies.

A real tear-jerker that one was...

they redid that with the Borg in StarTrek once.
I wonder what the first version of that story was...

Having said that, I will likely use Cadosia (Rt. 17 exit 87A) as a place name in a future work. Never been there, but passed the exit many, many times.

On backwards-reading: yeah, I read most unusual looking words backwards. I can't really shop at Nordstrom's for the distraction of it. Mortsdron? What's that? (Actually, that's a good fantasy villain name. Maybe he lives in Cadosia.)

HALFWAY TO PARADISE

Actually, a fanfic-writing project I'm in made a running joke about deriving names by just turning other words around. One cowriter named a butler Noitisopxe, then put him in a scene to exposit some.

Piscusfiche: Only if it's Mary-Sueish to also use your character's name for your cat.

What? Their personalities are eerily similar, and they're equally likely to make me flee the computer room (where the kittens live) when being contrary.

*readies fork, in preparation for dead and dying Gulab Jamun mercenaries*

The mountains in question are the Poconos, and the sign is for the "Endless Mountains Region," (or some such) which is a construct of the PA tourism department. They don't quite have the chutzpah of their brethren in New Jersey, who at one point dubbed the Elizabeth/ Newark area the "Gateway Region," one of the "Seven Tourism Areas of New Jersey." That creates a lovely image of people from pristine Western states trekking in to look at oil refineries and urban blight...

My favorite road sign is the exit off I-95 in northern Maryland labeled:

NORTH EAST
RISING SUN

It always looked like it ought to be the beginning of some sort of secret coded message.

Really.

I put that name in my novel-in-progress

Does your NIP (uhh, hmm, so that's why they generally call 'em WIPs) have hot air balloons? 'Cause that would be cool.

> Do you think it's too late to tell George Lucas that the name General Grievous is perhaps infelicitous?

Oh, I think it's far far too late to tell George Lucas anything about names - he's been blessed with the most astonishing tin ear.

Most annoying for me are the would-be-clever echoes of normal words - 'Grievous' doesn't even bother to hide anything, but 'Darth Vader' gives of whiffs of 'dark/dastardly invader'.

'Calamari' I can just about handle as a joke except that a) I don't think joke species names help anything in this context and b) he's a lobster dammit, not a squid.

Nope, no balloons in the WIP (up to this point, anyway) but I did get a smile out of reading the website. I made a playlist to go with the writing, and the song for the part where the hero reaches the Endless Mountains (as he calls them) is "It's Possible." (from Seussical)

There's a small town not that far from where I live named Efland, which always makes me do a double-take; I can't give up the notion that I should be able to take an exit to Elfland.

> But what's really not working for me is that
> "vik" is not any word I know in German, so I can't
> quite sort out why the concept of a good one would
> make a German speaker's head explode. Is it
> supposed to be slang?

German ficken 'to fuck'.

I laughed and I had to put the book down.

The aliens were named: Maror (he was the leader), Beitzah, Zroah, Karpas, etc.

Not Indian food, but items on the Passover seder plate.

I was laughing because it was really ridiculous and because there were probably people out there who had no idea where the names came from, possibly including the editors. :)

Peter David is a funny guy.

Also, just as another thing. Soma did not originate in Brave New World if that is what was being implied above. It's actually in the Vedas. But there it's a hallucinogen, not a sleep aid. ;)

That explains all those snickers when I told people I was captain of my high school's lacrosse team.

I think all the Darth lords used names that
were words missing a "in" prefix.

Darth (in)Vader
Darth (in)Sidious
Darth (in)Maul

oh, well, never mind....

Probably because it's an urban legend.

IIRC, there's a Colonel Shitov in War And Peace.

Not, I would think, a good name for a nice, reliable automobile . . .

Will future versions of word processors correct "Troilus and Cressida" to "Toyotas and Cressida?"

I always assumed that it was a back-formation from "somatic."

You certainly can't say he went downhill - he started right off the bat with "Princess Leia Organa."

I seem to remember hearing that "darth vader" is pretty close to "dark father" in Dutch. Let's see... the online dictionary confirms "vader" = "father", but "dark" is "donkel". It's "dunkel" in German... something else in Danish... nope, no "darths".

Interestingly, there is a town in Washington named Vader. I have no idea about the chronology, but one can only assume it came first.

Alfred Bester used British phonebooks (he was vacationing there at the time) to name characters in The Stars My Destination. I rather like the pseudo-Victorian sound of it, but residents of Stratham, Sheffield, etc. might disagree.

(The intentional pulp also makes him somewhat impervious to Teresa's original complaint.)

I find I feel the same way about the "parsecs" comment: the blatant error added to the kitsch. The field of black holes is actually a very neat, very self-consistent explanation. Too neat, too self-consistent. Too bad.

"'Darth Vader' gives of whiffs of 'dark/dastardly invader'"

I always thought he was named "Vader" because it means "father" in old English, in which case it would have been a clever bit of foreshadowing.

I feel the same way about "Annville Cleona" on route 81 in Pennsylvania, which is also a high school. "Cleona Annville" might be more appropriate, actually.

There are Endless Mountains, really? I put that name in my novel-in-progress, and I wasn't knowingly naming them after anything.

There isn't an actual mountain range called that; I live in that area, and it sort of vaguely refers to Bradford, Susquehanna, Sullivan and Wyoming counties, all of which are basically covered with forests and state game lands and aren't really very mountainous. I don't think it draws any tourists, it's just the name of the reason, like any other vaguely defined region ("Wyoming Valley", "Delaware Valley", "Mahoning Valley", "Inland Empire").

There's another sign on Rt. 81, in the Endless Mountains region, that says "Lenox Lenoxville Scott" (if I remember correctly). Doesn't that sound like the perfect fop?

But my favorite exit sign is the little example of dada on 279, just north of Pittsburgh:

Cranberry
Mars

> I always thought he was named "Vader" because it
> means "father" in old English,

Not quite: the Old English is 'fæder'. The Middle Dutch cognate is 'vader', though.

Fort Lewis
No Fort Lewis

"Is that me? Fie and double fie. Muttley! Where did you put my clean filters?"

It's a perfectly common last name, formed according to the Swedish practise of taking two words relating to nature and putting them together. (The result is often nonsensical.) The words in question here is "nord" (north) and "ström" (stream). My maiden name was Wikström, where "vik" means bay or gulf.

When we're talking about car names and other languages, Honda made a huge mistakes a few years ago when they named a model Fitta. It was quickly renamed to Jazz in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

Well . . . sort of. Moving pictures go back to 1894, narrative film to 1903, and even for those few that survive (90% of all silents are lost), not much cast, and less crew, data exist from the dawn years More to the point, it's simply not that long ago in terms of social patterns; Western surnames had already lost almost all their connection to professions (you might still find Cartwrights who made wagons, but not many Fletchers were still in the arrow business). And it's an era of printing: we have to guess at how Willum Shayk Speare spelt hys name, but we have census records for the Victorians and after.

Using imdb isn't a -bad- idea, it's just not likely to be as productive as other avenues.

I have a primary character in my current novel in progress, AIREALM, whose name is Tion which is short for Fluctuation. His sister's name is Bili which is short for Stability. However, both names are sort of crucial to the plot and I can't (nor do I want to) change them.

If this novel ever gets submitted to Tor, I hope you won't mind. :-)

About forty years ago, we found a delicious lemonady pop drink in France which they subsequently tried to bring into the US and failed. It had an onomatopoeic name for the opening of the bottle. Psssssssht. Never worked here. Hmmmm. I wonder why?

Jane

[1] "Dual carriageway ahead"
[2] "Part-time traffic lights", if I recall correctly.

Janeyolen: I am still mourning Orelia's name change to Orangina. I must learn to get over stuff like that.

Being Tolkien doesn't entirely protect you from unfortunate naming. He sited his First Age city of Gondolin upon a hill named Túna. Also, in at least one early draft Frodo Baggins was to be named Bingo.

Orson Scott Card in his novel A Planet Called Treason named the planet's capital city Humping. I'd love to know what the heck he was thinking. (He may have fixed this in the revised version, Treason; I wouldn't know.)

We play that as "Dragaeran animal or Country-Western singer"? Valdosta, for example, is clearly a distant relative of the vallista and thus a Brustian critter; Wiota and Exira, on the other hand, would feel comfortable in the extended Judd family.

My least favorite reclaimed verb was when a wizard was -- apparently with an authorial straight face -- "going off for a wizz." Didn't need to know that, thanks.

The problem with using Finnish character names is that tyypoes staart to look quiite normaal. (Unfortunately, there's not much choice when the book is set in Finland.)

Must... resist... Wodehouse... pastiche...

Chad: I also love NORTH EAST/RISING SUN, although it's been a while since I drove past it. Emily: Yes, yes, on Efland. I always wondered if there was a King of Efland.

It strikes me that "noted in passing" is an increasingly apt title for this thread.

Also I have a fondness for certain rarely used words as names, for example Megrim and Morganatic would be names I would pick in a fantasy context.

WRT the "Endless Mountains", there's an "Executive Committee Range" in the Antarctic (in Marie Byrd Land, wherever that is). There's something wonderfully... modern about that.

*Free Entry

I get the rest of my place names, including the new name for that town, from thorough abbreviations/acronyms/pronunciation-munging of existing words and phrases, adding likely-sounding place-name suffixes (-ton, -bury, etc.) where necessary. My places are meant to be in England, so I have to be quite careful to make them sound realistic without duplicating names that already exist.

I'm also having to avoid mentioning one of my major characters' first name and surname together, since someone with a very similar name married a celebrity recently. Maybe nobody else would make the connection, but I would.

On the other hand, they had to rename the Toyota MR2 for the French market, because it would have been pronounced very close to "merdeux", meaning "shitty".

Niall - Darth Sane, Darth Competent and Darth Dividualistic.

"Prepare to fire! No, not you, Darth Flammable!"

You are bad, bad, wicked, and evil. Thank you.

If I ever become a professional actor, I'd like to use Braxton Hicks, as my trade name.

The winner in trad ename medicines has to be Vagisil. Why they never used the tag line "When your vag is ill, use...", I guess I'll never know. Hmmm... name of the proud interceptor in my new space opera?

In M. John Harrison's The Pastel City the place-names in a far-future fantasy realm come from real places in the Highlands. They work remarkably well, though for years I thought Viriconium might be Inverness.

Other random comments: I'm always a bit nonplussed with folding my husband's Fruit of the Loom undies because of their abbreviated brand name, FTL. (No, I'm not going to joke on that one!) I don't tend to go by my married name, for then I'd have to spell *both* words when identifying myself, but he tells me that Hanscom originally meant "witches' hollow" -- pretty cool, if true. (Haggens Coomb, something like that?)

The original "you have to be old enough to get it" character names were in the James Bond books. As a grade school/junior high kid, I didn't have a clue.

Finally, a distinctive local business name that's been changed now, alas: the Bruce Weary Pain Clinic.

The Gutvik story, however, is no urban legend. I just didn't know it was a town in Norway. I can see piles of German tourists spasming with laughter on the outskirts of town by the "Welcome to Gutvik" sign.

Fond memories of a college friend who named her chair Chesterfield, her sofa Davenport, her footstool Otto, and her carpet Waldo. She always had to footnote the carpet's location (sebz gur jnyy gb gur qbbe).

Darth Vader was actually translated "Dark Vador" in french. Always wondered why. But then, seeing how some of the quirky conventions of french movie translators dangerously border on incompetence (though, to be honest, it seems to go the same pretty much everywhere), it may be better not to ask too many questions.
There might be answers.

I'm bothered as it is by characters whose names have inappropriate etymology, but I know that's a quirk of mine, so I strive to ignore it. Calling characters Megrim or Morganatic would drive me bugf*ck. "Morganatic" would be especially bad -- it's the wrong part of speech.

I heard a similar story about Rolls Royce having to rename a car they'd planned to call the "Silver Mist" because it doesn't play well in Germany. Don't know if it's true.

As for MR2, yes, 'emmerdeur' does mean that someone is a bore, a very annoying person, but it definitely has 'sh*t' in its etymology.

I hate to tell you this, Deborah, but it's been done.

Obviously, I didn't Google that one. *blush* I figured that would be too generic to keep! Back to WWD, I guess...

When I worked in the garment industry, I always got pulled into the meetings for naming garments. Inevitably the legal department would reject half the names and we would have to start again.

As for ninja, the ethymology is 忍者
忍 nin = endure, hide something or oneself
者 sha (contracted ja)= person

Nothing to do with silent killing.

The Ikea story reminds me of the Chevy Nova. It sold horribly in Latin America, since no va, in Spanish literally means "It doesn't go."

Years ago Chemical Bank had a similar experience when it put branches in Chinatown. The translated name had associations with things that didn't work well. That may explain why it changed names in the subsequent mergers (eventually to Chase).

Another weird bit of unfortunate naming, for those who remember Gerry Anderson's "Thunderbirds"... A few of the episodes featured a nuclear-powered passenger plane that had a tendency towards being sabotaged when it didn't crash, or stay airborne too long, at which point its engines would overload. The plane's name? The Fire Flash.

I wonder, does "Theodoric" bother you?

I also always feel that "Emily" is a closet adverb.

Yes, you very well might. Consider the vehicle - it was in the vanguard of street-legal superbikes. Most of its target market had probably seen Shogun, and face it, the stereotype of the Ninja assasin is pretty cool. So, the coolness rubs off on the rider, plus if you knew how to ride the thing properly, you could "kill" most of the other bikes on the road. Not that I'm condoning competitive riding on the street or anything.

Now it's an established brand with lots of brand equity. The market has a certain expectation of a bike with the Ninja label. It's also spawned name-imitators like Suzuki's Katana, also a fine bike from a similar mold.

Me, I like sport-touring or standard bikes and my long-time ride bears only letters and numbers, K75, in the classic BMW Motorrad naming style: lead letter indicates motor design, numbers indicate displacement, trailing letters indicate body/trim style.

That also reminds me: whenever my boyfriend and I go to his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, we drive past this intersection of roads...if you turn one direction you end up on Kings Cross and if you turn the other way, you end up on Fury's Ferry. Everytime we drive through it, I always want to write them into a fantasy novel, since they sound just like they fell out of some big brick of a book.

I picked up Hart's Hope by Orson Scott Card the other day for a re-read, and remembered suddenly that the man really had some weird naming things in that book, particularly when it comes to the name of the hero, Orem. See, for most people outside of Utah, Orem doesn't mean a thing. But OSC knows better, since he grew up in Orem. And as I did too, I REALLY couldn't get over reading the word Orem as the first name for a person. Normally, when I recognise a source, I feel all warm and fuzzy as if I'm in on some inside joke. But this one time, it REALLY irritated me.

I know that I should read all the previous comments, and that in doing so I'd see at least two or three dozen that remarked on this snippet, but I must say that's very funny.

Run your new words through Google. Hah!

On Thunderbirds: I liked how all the sons were named after Mercury-era astronauts.

One car that always gets me is the Toyota Tacoma. Have you been to Tacoma? Let's just say that there aren't many opportunties for off-roading around there.

When we're talking about car names and other languages, Honda made a huge mistakes a few years ago when they named a model Fitta. It was quickly renamed to Jazz in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

Oh, dear. And that doesn't require any faffing about pretending the word is spelled other than as it is.

I am reminded of a story Art Widner tells about some yokels admiring his Volvo, though they had never heard of a "Volva" before. I suggested a possible retort: "If you'd ever been in one, you'd remember."

While it's the opposite corner of Pennsylvania from me, and the one part of the state I've never actually been to, I can hazard a guess about the origins of the name. The Appalachians curve through Pa., from the northeast to the southwest. The flat parts of the state are in the northwest, near Erie, and the southeast, near Philadelphia. Everything else tends to be hilly, if not actually mountainous. And the hills and mountains were originally covered with trees and bushes, such as the mountain laurel that's now the state flower.

So I suspect the early explorers and pioneers, who were on foot or horseback, found the trip through that area slow going and began to despair of ever seeing flat land again.

Serge -- Well, there wasn't a Donald Tracy, either. (Let's not even go into the possibilities of "Gus," or "Deke," or even "Gordo.") And Brains's first name is given once as Hiram -- or maybe that's just another secret identity. They certainly are awfully secret at I.R. (one can only imagine how many times the Camera Detector would go off per mission these days, but then, the future is almost always a disappointment).

UC
Downtown

And here in the Northwest, they apparently fix roads with their blue pencils, as one often sees signs indicating:

Traffic Revision Ahead

I can't help but read it as an imperative, and I try to figure out how to signal "meters traffic." I don't know, maybe I read too many O'Brian books. ("Mr. Pullings, signal meters traffic.")

Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next book DO have a character named Braxton Hicks in them. It's quite deliberate, and Braxton's isn't the only name like that.

"Melissa - those of us from Elmira are going to have an awful time with your novel. But then again, how many of us are likely to be from Elmira?"

Probably not many, but I have so many cousins out there I wouldn't be surprised if we were related. I figure I'm giving half my family a good laugh. Are you from Elmira?

How'd you like to be caught in a Crossfire? Actually, a naming firm argues that consumers just don't think that way. Probably the same factor applies in the case of the Ninja. The attributes the consumer brings to it are not "assassin" and "dangerous" but "dark" and "cool."

I have generated a number of interesting non-words by making left-hand off-by-one errors on a Dvorak keyboard. Since the vowels are all on the home row, this tends to produce "words" with vewuls n oll thu rght ylecus (sorry, I mean "vowels in all the right places") that are somehow odd and alien...

Actually, Chemical didn't change it's name until it merged with Chase - and the management remained mostly Chemical. This transaction removed one of the wierder bank names from the financial landscape. Then again, Chemical itself swallowed up Manufacturer's Hanover, and in the past had been such things as the Corn Exchange Bank Trust Company and The Chemical Corn Exchange Bank, which I think would be pretty neat to see imprinted on my checks. Alas.

The city, Tacoma, is named for the mountain Tacoma or Tahoma (think of the H as being like that in "l'chaim!") -- which is also known as Mt. Rainier. Rainier's height is 14,410 feet above sea level -- which is where Tacoma is, only 44 miles away -- or 4393 meters. The distance from downtown Tacoma to the edge of development is about 23 miles.

In other words, Mt. Tacoma is plenty wild, and Tacoma the city ain't that far from said wilderness.

(Not that I would ever buy an SUV, as I'm both secure in my sexuality and in my driving ability. But hey.)

Marilee: Not unless you count a case of postpartum. I don't think Zyprexa's close enough for me to worry about though, but thanks for the heads up. :)

My brother owned a Volvo and my dad never failed to mispronounce it in the most horrible way. And he had no idea what he was doing either. Half the time we'd have to stumble into another room to break out in laughter.

Anyway, according to the Carlton TV website (thunderbirdsonline.com), H.K.H. is merely a cover name, and "his real name is unknown." I would think a person of such intelligence could come up with a more euphonious alias (say, "Dr. Octyl S. Suffoccinate"* or maybe "Bond . . . Hydrogen Bond") but I guess we're already having that discussion.

*Not the Spider-Man villain.

I suppose the Darth names can be explained by George's tin ear, but what is it with the inappropriate Portuguese names? Amidala means tonsil, Panaka is a fancy misspelling of idiot, Count Dooku sounds like Count of Asshole and Sifo-Dyas reads like f*cked (these last two were renamed in Brazil). Now that I think of it, the trend actually started with Boba "Silly Girl" Fett.

Star Wars: Teaching kids to swear in Portuguese since 1980.

Just as, while fiercely fierce battle, choreographed as if by Fosse or Nijinsky,* swirled all around her, Natalie Portman no doubt thought, Léon would kick all you guys' backsides into low orbit, and look cool doing it.

*Remembering that both those guys are dead.

And Senator Lott Dodd? Give me a break.

I can't help but read it as an imperative

and

Larry Brennen:
Chemical didn't change it's name until it merged with Chase.... This transaction removed one of the wierder bank names from the financial landscape.

Combing these two comments reminds me that one of Chase's incarnations was as "Chase Lincoln First", which was not only weird, but which I was never able to read as anything BUT an imperative.

BTW, to those of us from downstate, calling anything in ROC a tower is amusing. (But don't think that I have anything but fond feelings for Rochester - it's a really nice small city with far more resources than most cities of its size, and I wouldn't mind having one of those nifty victorians on Park Ave.)

On real-world placenames: I live in Edgewood, south of Riverside. It distresses me that there are so few people who know how cool that is.

On other skiffy resonances: My college town had an Eat 'n' Park, a diner chain whose mascot character was a smiley-face cookie. Unfortunately, I'd read the Sandman story "The Golden Boy" only a short time before they put up a big banner advertising SMILEY WATCHES.

Still, the cake-taker of names that passed before too few eyes is, for good or ill, outside of fiction entirely; nothing beats the double-take of having an invoice cross your desk from these guys.

Those guys, of course, read their science fiction in the magazine with the appropriate first 4 letters, and which name is the reversal of Superboy cheering "Go, Lana!"

I confess that I am somewhat amused at a card called a "Cressida."

Not, I would think, a good name for a nice, reliable automobile.

I'm puzzled about that every time I see one. My favourite road-trip game is trying to invent car names that the companies *wouldn't* use. It can be surprisingly challenging. Hyundai Baka. Volkswagen Roach. Ford Emu. Mitzubishi Boils. Toyota Attempt.

True, but 60 year old actors in the 1930s would have been born in the 1870s, so would have names popular at the time.

"More to the point, it's simply not that long ago in terms of social patterns; Western surnames had already lost almost all their connection to professions (you might still find Cartwrights who made wagons, but not many Fletchers were still in the arrow business)."

I guess I was thinking more of given names, which tend to reflect their time.

Just a thought. It's a potential tool. Could also be useful as a quick way to get some names from a certain nationality, by searching for foreign films from there.

One Christmas in Yosemite, the rental car counter clerk handed us the keys to a Suzuki "Esteem." A more underpowered vehicle less suited to driving in the mountains would be difficult to imagine. I wondered aloud why this tin bucket was called an "Esteem," and John replied, "Because it may suck, but it still feels really good about itself."

There's actually a reason he was named after Hannes Bok, but that'll come out in future stories, if and when I write them.

I saw a cel from, IIRC, Warner Bros, an aerial view of landscape with locations labelled: Turhan Bay and Veronica Lake. I was nearly lying on the floor laughing in the main library.

David Goldfarb :
Being Tolkien doesn't entirely protect you from unfortunate naming. He sited his First Age city of Gondolin upon a hill named Túna.

I was at a Mytho-meeting where a casserole was bought that was mostly tuna, with a topping of chopped parsley. It was agreed that that called for a hefty punfine.

(Don't click that link if your boss is looking over your shoulder. No dirty pictures, but you might get a question or two.)

The article you linked presents its own, euphonic answer. Just say no to SyBePa and say hello to West Woolloomooloo.

Oh, yes. When it hit the web, I used it to torture school friends who were working there. Kool-Aid, anyone?

*You're welcome.

**The ones we use to get a day off. They have so many indoor Moopsball games, school plays, and phrenologists' appointments...!

Peter may have been working in the grand tradition of Stan Lee, who named a couple of aliens in an early "Iron Man" story Edam and Gouda.

Decades later, they were revealed to be representatives of the Fromaji race...

kdb

I could see how Morganatic would be bothersome, also since it is such a cool word you would be shutting yourself out of using properly by using as a name. Then again:
"Nail Funguson: How did you get such a name then?
Morganatic Distal: My mother named me for the thing which bound her, but this talk is bothersome - let us drink in silence.
"

Later on this becomes a major point of contention when Lord Wobegoncraft author of "The art and craft of spanking high born ladies" allows Morganatic to precede him in entering a brothel, thinking by the hero's depraved countenance that he was possessed of some rank.

After the vengeful Wobegoncraft has Morganatic set up for stealing tarts, which is a bedangling offence in Bunburyland, Megrim Phastling, the last scholar of phantastical engineering in the whole nation, must come to the aid of the young fool.
He does this even though it takes him from his studies for that most inconvenient reason, being that his ward and niece, the lovely Virginia Dentata has fallen in love with Morganatic.

Will Morganatic consent to marry someone beneath him on the social scale, the daughter of an Academician?!? Will phantastical engineering regain its lost standing as the crowning intellectual achievement of mankind and dragons?
Will Nail Fungusson marry Jenny the big-bosomed barmaid and settle to a life of drunken bliss? Stay tuned for the next exciting chapter in "The vows of Morganatic"

On names that are probably intentionally rude, there is an Italian restaurant in the Village named Figa (C*nt). I walked up on down in front of it for a long while, totally fascinated. I so wanted to go inside and ask them for a card, or some matches. I was also tempted to ask them if they knew what it meant in Italian, but I figured they couldn't possibly not know.

Just as with the reastaurant in Aukland, NZ, named Pompino (blowjob), it is remotely possible that the owners asked some bona fide passing Italians to name something really popular among Italians without actually then checking on a dictionary... but despite this being a vastly more entertaining possibility, I don't think it's all that probable.

Thus:

Night. The Palace of C*nnil*ngus, dread emperor of half the world, viceroy of the moon, potentate of the islands of Lnagerh*ns, and offence to the gods of his forefathers. The sin of the emperor hangs heavy on his servants, the guards in the corridors mask dread and sickness upon their faces,
the great chef in the emperor's kitchen, the maniacal Bugf*ck An*l, cries over the delicate partridge and tion mouse to think of the doom of the gods, and in her vast bed the wife of the emperor is sick with child.

And obviously Lord Wobegoncraft is the master of Wobegoncraftcroft, perched high enough above the Lake of which so many tales are told, so high in truth that the shadowed Falls of the Frostbite are visible from its topmost window -- the only window that ever shows a light.

But why have the crofters of Roy ceased to sail across the lake in wooden pierogies, trailing their walleyed pikes, and building great anomic piles of slush? Why is load after load of frozen chicken parts delivered to the house's secret . . . well, it was supposed to be secret until Chapter 12 . . . lab and oratory, on nights when great bolts of electricity tear across they sky, lightening the darkening? Have his mad plans to combine the Armstrong and Colpitts oscillator circuits succeeded? Or do they feel *boom* so good, do they feel *ba-boom* so good, do they feel so good that they'll reanimate some hearts tonight? *baboom*boom*beeeeeeep

----

The gloomy lab of Wobegoncraftcroft where Lord Wobegoncraft works to right the horrors wrought by his father, the wrathful sire of Wobegoncraft. Icthor, Lord Wobegoncraft's shifty malformed servant shuffles in.
"Icthor, where hast thou been?" Lord Wobegoncraft always used the nondemotic when he had drunk deep of absinth and was engaged in necrotic experimentation.
"Ringing bells, master, it doth sooth my distempered brow."
"Never mind that now, it seems success is at hand"
"Shall you finally succeed in reanimating the lovely Miss Dentata, master?"
"Well, in sooth was she never that animate to speak of, but, yes, I trust I can warm her."

Will Lord Wobegoncraft change the pronounciation of his name at a penultimate moment?

Will Lord Wobegoncraft lose his ghoulish figure now that he is overeating poultry again?

Will Morganatic learn that not only the heart but other vital parts of the young Ms. Dentata have been replaced?

Will Morganatic make a particularly uncouth comment about something tasting just like something else, and refer to barbecue sauce, getting him slapped out so viciously that he falls backwards through a stained glass bedroom window onto some upthrust pikes of an especially wall-eyed aspect?

Is there something fishy in the state of Bunburyland?

And whatever happened to kindly old professor Phastling who we last saw bustling off for tea with the Dragon Mictatorial.

Ah, yes, I recall young Wobegoncraft. His mother was a strong woman, and his father uncommonly good-looking, but alas, he himself was merely average, or perhaps a trifle above.

"This alloy of Archaism in Futurism partly accounts for the failures of Aristonicus in a Roman Asia and of his contemporaries the insurgent Syrian slave-kings Eunus, Cleon, and Athenio in a Roman Sicily..."
[Walter Kauffman, "Toynbee: The Historian as False Prophet" Commentary, Vol. 23 • April 1957 • No. 4.]

I Googled this because it was paraphrased recently in a syndicated column:

Calmly Contemplating the Abyss
By Timothy Garton Ash, Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at St. Antony's College in Oxford, England.
The European Crisis may be the beginning of the end for civilization on the continent -- or not.
"Toynbee's answers to why civilizations decline and fall have been largely discounted by professional historians, but the question remains a good one. As with all terribles simplificateurs, some of his ideas are, at least, suggestive. For example, among the characteristic features of disintegrating civilizations he finds the Siamese twins of archaism and futurism. Some people wallow in the memory of a golden age that never was, while others glorify an imagined future."

This seems to be a paraphrase ("conjoined" = "siamese twins") of:

"Toynbee was led to ask why civilisations decline and fall through his experience of what has been called the European civil war from 1914 to 1945. His own grand, schematic answers have been largely discounted by professional historians, but the question remains a good one. As with all terribles simplificateurs, some of his ideas are, at least, suggestive. For example, among the characteristic features of disintegrating civilisations he finds the conjoined twins of archaism and futurism. Some people wallow in the memory of a golden age that never was while others glorify an imagined future."
Contemplating the European Crisis

I also find:

"He [Toynbee] argues that as civilizations decay, they form an 'Internal Proletariat' and an 'External Proletariat.' The Internal protelariat is held in subjugation by the dominant minority inside the civilization, and grows bitter; the external protelariat exists outside the civilization in poverty and chaos, and grows envious. He argues that as civilizations decay, there is a 'schism in the body social,' whereby abandon and self-control replace creativity, and truancy and martyrdom replace discipleship by the creative minority. He argues that in this environment, people resort to archaism (idealization of the past), futurism (idealization of the future), detachment (removal of oneself from the realities of a decaying world), and transcendence (meeting the challenges of the decaying civilization with new insight, as a Prophet). He argues that those who Transcend during a period of social decay give birth to a new Church with new and stronger spiritual insights, around which a subsequent civilization may begin to form after the old has died."
A Study of History

See also:
"Futurism and Archaism in Toynbee and Hardy" contained in Still Rebels, Still Yankees, by Donald Davidson.

This week's For Better or Worse strips feature a take-off of the Cressida--the Crevasse. No cracks about the name, okay?

Step away from the caffiene. Just put it on the floor, step back, and nobody gets hurt. There's a good boy.

MKK

What have I done to make you despise me so?

I do like Megrim Phastling having tea with the Dragon of course, because as we will remember Megrim was the last scholar of phantastical engineering in Bunburyland.

The Dragon is dear old nearsighted Mictatorial the Dragon who is now grown so wizened in his antiquity that he can fit in small house and has thus moved from his draughty cavern into town. Mictatorial is a well known collector of tea, perhaps because he only has enough fire left to set a kettle, perhaps because he is a comfy old drake. His days are spent debating if there can ever be a proof of the four-color theory of Will o' the Wisps with Professor Phastling, and maintaining a long-running competition with a similarly town-bound unicorn for the local virgins, of which there are so very few since a true hero has arrived, meaning Morganatic, with the hero's usual appetite for despoilation.

y'all try and do that on coffee.

I'll bite. I just did a bunch of google and dictionary searches and all I found is that Gutvik is a place in Norway. Nothing in German, not even when I change the spelling to more likely German things.

That's a silly story. no va does in fact mean "it doesn't go," but nova means, oddly enough, "nova." So that name is not the reason.

I don't get this. Morganatic doesn't strike me as a felicitous name, either, but the reason doesn't make sense to me. We call people Red and Tiny and Happy, and those are also edjectives, and while you might or might not like them as names, the precedent is there to make a noun of an adjective.

Are there characters named Megrim and Morganatic?

Here's the googlecache of an item on Ananova. (The original seems to have expired.) And here's a translation of the verb courtesy of dict.leo.org.

BTW - if you take the German word for bird, der Vogel and make it into a verb, you get another colloquial word with the same meaning. I actually don't know too many German swear words. Really.

However, I've also been told that in the wake of multiple sales, they don't need to know every book title, just what's current (Including upcoming publications.) They want to know that your "several novels sold" are legitimate (Covered by giving a reputable publisher's name and a book title they can find online), and not trying to mask a stalled career (Ie, your latest book was published 2004-2005, not 1995). The first is a promise of publishable quality, the second a promise of saleability. It only takes one or two names to prove that, not all 15.

Not listing a history in your cover letter isn't crippling. The work stands on its own.

I have a Hoon,Asah-dee’eph, an official in patents and copyrights. Look at the left-hand side of a keyboard. When one first learns to type, what can be more boring than to sit in class and repeatedly hear that learning tape drone out, ‘A S D F. A S D F.’ A perfect name for a dull bureaucratic Hoon.

Rumor has it a place waits in the Klingon Diplomatic Corps for K'ohl Tar

During the fanfare, it was recalled that a couple decades before, a shirt company had run a color-naming contest around the same idea. (Sorry, it's been a long time and I don't remember the name of the company -- I think it's out of business -- or the decade.)

But it's nice to know that there's an academic study now, because, as all Velveteen Undergrads discover, having a thesis makes you real. Now I'm looking forward to Microsoft's slogan, "Windows: Any color you want, as long as it's blue."

I don't object to made-up names, but I like characters to seem like actual people, and a name like, oh, ferinstance, "B.Z. Gundalinhu" can make an otherwise engrossing book very bumpy. I keep pausing in my reading to say "What was his mother *thinking*? Why hasn't he legally changed his name to something people can pronounce?" I admire writers like Gene Wolfe or Tolkein who have a gift for language and can invent beautiful, perfect-sounding names for their characters, but I find that they are few and far between.

This is from the Punjab, for heaven's sake.