Four catalogs arrived in Monday’s mail. One of them came from a company called Acorn which specializes in BBC videos and other stuff for the granola/ PBS/ Kumbaya crowd.

It seems to be a harmless enough company but it’s going to need a new name thanks to the ascendency of an organization of political thugs called ACORN: Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
That got me thinking about unfortunate names of companies and products.
I still get email from HoMedics which is a very funny name, indeed.
You probably know about American Motors (1954-1987) whose bosses once thought it would be a good idea to name a car Matador, apparently under the impression that it means bull fighter. It means Killer.
Chevrolet had a minor problem in Latin America with its Nova car; no va means “it doesn’t go” in Spanish. Might as well call it el Clunker.
My all time fave came when PET, a dry milk, moved into the Canadian market without much thought. PET (pet) means “fart” in French. Beaucoup hilarity in Québec grocery stores.
Lately we’ve been seeing more and more weird names for all kinds of products. Prescription drugs lead the way but nobody knows enough about them to care. You can call a drug anything at all. Oddly, they all seem to have two names; one is a scientific name and the other is, I guess, a nickname. Bladder control drugs are a good example, scientific name first, nickname in brackets: Oxybutynin (Ditropan), Tolterodine (Detrol), Darifenacin (Enablex), Solifenacin (Vesicare), Trospium (Sanctura), Fesoterodine (Toviaz).
Imagine giving your product two names and neither of them actually means anything. A breakthrough is right round the corner; all it’ll take is someone with the cojones to say “Hey! Let’s call it PNA: Pee Normally Again.”
Once upon a time car names were either alphanumeric like X4Ti or XKE. More often they were actual words: Biscayne, Impala, Bonneville, Corvette, Cobra, Dart, Taurus, Tempo. Even Rolls Royce’s Phateon was named after the son of the sun god, Helios.
Most of those names are still around but now we’re being tortured with car names that are just nonsense syllables: Elantra, Galant with one l, Prius, Altima, Axxess, Azera, Camry, Celica, Cressida (this is actually a woman’s name or at least what a medieval writer thought a Trojan woman’s name might be).
Does all of this give meaninglessness a new meaning? Maybe it’s SOP in a soulless global market nowadays: names that don’t mean anything to anyone at all?