News Corp. and NBC recently announced the name of their new online video joint venture: Hulu. Here’s the rationale behind this brand name, according to Jason Kilar, the CEO:

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building.

Yesterday a friend sent me link to a Boing Boing item in which someone claimed that oh noes! the word “hulu” means “butt” in Indonesian. They provided a link to the source, a website called Webster’s Online Dictionary, which has one page with multiple definitions of the word “hulu”. My first reaction was that of course they should have hired a naming company with global linguistic capabilities, or at least done some linguistic screening. But then I dug a bit deeper.

Webster’s Online Dictionary is NOT the same as or associated in any way with the Merriam-Webster online dictionary or Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (the gold standard for printed dictionaries). It’s a collection of definitions and translations thrown together by a guy named Philip M. Parker, who likes to collect books. (He’s also an author; check out his, er, interesting titles on Amazon.) The translations on his site have no attribution, references, or sources of any kind, which should be an immediate red flag.

I checked a few online Indonesian dictionaries, as well as a Malay dictionary we have in the Catchword library, and the word “hulu” is never translated as “butt”. The actual definition is “head”, both literally (the head of a human body) and metaphorically (the river head). It can sometimes be used for “handle” or “hilt”, and perhaps that’s where the mistranslation came from. Just to verify my own research, I contacted Hikmat Gumilar, a native speaker of Indonesian and a professional translator. His response: “Hulu means upstream or pate.”

So one person decided to Google the word “hulu”, clicked on a single amateur website that gave a bad translation, and now this piece of naming misinformation is all over the blogosphere. I predict it will become a brand name urban legend, like the Chevy Nova story. You got the scoop here: I’m a linguist, and I like debunking these things.

“Hulu” does NOT MEAN “butt”.

Posted in Language use | No Comments

One might think Catchword recently participated in a press junket, what with all the great articles on naming we’ve been quoted in lately.

The latest example of Catchword offering it’s unique opinion on naming is in today’s LA Times piece titled Dot-com names get dottier. Once again, our very own Burt Alper offers his sage opinion on dot-com naming and brand naming issues:

“Old-school ideas about sounding trustworthy or sounding big are not as important as they used to be,” said Burt Alper, co-founder of Catchword Branding in Oakland, which has helped companies pick such names as Vudu (makes a device for watching videos) and Promptu (creates voice-recognition products). “Now, it’s about sounding different and standing out from the crowd.”

Posted in In-the-News | No Comments

Catchword’s own PR darling Burt Alper was recently featured in a New York Times piece by Stuart Elliott titled On 10th Anniversary, ‘Dianabilia’ Takes Over . The article explores the phenomenon of Diana, and Burt discusses how ‘Diana’ functions as a brand name:

“If you think of her as a product, she was able to accomplish a lot,” said Burt Alper, principal at Catchword Branding, a consulting company in Oakland, Calif. He added, “She was brilliant in reaching out and connecting to her audience in a way every brand would want to do.”

And Diana is “remembered as this young, captivating person, a beautiful princess who passed before her time,” he said. “She did not go through a waning of her popularity and she did not go through the aging process.”

Mr. Alper likened Diana to celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, who have become marketing stalwarts in death because their images are “frozen in time” at what is perceived in retrospect as the high points in their lives.

Posted in In-the-News | No Comments

Did anyone else catch Stuart Elliott’s piece in yesterday’s NYT on TIAA-CREF promoting their .org status as a differentiator? I guess now that saying “.com” is assumed, those people with something else to say might as well try to capture the moment. We naming consultants were not so impressed.

They overlooked the fact that .org is not strictly regulated to include only not-for-profit companies. Unlike the .edu suffix, which is carefully monitored to ensure that only secondary, accredited schools can register domains using the suffix, .org is open to anyone. In fact, many companies register the .com AND the .org (including TIAA-CREF) whether they are for-profit or not, merely as a defense against someone else registering the domain for some other use.

I think it would be a great step forward for the powers that be to consider limiting .org registrations to non-profits (the same way the .edu domain names are regulated). TIAA-CREF’s strategy would be more defensible, and more radical, in that context. And the rest of the non-profit community would find name development much easier.

Posted in Advertising, Branding, Company Naming, Domain names, In-the-News | 1 Comment

Magellan just announced Triton, their new line of handheld GPS devices. The Catchword team had a lot of fun creating this new product name for Magellan. The name Triton references the son of the Greek God Poseidon as well as a moon of Neptune. In addition to the nice semantic references, the -on ending provides a durable and rugged sound to the brand, both good associations for this sturdy, portable device. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this project was the international linguistic screening we conducted on our finalist product names. Triton had to perform well internationally because it will be sold across Europe and Scandinavia.

Posted in Name Launch, Product Naming | No Comments

My children are already famous. After being interviewed by the Wall Street Journal a few weeks about about baby naming (see “Naming on a more personal note“), I was contacted by The Times (of London) for a similar piece. So now Beckett and Sheridan have appeared in two of the most widely read papers on the planet — all because their dad happens to work for a naming company. What luck.

At least this article includes my three “golden rules” of naming (originally created for expecting parents, but now co-opted for people naming companies or naming products). Who knew that being a naming expert would lead to so much fanfare?

Posted in Fun stuff, In-the-News, Language use | No Comments

I heard an ad on the radio yesterday for AM/PM mini-mart. The purpose of the spot was to push junk food in mass quantity. Super-sized sugar drinks with extra-large bags of cholesterol and carbohydrate bombs. And it was all summed up by their new tag-line: Too much good stuff. Puh-leeze.

Did the folks at AM/PM miss the memo? Obesity is the new plague. Diabetes the new pox. It’s one thing to sell the food — all convenience stores do that, and will likely continue to do that until every one of their customers drops dead. But the tag-line is just plain dumb. It calls attention to the problem, and then gives it the snub.

The folks at AM/PM don’t need a tag-line that suggests they are doing the world a favor by selling this junk, but I think they could have done better than this. I know a great naming company that would love to help…

Posted in Advertising, Branding, Language use | No Comments