The column appeared in the New York Times Magazine on April 13, and was titled “Revanche is Sweet”. It had a section about Senator Barack Obama’s use of the word perfect in his big speech about race. Safire concerned himself with the use of the word as a verb and as a noun.

Wait, did The Name Inspector just say “noun”? Yes, he did, because that’s what Safire called the form of the word perfect that’s pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable:

The primary meaning of the noun, pronounced PERfect, is “complete, whole, finished,” and the verb taking that action, pronounced perFECT, means “to complete, make whole, finish.”

Dear reader, that’s not a noun. It’s an adjective. Of course you knew that. (If you didn’t, you might be feeling a little insecure right now. But do you write a column for the paper of record that’s billed as being, you know, On Language? Are you “the most widely read writer on the English language”? No? Then you won’t bear the full brunt of The Name Inspector’s scorn. Though you might get a funny look and a disbelieving but sympathetic shake of the head.)

This was no fluke. The article referred to perfect as a noun no fewer than four times.

Now, sometimes perfect is in fact used as a noun. For example, when it’s the name of a grammatical category indicating completed action and related notions, as in present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect. An editor or teacher might say “You should use the perfect here”. That’s a noun (though even in this context people might think of it as shorthand for “the perfect form” or something like that). Perfect might also be used as a noun when people are discussing philosophical abstractions, as in “The perfect is the enemy of the good”, the common English translation of Voltaire’s “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”.

But perfect meaning ‘complete, whole, finished’ in a more general sense is an adjective. As are the words complete, whole, and, sometimes, finished.

There are two issues of concern here. One, what was Safire thinking? And two, how did this get past the editorial staff of the New York Times Magazine? The Name Inspector can’t resist observing that the self-appointed guardians of correct usage are often among those who are most susceptible to the occasional cluelessness about grammatical facts.

It’s possible that Safire was just kicking it old school with his grammatical terminology. Really old school. One definition of noun in the Oxford English Dictionary is simply ‘An adjective’. This is described as an obsolete and rare variant of the term noun adjective, and the most recent citation given is from 1669. If that’s what Safire and the NYTM had in mind, it’s time for them to invest in a new English reference grammar. The Name Inspector recommends Huddleston and Pullum’s The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, though A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Quirk et al. is also quite nice.

It’s seems more likely that this was just a dumb mistake. In that case, print a correction! Everyone makes mistakes. Nobody’s a perfect. (Now that’s a noun!) Own up to this and help your younger readers avoid the grammatical confusions of their elders.

And New York Times Magazine? If you should ever need a savvy observer of language who knows his way around the web and can tell a noun from an adjective, The Name Inspector can recommend someone.

Tags: safire, william safire, on language, grammar, parts of speech, noun, adjective, new york times, nytimes

That’s phonotactics–the study of sound sequences that do and do not occur in a given language. Some non-occurring sound sequences are simply unpronounceable and are not found in any language. Others are pronounceable but just don’t fit the idiosyncratic preferences of a particular language.

Lately The Name Inspector has noticed a bunch of names used in English-speaking contexts that don’t toe the line of normal English phonotactics. He suspects this is a new strategy for creating short names that are available as .com domains.

It’s really common for names to mess with orthography. That strategy is typical of Web 2.0 names (Flickr, Digg, Zooomr, etc.) and has been with us for a long time (Cheez Whiz). But phonology has been pretty sacred until now. While all the following names are pronounceable, they start with sound sequences that don’t occur syllable-initially in English, except in some borrowed words.

Zlio. This website allows you to instantly create an online affiliate store. It was in the news a while back because it got banned from Amazon.com. In English, the sequence zl- only occurs in the word zloty, the Polish currency unit.

Vlingo. This is a voice-to-text application for mobile devices. We English speakers see vl-at the beginning of a word only in the name Vladimir and in a tiny handful of obscure borrowed words.

Jwaala. An online banking tool. This name is based on a Sanskrit-derived word for ‘fire’. English has plenty of words in which j- is followed by the vowel -u- (e.g. juvenile), but none in which it’s followed by the related consonant -w-.

Srixon. The name of this golf ball manufacturer has a beginning that English speakers only find in the place name Sri Lanka.

How much farther can the phonological sensibilities of English speakers be pushed? As names become increasingly scarce, let’s wait and see.

Tags: zlio, the name zlio, vlingo, the name vlingo, jwaala, the name jwaala, srixon, the name srixon

What can you do at Bizjam? You can learn about how to use social media to help your business, brush up on basic business stuff, and network ’til you getwork. There’s also a party on Thursday night. Last year’s party featured, among other things, good food in really interesting non-food-like shapes.

So, who’ll be the lucky stiff? Whoever presents the most convincing case that they’d benefit from the conference but find the cost a bit prohibitive. If you’re interested in going, email The Name Inspector and lay out your case. If multiple cases have equal merit, people who’ve left comments on this blog will have the advantage, and earlier entries will trump later ones.

Tags: bizjam, bizjam08, biznik, networking, seattle

Tags: twitter

Sometimes it takes a crazy kind of name to snap a name inspector out of a long dry spell. Verb for Shoe is just that kind of name. It belongs to a computerized, interactive shoe created by MIT-spinoff VectraSense Technologies. Apparently this shoe detects different activities of its wearer and inflates and deflates cushions in its insole to provide custom comfort and support. Part of The Name Inspector thinks “Wow!” and the other, larger, more sensible part is reminded of the old Onion headline: “U.S. Dentists Can’t Make Nation’s Teeth Any Damn Whiter“. Just exactly how comfortable can our feet get? $700 comfortable?

As he writes this, The Name Inspector is wearing a $90 pair of Keens, and his feet are just about as happy as they ever have been. But, to be fair, there’s more to the Verb for Shoe experience, apparently. According to talk2myShirt, these shoes are networked. Just why is a little unclear. Something about interacting with people in virtual and real space at the same time. But why through your shoes? So many questions, which at the time of this writing are not answered on the Verb for Shoe website.

But technology aside, the name Verb for Shoe is not only linguistically and conceptually bizarre, but it makes reference to grammatical categories as well. What could be better than that?

Verb for Shoe is a noun (verb) modified by a prepositional phrase (for shoe). But that prepositional phrase ain’t right. Normally a noun like shoe would be preceded by some kind of determiner: a shoe, the shoe, your shoe, etc. Determiners can be left out only in certain situations, like when the noun is plural (for shoes) or when it refers, concretely or abstractly, to an undifferentiated mass of stuff (for mud, for fun). The word shoe is neither a plural noun nor a mass noun. So what’s going on? When do you encounter a prepositional phrase like for shoe? Well, when you’re talking about words and their meanings, as in “What’s the word for shoe in French?”. In that sentence, shoe doesn’t refer to a shoe–it refers to the idea of a shoe.

So the name Verb for Shoe is about the idea of a shoe, or more specifically, changing our collective idea of a shoe. Why Verb for Shoe rather than Word for Shoe? Because we think of shoes as objects, but VectraSense wants us to think of this shoe as an occurrence. Verbs name actions and processes–hence, Verb for Shoe. You can imagine someone in a namestorming session saying, “What’s a verb for shoe? Whatever the verb for shoe is, that should be the name”. And then everyone realizes there is no verb for shoe, and they just go with the phrase that describes the mythical word they’re looking for. This is a very “meta” name.

A great thing about Verb for Shoe is that it gives The Name Inspector a reason to talk about notional (or conceptual) versus grammatical categories. The popular understanding of grammatical categories is that they express the notional ones. When you first learned about nouns and verbs, you probably learned that nouns are for people, places, and things and verbs are for actions. While the correlation between the two types of category is strong, linguists are always quick to point out that it’s imperfect, and that grammatical categories are best understood in morphosyntactic terms–that is, in terms of the kinds of suffixes that attach to words and the positions that words occupy in sentences.

How is the correlation between notional and grammatical categories imperfect? Well, while many nouns do refer to people, places, and things, there are also nouns, like fun, kiss, game, and trial, that name action- and event-like phenomena. And while many verbs name actions and processes, there are verbs like resemble, remain, and cost that name things less dynamic and/or more abstract.

The situation is actually kind of complicated, because different grammatical categories have different degrees of freedom to name different things. Nouns can name just about anything, because people have conceptual reasons to reify all kinds of phenomena that are not very thing-like. Verbs are more restricted than nouns–they never name people, places, and things, for example.

So how do you define nouns and verbs? You can’t do it right without mentioning things like this: Nouns are preceded by determiners and head noun phrases, which can be subjects of clauses. Verbs are marked for tense and aspect and head verb phrases, which join with noun phrases to make clauses. If this all seems a little circular, it is, in a way. Grammatical description is all about how systems hang together. And if it all seems a little a bit dry, well, it probably is. The strange and lucky subculture of language geeks, of which The Name Inspector is a proud member, is able to delight in this kind of grammatical detail. Others find it hard to stand, even if they’re standing in $700 networked shoes.

Tags: verb for shoe, the name verb for shoe, shoes, wearable computers, wearable computing, wearable electronics, grammatical categories, syntactic categories, verbs, nouns, grammar

Word travels fast on the web. That can be a big boon to a business, but it has its down side as well. Consider Blews.

This is the name of a news aggregator being developed at Microsoft Research. It not only displays news stories, but also shows how much they’re being discussed in blogs from the political left and right. And it does automatic sentiment analysis to determine the “emotional charge” of the associated blog posts. It’s not even an actual product yet–it’s a research project. But here it is being discussed by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch, almost as if it were a web startup’s beta.

The problem with Blews is not the technology, which Arrington finds promising, but the name. In the slow old days, this in-house project name would probably never have made it into the wide world. But thanks to the web and influencers like Arrington, it threatens to become a brand.

Arrington is careful to point out that the creators of Blews are not UI experts or web designers, implying that readers should not judge the idea too harshly from a user experience perspective. The same sort of slack should be cut, The Name Inspector supposes, for the name. (A name is, after all, a part of the user experience. It might not affect the way a user decides where to click, but it affects the way a user remembers an app, thinks about it, bookmarks it, and tells others about it.)

So perhaps it’s not fair to pick nits. On the other hand, there’s a value to getting criticism early in the process, right?

This is a pretty bad name. Presumably it’s a blend: Blogs + news = Blews. It also alludes to the use of colors to represent the political spectrum: red for conservative and blue for liberal (and purple for those mixed-up areas). The GUI uses the colors red, white and blue in a way that makes it, as Arrington points out, a dead ringer for a sideways Rocket Pop.

But there are three big problems with the name Blews. First, people are likely to modify it with Microsoft, on the pattern of Microsoft Word. The result sounds like “Microsoft Blues”, which does make a pretty good name for the malaise experienced by the characters in Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs, before they started working at that virtual Lego startup in California and got all confident and fit and sexed up, but not for an innovative web technology from the software giant.

Second, there’s the unfortunate but inevitable evocation of the phrase “Microsoft blows” (or the slightly less negative “Microsoft blew”, which at least leaves open the possibility that Microsoft no longer blows). Some TechCrunch commenters picked right up on that.

Third, Blews looks like a violation of grammar: a third person singular present tense ending stuck onto an irregular past tense verb. It’s the linguistic equivalent of biting on tinfoil.

Let The Name Inspector make it clear that he finds nothing less interesting than gratuitous Microsoft bashing. He knows nice, smart people who work there. He’s just saying that it’s a mistake to give the haters this kind of raw material. The Name Inspector stands always at the ready to help people avoid this kind of situation.

Tags: blews, the name blews, microsoft blews, the name microsoft blews, microserfs, coupland, douglas coupland, legos, sentiment analysis

It turns out The Name Inspector has been the victim of a spam-injection attack on his WordPress blog. Hidden links were appearing in the footer, and they were picked up by Google’s crawler and got in the index. Now the blog is being penalized.

If you run WordPress and have noticed a big drop in Google traffic, you should know about this. Check your wp-includes directory for the following file: class-mail.php. That’s not a legitimate Wordpress file–if you have it, you’ve been attacked. Details about this Wordpress vulnerability can be found in the support forum, but the first thing you need to do is upgrade to the most recent version.

Now on to the plea. Though The Name Inspector has appealed to Google for “reinclusion” and will presumably have the penalty lifted (as long as the problem is gone), this whole distasteful experience will probably have negative longer-term effects on his search engine visibility. Many of you have linked to this site already, and The Name Inspector thanks you. Those who enjoy the blog but haven’t linked to it on your own blogs, please consider doing it now. Maybe point to this cautionary post. Or one that’s actually interesting. Help replenish The Name Inspector’s Google juice.

And now, this site will be down temporarily while The Name Inspector upgrades.

Thanks Marcelo! Hi mom!

Tags: top blogs, top bloggers, a-list bloggers, seattle bloggers, seattle blogs, seattle a-list, seattle 2.0, seattle2.0, seattle, awesomeness

The Internet Movie Database, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, recently acquired a film distribution company called Withoutabox. Amazon.com has a digital movie download service called Unbox. These names just make too cute a pair for The Name Inspector to ignore, and bring up some grammatical issues that he expects will delight and amuse you. OK, he hopes they won’t bore you to desperate tears. Please bear with him.

Let’s start with the basics. In The Name Inspector’s typology of names, Withoutabox is a phrase name. A prepositional phrase, more specifically. Without is the preposition, and a box is a noun phrase that serves as its object.

To think about the meanings of a phrase name, you need to consider not only the meanings of the words in the phrase and how they go together, but also the ways that the phrase as a whole might be used in a sentence. This is especially true of prepositional phrases, because the main function of a preposition is to make it clear how its noun phrase object fits into a larger context.

Semantically speaking, the function of without is to indicate absence–in this case, of a box. Grammatically, without can connect that absence-of-a-box meaning to a larger context in two main ways: as an adverbial (a modifier of a verb or verb phrase), or as a postnominal modifier (a modifier of a noun that occurs after the noun). An example of the adverbial use of without a box is “Distribute your movies without a box”, where it modifies the distributing. An example of the postnominal modifier use is “This is a movie without a box”, where it modifies the movie.

In this context the two interpretations amount to more or less the same thing. As the website states, “Withoutabox declares all members of the film community to be free from restrictive distribution channels”. One aspect of this freedom is the fact that members do not have to put a film or tape or disc into a box and load it on a truck in order to get it in front of viewers. So the name Withoutabox works mainly through metonymy: it focuses on a small, literally descriptive detail–the idea or image of a movie that’s not in a box–and uses it to stand for a much larger scenario–a distribution system that’s not constrained by physical distance and scarcity.

Withoutabox has a hint of metaphorical meaning, too. The name is reminiscent of the phrase outside the box, that tired cliché that many of us–especially business types–drag out when we want to encourage innovative thinking. (Nothing is deeper inside the box than the phrase outside the box.)

The Name Inspector doesn’t know for certain how this cliché got started. There’s the obvious use of a centrality metaphor for normalcy, with normal being in the middle, as in middle of the road, and abnormal being out there, marginal, edgy, on the fringes, etc. There’s also a related containment metaphor, in which being inside the container is conforming to group behavior, and being outside is being different. But The Name Inspector read somewhere that the phrase think outside the box actually relates to an old brain teaser involving a square made out of nine dots drawn on a piece of paper. The idea is that you’re supposed to draw lines through all the dots by making only four lines and not lifting your pen from the paper.

Remember, think outside the box!

Though Withoutabox is kind of a long name, it has a fast, familiar pronunciation, similar to that expression of confident certainty without a doubt, that’s encouraged by the spaceless orthography.

Unbox

The name Unbox is deceptively simple. It seems to be shorter version of Withoutabox, providing a straightforward description of one aspect of downloadable movies in order to highlight the benefits of digital distribution.

But wait a minute. The prefix un- usually attaches to a verb (undo, unwind, etc.) or an adjective (unkind, unacceptable, etc.) to make a syntactically similar word with the opposite meaning. The most natural way to interpret Unbox is as a verb meaning ‘to take out of a box’ (comparable to the verb uncage ‘to take or let out of a cage’).

A verb prefixed with un- usually denotes the reversal of the action denoted by the unprefixed verb. You can wrap something and unwrap it, tie something and untie it, and so forth. So the verbs that un- attaches to denote actions with results that can be reversed.

In this context, however, unbox is being used, at least on the most literal level, in reference to something that has never been in a box–namely, a downloadable digital movie. So the name Unbox is less direct than it first appears: it evokes an imaginary scenario of taking something out of a box in order to emphasize the absence of a box and all that implies. If the name were Unboxed, this wouldn’t be the case. The past participle unboxed can simply describe something that you might expect to be in a box but isn’t. With adjectives and past participles (that is, adjectives made out of verbs), un- basically means ‘not’ (uncool, undisclosed, unanticipated, etc.). Something can be unguarded even though you can’t unguard it. But Unbox requires us to imagine an act of unboxing. We might think of this name as more of a philosophical exhortation than a physical description. Free yourself from the tyranny of the box!

So even the meaning of an unassuming name like Unbox requires you to use your imagination a little bit.