Names that turn the lights on in your head
How to get the kind of resonance that happens when we discover a new word that describes something we recognise in our minds.
My friend Nick Searle likes to walk. “Likes” is an understatement: he once landed at Heathrow Airport and decided the best way to get to our studio in Hammersmith was to walk all the way.
Many years ago, Nick and I were walking through some surprisingly wild woodlands near Holloway in London. After a while, we ended up walking on a path that was quite deeply sunk into the land and Nick said something that turned all kinds of lights on in my head: “This is why they call it Holloway”.
Of course! I had only ever thought of the word as a name, not as a word... A holloway is a path that is sunken in the land. Hollow way!
Many words are like that, pointing at something more meaningful than might appear at first sight. The German word Stammtisch is a wonderful, composite word. A Stamm is a tribe. A Tisch is table: tribal table. A group of friends regularly get together at the same table in a public place, like a pub or a brasserie. The table becomes their Stammtisch.
One week, your friend Bill can’t make it. Another week, it’s Ben who can’t make it. But everyone just carries on. We’ll see Bill and Ben next week: the Stammtisch remains the Stammtisch. Yes, it’s a table, but the word takes it far beyond the physical table and turns into a phenomenon, like the social equivalent of a whirlpool in a river. You could replace the table itself, you could even replace the individual friends over time, as some of them leave town and new faces show up on the scene. The Stammtisch would still be the Stammtisch. If the word didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it, just to point at the phenomenon.
In French, an amuse-bouche is an amusement for your mouth: something light and playful you’d eat with your apéritif before starting a longer meal, just to get the juices flowing. A few years ago, realising that our branding workshops could sometimes be long and difficult, I decided to open them with something light and playful, and called this part the amuse-tête. You should always open a long and difficult meeting with an amuse-tête, especially if you want participants to be playful and creative.
A few weeks ago, I had to come up with a name for this substack, where we examine how brands can become the opposite of boring. Of course, boring written backwards is... gnirob! Surely, this is the shortest, most economic word to describe the opposite of boring. I have a feeling Hemingway (Mr. Say-It-All-In-One-Word) would approve. Surprisingly, the gnirob.com domain name was still available. So, here we all are.
You don’t have to work with composite words to touch on something interesting. Baldassare Castiglione, who wrote the first book on court etiquette, coined the word sprezzatura, which could be loosely defined as “acting like you just don’t care about such trivial things”. If you translated it literally, it would mean something like “unpriceness”. The word embodies a whole way of being that implies, for example, that you should win a tennis match, but make light of the situation and generally appear as if you weren’t trying very hard. It takes a lot of confidence to do that. Gianni Agnelli, for example, had tons of sprezzatura: he always dressed very smart, but in a somewhat dishevelled, nonchalant way.
I suppose it’s precisely because there are such resonant words at our disposal—words that turn the lights on in your head—that I’m often a little disappointed when I ask companies what the concept is behind their name. In the dotcom era, for example, it used to be quite trendy to give your dotcom a composite name, like Razorfish or Moonpig or Strawberryfrog. Quite often, the explanation behind the name fell far short of the explosive energy that lies dormant in such juxtapositions.
The way I see it, if you’re looking for the lights to shine when people say your brand’s name, you should aim for emotional resonance. This emotional resonance occurs because we hear it and just “get it”. It’s the same kind of resonance that happens when we discover a new word that describes something we recognise—a word that should have existed all along, and now that it does, it helps our mind point at this concept in our heads. Gnirob!
I’ve often spoken about our insistence on discovering a brand’s “aboutness” before we can think of its name or graphic identity. One conclusion this essay is leading me to, is that it’s worth thinking of this “aboutness” as a dictionary definition without a word.
Imagine a world where your company’s product has been included in the dictionary, but there’s been a printing error and the only thing on the page is the word’s definition. Where the actual word is supposed to be, they just left a blank space. The emotional resonance of the word you might come up with to fill that blank space is probably worth looking into.
And, vice versa, if your company has a name, but you’ve been struggling to find what it is that consumers buy into when they buy your products, it’s probably worth imagining how a dictionary definition might read next to the word.