Thursday, September 8, 2011

How Hottest Startups Got Their Names

I was naming a product today, a new game engine. My antennae always tingle when a naming assignment comes along -- hitting dictionaries and thesauri to cross reference wordplay and find the be-all name.
To highlight the also-ran... today's winner that wasn't selected for the game engine (in which one navigates an avatar step by step across a game board)

car·a·cole (kr-kl)
also car·a·col (-kl)
n. A half turn to right or left performed by a horse and rider.

intr.v. car·a·coled, car·a·col·ing, car·a·coles also car·a·cols
To perform a caracole


Best of all it has provenance: [French, from Spanish caracol, snail.]


Kinda matches my Fibonacci, no?


Even more exciting is what Caracole finds you in google. Try it dear reader...


#1 is "Pretentious Pontification Corner" which suits this post well. They pontificate about the Edmund White’s 1986 novel Caracole and the meaning of the word “caracole”: “caper” in English, “prance” in French, “snail” in Spanish. Caracole reads as a cunning dissection of the New York intellectual scene.

Ever wonder how today’s Hottest Startups got their names?

Some of our favorite startups were sired by picking names out of hats, by throwing out odd proper nouns that might be cheap domain names and by haphazardly removing vowels.

Take a tour -- Great slideshow through a billion dollars in dart-throwing.

Not sure then about the name choosing for Caracole in Ohio -- the first licensed adult care facility in Ohio for people living with HIV/AIDS.





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