June 20, 2011
When Shakespeare wrote that, that question probably wasn't on many people's minds.
But over the centuries, the question became more and more relevant as more and more
people began to publish names or whole strings of them and taking undue credit for
coming up with names or offering goods and services represented by them. Progress in
technology allowed names and strings of them to be exactly copied and distributed by
more people than ever. Intellectual property became something important.
The most recent advances have made it all the more clear what's in a name. Phishing
attacks via e-mail are used to get the trust of naive 'customers' to make them give
up valuable personal data. People impersonate famous individuals on Twitter and
Facebook to give their messages more clout. Or they pretend to be PhD's on Wikipedia
to win an argument. And articles on Wikipedia are copied in full to sell advertising
space on probably hundreds of websites. Whole books are downloaded from countless of
sites supported by advertising. In advertising, a phrase like 'Just do it' or 'Think
different', the second arguably grammatically incorrect, can make people trust you
to the end of the earth or leave you completely ignored.
A name can be made to stand for anything, but is the value of a good or service, the
trust you bestow on it, determined by the name or by what it stands for?
Names clearly have something in them that is used to identify what they refer to.
It's just language. But words and combinations of them are the new gold.
Can we understand what can make language valuable? What makes tag lines and speeches
persuasive? Why is choosing your words carefully and even your accent and way of
speaking important?
The rush is on.