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”.

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?

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…

As seen in CIO magazine: The Most Annoying Workplace Clichés

We hear these phrases all the time. They used to have meaning, but now they’re shorthand for “I read some books about business that I got from Amazon. I am one of the business people.”

As professional word people, we’d just like to say: Please stop. If you’d use regular English, we’d all be so much happier!

15 MOST ANNOYING CLICHES
As identified by the Accountemps survey of 150 senior executives

1. At the end of the day
2. Solution
3. Thinking outside the box
4. Synergy
5. Paradigm
6. Metrics
7. Take it offline
8. Redeployed people
9. Core Competency
10. Win-win
11. Value-added
12. Get on the same page
13. Customer-centric
14. Generation X
15. Alignment

We here at Catchword do not endorse the use of the following phrases. But they make us laugh. Found on the Internet; if I can find an attribution, I’ll include it in an edit.

36 ways to say someone is stupid

Big hat, no cattle.
A few clowns short of a circus.
A few fries short of a Happy Meal.
An experiment in Artificial Stupidity.
A few beers short of a six-pack.
Dumber than a box of hair.
A few peas short of a casserole.
Doesn’t have all his cornflakes in one box.
The wheel’s spinning, but the hamster’s dead.
One Froot Loop shy of a full bowl.
One taco short of a combination plate.
A few feathers short of a whole duck.
All foam, no beer.
The cheese slid off his cracker.
Body by Fisher, brains by Mattel.
Has an IQ of 2, but it takes 3 to grunt.
Warning: Objects in mirror are dumber than they appear.
Couldn’t pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel.
He fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.
An intellect rivaled only by garden tools.
As smart as bait.
Chimney’s clogged.
Doesn’t have all his dogs on one leash.
Doesn’t know much but leads the league in nostril hair.
Elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor.
Forgot to pay his brain bill.
Her sewing machine’s out of thread.
His antenna doesn’t pick up all the channels.
His belt doesn’t go through all the loops.
If he had another brain, it would be lonely.
Missing a few buttons on his remote control.
No grain in the silo.
Proof that evolution CAN go in reverse.
Receiver is off the hook.
Several nuts short of a full pouch.
Skylight leaks a little.
Slinky’s kinked.
Surfing in Nebraska.
Too much yardage between the goal posts.

New dog breeds are winning fans across America, according to a recent article in Money magazine. These au courant mixes typically are one part poodle, since this breed is hypoallergenic and doesn’t shed. The results tend to be adorable, friendly, long-lived — and humorously named:

Labradoodle — Labrador retriever + Poodle
Schnoodle — Schnauzer + Poodle
Goldendoodle — Golden retriever + Poodle
Maltipoo — Maltese + Poodle

But why stop there? Surely there’s room for more genetic mix-and-matching, not to mention neologisms. We’d like to see these combos:

Cockerdoodle — Cocker spaniel + Poodle
Cockerdoodle II — Rooster + Poodle
Befoodle — Confused Beagle + Poodle
Caboodle — Cat + Poodle (resulting in large litters)
Snickerdoodle — Hyena + Poodle
Noodle — Hairless Poodle
Voodoodle — Sacrificial chicken + Poodle
Moodle — Cow + Poodle

I invite, no implore, others to share their contributions so I can stop obsessing about this.

Descriptive names definitely have their place, but you always have to be careful about tripping over everyday language….

Last week, I traveled with two of my young kids to DC. My cousin met us at the baggage claim, prepaid for parking at an automated machine, and off we all trundled to her Audi. So far so good. But then: a snag. All the tollbooth signs read, “Pay and Go.” “Well, of course you can pay and go, silly,” we both said with exasperation. “What about folks who’ve prepaid?”

The brilliant namer among us finally ascertained that Pay and Go is in fact the name of Dulles’ prepaid parking system.

Note to namers: sometimes the target audience is “tired moms who’ve been traveling for six hours with high-maintenance companions.” Name should not be confusing in any way.

Buzzword of the Day

splog: A fake blog created by spammers as a home for their ads and scams. Of the 7,000 new blogs started each day, nearly 10% are now splogs. (Sorry, there’s nothing humorous about this one.)

**

It’s short for “spam blog”. Until I got this email, I did not know such a thing existed. But hey! There are even sites set up to report them, like Splog Reporter, Fight Splog!, and SplogSpot. It’s sad but true: We really are drowning in spam, just like the Monty Python sketch that originate the term - pretty soon the Internet will have to call it quits, and the credits will roll.

Posted to the American Name Society list by HJ Wilk:

The definitive word on the geography of cylconic storms: In the Atlantic, both South (rare, but not unknown) and North, they are known as hurricanes. In the Eastern Pacific, they are also known as hurricanes. In the Northern, Western Pacific, they are typhoons. In the Southern, Western Pacific, and on and just to the West Coast of Australia, they are cyclones.  In the Northern Indian Ocean, the type that strike Bangladesh, India, etc., they are also cyclones, as well as are those storms in the Southern Indian Ocean, the ones that strike on or are near Madagascar or the Southeast Coast of Africa..

Meteorologically speaking, these are all the same kind of storms, except the Coriolis effect is operative, and Northern Hemisphere storms turn counterclockwise, while Southern Hemisphere storms turn clockwise.

Source: C. Donald Ahrens, Meteorology Today, 5/e, ISBN 0-213-027793. West Publishing Company, Minneapolis/St. Paul, 1994 

With hurricanes much in the news lately, I’ve been thinking about what it must be like to share the name of a particularly devastating storm. I speak as the parent of “Hurricane Camille,” who at age almost-2 does indeed leave a path of destruction in her wake. (Camille, incidentally, was the second most intense U.S. hurricane on record — one of only three class 5 storms to ever hit land. And yes, this did give my mother-in-law pause….)

Turns out Atlantic hurricane names are selected by the World Meteorological Organization, and the same list repeats every six years. The list only changes when a storm is so devastating that future use of its name would appear insensitive. So we’ll never again see a Charley, Frances, Ivan, or Jeanne — all 2004 hurricane names that have been retired.

How then will the Katrinas and Ritas of the world fair? My guess is that they’ll be affected far more than the Andrews and Charleys. Since the latter names are much more common, their countless non-storm associations dilute the impact of a single, negative event, however promiment. In selecting distinctive baby names, parents always run the risk that their child’s rare namesake will be an ax murderer or famous porn star.

So to all the Beryls and Ernestos out there, may the second and fifth storms of ‘06 be mild and unmemorable.