Nancy Friedman’s blog Fritinancy is a great source of information about how products get their names. For example, the names Twitch and Jitter were rejected before the creators of Twitter finally settled on the well-known moniker. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “How Products Got Their Names”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Grant, you and I often invite folks to contact our show on Twitter, right?
But if it hadn’t been for a twist of lexical fate, we’d be inviting them to contact us on Jitter.
On Jitter.
On Jitter, because that’s what the service was going to be called, either Jitter or Twitch.
And co-founder Jack Dorsey has said that they were looking for a name that evoked what the service did.
And, of course, in the early days, they would get a text message, and every time that would happen, their phone would buzz or jitter or twitch.
Yeah, they’d do that table dance, right?
The phone kind of just bounces all over the table.
Exactly.
So they started nosing around in the dictionary looking for a word that was close to twitch, and they came across Twitter.
And, of course, that perfectly encapsulated what they were doing, sending out those short bursts of information.
So if that product name hadn’t gone through an evolution, we would all be jeeting.
Jeeting.
Jeeting, sure.
No.
Or jittering.
It sounds wrong.
And, you know, the parent company at the time was called Odeo, and Twitter was an offshoot of Odeo.
Right.
So it could be like Yodi-Oling or something like that.
I don’t know.
That’s great.
Ode-Oling.
Boy, I’m glad they chose Twitter.
But, you know, a great place to find out about product names is the blog by our friend Nancy Friedman.
Right.
It’s called Frida Nancy, which is a great name in itself because it comes from an old word that means chirping or creaking.
You know, Frida Nancy, Nancy Friedman.
And she’s got great stuff on there all the time about brand names and how products get their names.
So we’ll link to that from our website.
And the best stuff that she does is when she finds these terrible names of products and reports them and talks about how bad they are.
Everybody likes a bad review more than a good review, right?
Fun for the whole family.
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Words@waywordradio.org.
