I've always wondered where authors get their new names. I mean, if you're Tolkien the language comes first, and then you just run the linguistics, but where do authors tend to find inspiration/ideas for names?

(In the opening to the novel of Nightfall, I seem to recall a note decrying the practice, but the right ones make the story much richer.)

Lord Masala Dosai swept into Acchar Palace, his shock troops leaving a trail of dead or dying Gulab Jamun mercenaries behind them.

"Curses!" declared Lord Dosai. Neither Princess Restoril nor King Cialis could be found within the palace walls, although the emaciated body Grand Vizier Uthappam, Dosai's chief spy, had been found in the dungeons.

And that doesn't apply only to the names of people and places. I remember the old "Galactica" for having the radar operator warning Adama that the Cylon ships were only microns away. Which prompted Mad Magazine's parody where the Viper pilots fear they might not make it back because they had only 10 anchovies of fuel left.

I can think of two ways.

An enthusiasist (read: someone looking to distract themselves from actually writing) will build a language. Someone less enthusiastic might run a name generator three or four hundred times and pull out the interesting looking ones.

Damn you, Brennan. You beat me too it.

A well known fantasy author's first work has a major character apparently named after a support group for the spouses of alcoholics. Made it damn hard for me to suspend my disbelief.

". . . names of drugs . . ."

Of course, that could be a form of product placement.

Once, long LONG ago, I made up a villain named Xanax.
(And yes, he put people to sleep.)

My first novel has characters named after towns in New York's Southern Tier. It doesn't seem to have hurt the book any-my first reader loved it, and she's from that area. (Now watch. I'll get e-mails saying "Why didn't you just name someone Horseheads?" ;) )

Melissa Mead: (Now watch. I'll get e-mails saying "Why didn't you just name someone Horseheads?" ;) )

Or Painted Post.

Re: no. 1: and since they're in your slush, they haven't gone to PublishAmerica, which is a good thing.

(Shameless self-promotion: The Only Thing You Need to Know About PublishAmerica.)

...even the lowest kitchen drudge, Martha's Vinyard, had fled the scene.

I think the worst names I ever came up with in stories (unpublished all) were "Anna Polis, MD" and a very-old-money character named "Arch St. Greenwich" (which makes more sense if you've ever driven north of NYC o Connecticut on I-95)

One of Jordan's Aes Sedai is called Kiruna. Still makes me giggle every time.

Internal consistency in an invented language will certainly not prevent it from tossing up an existing brand name, or for that matter an airplane part. Proprietary drug names pose especial risks, as they're usually a combination of a bit of an impossibly awkward, though chemically accurate, generic (all those Box and Cox inhibitors we had) with a euphony enhancer that may have been made up in a caffeinated haze the night before the presentation and may also have been spat out by a computer program with the intelligence, inattention, and insouciance of a small wing-beating bird.

And sometimes you get nailed after the fact. When I named a character "Rogaine" in early 1983, there really wasn't a prescription med with that name, and indeed the drug was first announced as "Regaine." I think they decided there was too much implicit promise in that, but coulda been anything.

It’s surprising how many of them turn out to be the names of drugs, Indian side dishes, or obscure islands.

Or anagrams for lesbian.

Names of Indian side dishes have been used deliberately in an episode of Red Dwarf: Tarka Daal and Bhindi Bhaji, representatives of the mighty Vindaloovian Empire.

A well known fantasy author's first work has a major character apparently named after a support group for the spouses of alcoholics

Which I completely missed until someone pointed it out. Guy Kay's Prince Aileron did bother me a little.

John M. Ford: I see you know my secret pain. The pharmaceutical companies keep naming impotence drugs after my characters, or coming damn close. For example, I had a female character named Iagra, because I had this thing for the name Iago, and it was pronounced Yah-gra, but when Viagra came out, I reluctantly put her away until I could come up with a name that fit MY perception of her mentally.

I also had a Lady Ciallis. Now I live in fear that some pharmaceutical company is going to co-opt Zyastra. (The ONLY google hit for her name right now is my journal. I've had the name forever, and it's now on the third, and hopefully final character. I'd say iterations, but the first two Zyastras are as different from Zy number three as they are from each other.)

(Query: Is it a sign of Mary-Sueism if you use your character's name to play World of Warcraft? Too much self-identity?)

John M. Ford: And sometimes you get nailed after the fact. When I named a character "Rogaine" in early 1983, there really wasn't a prescription med with that name, and indeed the drug was first announced as "Regaine." I think they decided there was too much implicit promise in that, but coulda been anything.

Actually, in many overseas markets, it is sold as "Regaine". The FDA didn't like the implied promise, so it needed a different name in the US.

Diana Wynne Jones, may she live forever, has a whole story on creative word invention: Nad and Dan adn Quaffy. Her intro to the story says that she got the idea from a favorite writer--can anybody give me a hint who it is?

I also wanted to name a fantasy country after the Meherrin Indian tribe, because I really like the way Meherrin falls together as a word. I kept running into it every time we drove north from Raleigh into Virginia, and we'd pass over the Meherrin River. And I thought about just co-opting the river (ditto the Farollan Islands outside of San Francisco, and the Canterra Tower in Calgary) and reworking it somehow, but then it might throw the reader out of their suspension of disbelief if they were somehow familiar with the original sources of the names.

Oh yeah! I'd almost forgotten Dr. Viagro. Fortunately somebody pointed that one out in time and suggested that I change it.

Larry, are you from around Steuben County, by any chance?

And speaking of characters named -tion, there is a Tion in Wheel of Time.

Will wrote:

I've always wondered where authors get their new names. I mean, if you're Tolkien the language comes first, and then you just run the linguistics, but where do authors tend to find inspiration/ideas for names?

I've warped the names of fashion designers. Since I get Women's Wear Daily, there's always a copy near my computer. I also like my book of medieval poetry when I need a Latin sounding name.

My current favorite method (and very little work) involves listing the names of students who have left their sewing supplies after class since I'm picking up their rulers and such anyway. Of course, I still have to work on men's names.

Sometimes it's impossible to come up with anything. In a fit of frustration once, I named a mountain range The Nameless Ones since I couldn't think of anything.

Melissa - Larry, are you from around Steuben County, by any chance?

Nope - I just used to drive from NYC to Rochester a lot, so goodly chunks of NY17 and I-390 are burned into my brain.

Here at Large Software Company(TM) employees volunteer their names to be used in demos and advertising, thus enabling us to avoid lawsuits from other people who happen to be called J. Twombly Fibblefish.

That's going to cause confusion. Mind if we call them all "Bruce" to keep clear?

(please pretend I signed my name and email with bruces in place of all the kips, then chuckle politely)

It’s surprising how many of them turn out to be the names of drugs, Indian side dishes, or obscure islands.

Or something in another language you have no clue the meaning of.

I named a character in "The Ten Teeth of Terra: The Decadents" thus:

EVA ACITU

because of the many times I rode the subway to high school, and saw UTICA AVE reflected in a window. Perhaps she has a sister, TIXE?

When I was a kid I used to drive with my family to the beach among unending fields of maize. At one point the company supplying the seed decided to advertise and planeted signposts with the name of the brand. It sounded so deliciously alien to us that we played for quite a while the game of inventing tacky titles with the name in it. "The Third Moon of Maize Brand." "Maize Brand's Last Stand". "Son of Maize Brand." "The Black Moons of Maize Brand."

Eventually, I stared working on my multi-volume space opera. I grew up, travelled, learned a few things about the world, but I still have a hard time giving up my heroine's planet being named "Asgrow".

Once upon a time I got to see the big list of suggested names for a chimeric protein to be used for cancer treatment. In retrospect, yeah, lots of them would have made, uh, let's call them acceptable charachter names.

But thinking about it, what else would you expect - you've got these geeks and they're making up words....

Ingly, brave Ous warrior, cruelly imprisoned in the dungeon of If.

It happens in real languages, with real names too. I read a story to my writing group. There was a character named Orla, a reasonably common Irish girl's name. Two guys giggled through the whole story. Found out why afterwards - Orlah (same pronunciation) is the Hebrew word for foreskin.

Can someone gives the normal form of the true story of the detergent manufacturer who hires a consultant to design a new product name? There's a lot of detail on phoneme analysis, of this sort: "We want to start with the letter D as in Draino, which has connotations of cleanliness, and end in a K, for crispness and finality..."

The WASPy nerds at last present the highest ranking name at a Board meeting: [beat, beat]

DRECK!

And speaking of characters named -tion, there is a Tion in Wheel of Time.

There's also one in Dave Duncan's The Great Game. It didn't bother me there because it was a proper noun and so capitalized. Uncapitalized I think I would have had the same reaction as Teresa.

I try to devise a naming system for a given story. The one for a novella I'm currently working on:

Royalty have Eastern European names (I impressed a Hungarian friend by naming a prince Laslo).

Servants are named after characters in literature (a variation on the Roman habit of naming slaves after Gods).

Clergy and Doctors have Arabic, Hebrew or Latinized names.

It seems to be working out fairly well, though I did accidentally name a long-dead princess Vespa. Luckily someone caught it.

I don't think it's worthwhile trying to create character names that have no meaning in other languages, but avoiding names that sound like really bad words in Germanic and Romance languages is a good idea.

Hey, even IKEA makes mistakes and they're the masters of Scandinavian-sounding nonce words. A few years ago, they named a children's bed frame "Gutvik". When it hit the market, heads exploded all over Germany.

I'll refrain from translating the pronounced version, but you can try it yourself, remembering that German "V" = English "F" and it does mean what it sounds like.

My wife and I were in Budhapest when the movie Snatch came out there. They translated the title quite literally so we saw posters all over that said Podfük in big black letters.

For several years, the city in my first novel was going to be called Lorem, which I thought was a perfectly serviceable gibberish fantasy name. I eventually had a moment of clarity and named it something else.

For creating and polishing fantasy names, I like to use online phone directories-- French, German, Hungarian, etc. Too many times, I've pretzelled my brain for hours on end trying to come up with the perfect gibberish name, only to find that 50,000 people in Albania have it as a surname.

I thought the tradition was to name people after places and places after people?

The definitive article on the Corporate version of this is Ruth Shalit's The Name Game.

This works the other way too - I used to think 'Tarka Dal' meant Otter with Lentils.

In an early draft of Joe Kertes's novel "Boardwalk," he made up the character names by picking obscure words from a dictionary. My favourite was a female professor named Ootid Fedge. (If I ever have another daughter....) By the time the book was published all the fun names had been replaced by more conventional ones.

Years ago, writing a short story set in Latin America, I let my brain generate a few appropriate-sounding Spanish names and thought no more about it. It wasn't until a few weeks later I discovered they were all politicians in Argentina (or somewhere S. American); presumably I'd read a story mentioning them in the paper that morning and forgotten the context. (Thankfully, I don't think anyone else noticed)

Serge: I've lost count of the amount of bad sf I've read where "parsec" seems to be interpreted as roughly synonymous with "kilometre"...

JVP:

Ursula LeGuin reports naming the city Omelas in the great short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by a similar method.

SALEM, OREGON

This may be the right time, Teresa, to preemptively admit my embarrassment that my novel in your pile somewhere has a kingdom named Midden.

I think my vocabulary's a bit above average, but I honestly did not know when I wrote the book that "midden" was a word. Seriously. I do now, and this is at the very top of my list of things to correct (now that it's too late, of course).

I think the Diane Wynne Jones story is alluding to C. J. Cherryh, at least if I'm recalling right. It's the one about the fictional author's coffee-fuelled non-stop writing sessions being reflected by the sounds-like-coffee-fuelled non-stop piloting of the characters, with a strong resemblance in feel to the tech of the Alliance-Union stories.

Strange things happen.

At the risk of appearing to be a nattering nabob of negativity, I would avoid retasking one or two real words as well. In particular, I would not call cyborgs "Tools" and if I had to call them that, I would not call the top models "major Tools."

At least, I _think_ that was the adjective. It was in a back-swing*/singularity novel so I am not going back in to check. I remember it was an unfortunate choice of words, given the use of Tool to mean a cyborg.

* "Gee, the world is so crowded that my hero is having trouble with his sword's back-swing. Better kill off a few billion people to give him more room."

We google character names and titles, too, after the coincidence of sharing the title Agent of Change with another Steve Miller -- both books published the same year. When we needed a new element we borrowed one from Compton Crook (aka Stephen Tall) and used Timonium, his home town and a place I edited a newspaper. Kay's Aileron mentioned above was bad, and I've seen folks using the names of currently active actors, which seems wrong unless usefully referential

A well known fantasy author's first work has a major character apparently named after a support group for the spouses of alcoholics. Made it damn hard for me to suspend my disbelief.

My high school girlfriends and I had fun with that. "And ifh you REALLY gesh in trouble, you can break open the elfshtones and DRINK them!"

One of the early Man from UNCLE novels had a villain named Tixe Ylno, quite consciously.

I think those islands off San Francisco are actually the Farallons, so Farrolon is not a bad name to consider.

When one of my former employers announced the name of a company were were buying software from, several of my co-workers broke up laughing -- apparently, the name (which I have, alas, forgotten) is a very rude word in Arabic, or certain dialects thereof.

I once read a self-published fantasy novel in which the military ranks were anagrams or near-anagrams of ours -- joram from major, for instance. (I don't habitually read self-published books; this was written by a friend's grandson, and showed potential, IMO; it was a fun read, no huge problems, a bit trite, but not unreadably so, to me. Similar to Deed of Paksennarrion.)

I hate to tell you this, Deborah, but it's been done.

Sometimes writers do it on purpose, but subtly. Lois McMaster Bujold has a young character named Martin, and his last name is never, ever mentioned, but his brother is Corporal Kosti, and his mother is always called Ma Kosti.

There's an NPR reporter named Martin Kaste (pronounced the same), and I shall ask LMB if she did that on purpose the very next time I see her.

Steve, I've been known to call the Republican party "a stinking midden where true conservatives smother in the effluvia of right-wing extremists." If your kingdom is nahhhsty, maybe it's not such a bad name.

To Andrew Gray:

About 'parsec' being used to mean 'kilometer'... Of course, there is the INfamous example of Han Solo using 'parsec' as a unit of time and that had lots of people mad at George Lucas (even more than his later cooking up the ewoks?). Anyway, I remember an interview with Mark Hammill where he pointed that lots of people had pointed to George the slight problem with that, but he kept it in anyway, to show that Han Solo doesn't always know what he's talking about, I think. A notion that's not really reassuring to a passenger of the Millenium Falcon.

A distant cousin of my wife's wrote (and had published) a fantasy novel called "The lament of Abalone". We have a copy, passed on by my mother-in-law, so I know this is not a spoof. There's no reason to suppose I'll ever meet the author, but sometimes, when I run out of other things to fear in the night, I wonder what I could possibly say to her.

Tom: I realised after submitting that I had switched the A with the O. :)

Stef: I think I know which character you are referring to, since I hit those books right after the Very Important Sixth Grade Seminar on Drinking and Drugs, and choked on the same thing.

My wife just completed a fantasy novel set in Africa around the time of Alexander the Great. She had a real problem with coming up with names because there's nothing written down about that part of the world that's older than the early Christian Era. She didn't want to make up silly names a la Burroughs so she wound up using the Yoruba as a model, although they came after Alex the Pretty Good.

Meilssa Mead: My first novel has characters named after towns in New York's Southern Tier.

Exit 58 of the NYS Thruway is helpfully signed for the towns of "IRVING GOWANDA" , which I've always thought would make a wonderful character name. He practically writes himself.

I saw a book a few years ago titled The Bone Orchard. Being an Elvis Costello fan, I was intrigued (the title is a line from a Costello song), I thumbed through it... only to find that the author had named his hard-boiled protagonist Declan MacManus (which is Costello's real name).

The disconnect was too great for me to actually read the book.

Steve E: In my book-in-work for Tor, there's a character named Midden. However, it's explained to a surprised observer that it's a family name, he comes from a long line of midden-keepers, and that it happens to be an important job (even more so in the book's world, for reasons I won't go into).

Context is your friend. Be good to your context, it may save your backstory some day.

Georges Simenon used a vast collection of phone books -

I've heard the laundry detergent story as European market: modelled after Tide, short snappy no unfortunate meanings clears trademark = DRAB so I suspect it's just another old urban legend along the lines of no va.

Do you think it's too late to tell George Lucas that the name General Grievous is perhaps infelicitous?

I was reading a book last week where the characters had names that sounded too much like man-made materials. They weren't as bad as Nylon and Polymer, but they came close enough to make me giggle at the wrong spots.

When I go hunting for names, I use this site or I go surfing through baby name sites. (To keep things consistent, I first pick the language base(s) for the various countries.)

I always imagined Leonia Teaneck as a pillar of the local Junior League.

DB: Sanibel? Sale bin? S. Blaine, in Basel?

JVP, the minute I saw Eva Acitu I'd have stopped to spell her name backward. Not everyone' wired to spot backward English, but if you are, it's very distracting.

Bob Oldendorf: Exit 58 of the NYS Thruway is helpfully signed for the towns of "IRVING GOWANDA"

While it's not quite suitable for a person, I've always enjoyed the sign on the Pulaski Skyway promising "Kearney So Kearney".

Irving Gowanda-you're right! Makes me think of the Shenendehowa middle school, though. (Gowana)

I ended up using Ilion, Olean, Avoca and
Sav(r)ona.

Oh, and on the same trip, for the same book, I used the laziest character naming method ever. I looked to where my little sister was sitting and said "Hey, what's a nice made-up boy's name?"

"Uh, Juliar."

And that was that. The funny thing is that when people read about this character, who's a choirboy, they ask if he was named after Juilliard. I wish I'd been that clever. ;)

Hey, even IKEA makes mistakes and they're the masters of Scandinavian-sounding nonce words. A few years ago, they named a children's bed frame "Gutvik". When it hit the market, heads exploded all over Germany.

Er, hmmm? Sorry, I am confused. IKEA does not generally use nonsense words to name their product lines. They're actual words, usually either place names or gerunds or adjectives that somehow bear on the nature or use of the product. Gutvik appears to be a place in Norway. But what's really not working for me is that "vik" is not any word I know in German, so I can't quite sort out why the concept of a good one would make a German speaker's head explode. Is it supposed to be slang?

Any thoughts on when the habit of using title+initials for character names, or initials plus a "blank" disappeared?

I'm thinking of Poe, (and Dumas?) as examples here, to wit:
"our old acquaintance, Monsieur G -- -- , the Prefect of the Parisian police."
( The Puloined Letter)

Exactly the kind of thing that drove me up the wall as a 13 year old. I'm not sure if it was the age, or the sudden jump from pronounceable syllables to emptiness that got me. I recall reading other stories that had entire characters never referred to except by their initials, which at first seemed kind of snarky, but eventually got to be grating.

R.

A former employer had a facility near the home of the University of Oregon. After flying in one day, I noted all the business names that somehow incorporated "Eugene Springfield" and actually wondered who he was.

At least until I looked at a map.

There was a BBC TV play a few years back about a convention of fans of a 1980s SF TV series (clearly modelled after Blakes 7) -- in one memorable scene one of the fans is giving a lecture on the mythological significances of the names of the characters... and the drunk writer in the back of the room procedes to point out that they're actually all anagrams of types of Indian food.

One of the early Man from UNCLE novels had a villain named Tixe Ylno, quite consciously.

A writer on another board admitted to naming an overweight character "Lor-etseloc" (or something similar, I can't find the reference now). I think that book has been published, and reasonably well received.

Ulrika - the thing a German would hear is the stem of ficken - a bad word indeed.

Anne MacCaffrey lifted the names in The Crystal Singer off maps of Ireland, her adopted home, which made it hard to read without brain-strain for Irish people. Towns, lakes, whatever, she stuck them with complete abandon onto planets, moons and characters alike.

As for Lucas, I'm glad he stopped naming Darths by chopping the leading "in" off adjectives before we met Darth Sane, Darth Competent and Darth Dividualistic.

"Prepare to fire! No, not you, Darth Flammable!"

The Ikea story reminds me of the Chevy Nova. It sold horribly in Latin America, since no va, in Spanish literally means "It doesn't go."

I was hoping that Lucas would persist until we got Darths Kwell, Teralia, and Diragandhi.

Meanwhile, this morning's newspaper had a large ad for some sort of all-natural male enhancement product called Procylon. I note in passing that the flensed remnants of the Pure Food and Drug Act no longer seem to require the makers of "nutritional supplements" to mention that their claimed effects have not been reviewed/approved by the FDA. (Also spotted today in the Asian megamart: a snack-pak of roasted Chinese apricot pits.)

> A notion that's not really reassuring
> to a passenger of the Millenium Falcon.

I don't think there is much of anything
reassuring about the Millenium Falcon
if you're a passenger. The hyperdrive is
always breaking down, most of the
maintenence is done by a big monkey,
from the sound it makes when the hyperdrive
goes bad, one could guess that the things
been running without oil for a few parsecs,
and there's probably a silhouette pattern
of it on every Emperial Destroyer with
the note: pummel on sight.

what's that red light?

I was Procylon as a teenager, I wanted to see them blast that annoying kid and his badly-done robotic doglike thing.

Good point, Greg, about the Millenium Falcon. I never thought about it, probably because it reminds me of my first car, a Dodge Omni.

Back to how drugs are named, I am reminded of Dilbert's clueless boss trying to name one of their crappy products by picking one name from astronomy and the other name from physics. The best he could come up with was Uranus/Hertz.

I had a 1976, three-quarter ton, chevy, 4x4, pickup that had a flatbed made out of 6x6's, and a grill made out of quarter-inch angle iron. (Don't ask me, it came that way.)

You could pop the hood, climb into the engine compartment (when the engine was cold) and close the hood behind you.

I was always futzing with the carbeurator to get it to idle right. new floats, new jets, new distributer.

That truck always made me think it was the terrestrial equivalent of the millenium falcon.

And other drivers often deferred the right of way to me. No wookie to tear someone's arms out of their sockets, but that grille was just plain menacing.

> I was Procylon as a teenager,

Then there was that episode where one of the humans got shot down and crash landed on a planet and wound up with a cylon robot with him. Somehow they became friends, figured out world peace, and then by the end of the episode, the robot protected the humans from his mean cylon buddies.

A real tear-jerker that one was...

they redid that with the Borg in StarTrek once.
I wonder what the first version of that story was...

My favorite Southern Tier road sign/potential Epic Fantasy Map Element is on Route 81, headed south, just over the border into Pennsylvania: "Endless Mountains, Next 6 Exits." Presumably they are endless on the east-west axis.

Having said that, I will likely use Cadosia (Rt. 17 exit 87A) as a place name in a future work. Never been there, but passed the exit many, many times.

On backwards-reading: yeah, I read most unusual looking words backwards. I can't really shop at Nordstrom's for the distraction of it. Mortsdron? What's that? (Actually, that's a good fantasy villain name. Maybe he lives in Cadosia.)

LMAO. some of the names I've used in stories include good Irish names/words (Kayli for one). I also have Very Small Mac program, Imaginame, that came out in 1995, the writer calls it 'his first C project for the Mac." I've come up with a couple of names from that that work, but you have to run it a couple dozen times (it outputs 4 at a time), and you get lots o'stuff that just don't make sense. I do run names online now just to see if it's used, before I get too far in.

I've mentioned before on this blog my favorite roadsign from Washington State:

HALFWAY TO PARADISE

Alex: There are Endless Mountains, really? I put that name in my novel-in-progress, and I wasn't knowingly naming them after anything.

And, of course, the incredibly capable EU of Star Wars explained away that "parsecs" bit, if a little handwavy--the Kessel Run goes through an area that's rather black-hole heavy, so the Falcon literally shortened the distance it traveled.

Actually, a fanfic-writing project I'm in made a running joke about deriving names by just turning other words around. One cowriter named a butler Noitisopxe, then put him in a scene to exposit some.

(Query: Is it a sign of Mary-Sueism if you use your character's name to play World of Warcraft? Too much self-identity?)

Piscusfiche: Only if it's Mary-Sueish to also use your character's name for your cat.

What? Their personalities are eerily similar, and they're equally likely to make me flee the computer room (where the kittens live) when being contrary.

*readies fork, in preparation for dead and dying Gulab Jamun mercenaries*

Alex: There are Endless Mountains, really? I put that name in my novel-in-progress, and I wasn't knowingly naming them after anything.

The mountains in question are the Poconos, and the sign is for the "Endless Mountains Region," (or some such) which is a construct of the PA tourism department. They don't quite have the chutzpah of their brethren in New Jersey, who at one point dubbed the Elizabeth/ Newark area the "Gateway Region," one of the "Seven Tourism Areas of New Jersey." That creates a lovely image of people from pristine Western states trekking in to look at oil refineries and urban blight...

My favorite road sign is the exit off I-95 in northern Maryland labeled:

NORTH EAST
RISING SUN

It always looked like it ought to be the beginning of some sort of secret coded message.

There are Endless Mountains, really?

Really.

I put that name in my novel-in-progress

Does your NIP (uhh, hmm, so that's why they generally call 'em WIPs) have hot air balloons? 'Cause that would be cool.

On the drug name topic, it still blows my mind that there is actually a drug now named Soma, and it's a muscle relaxant. That just kills me.

Rich Magahiz wrote:

> Do you think it's too late to tell George Lucas that the name General Grievous is perhaps infelicitous?

Oh, I think it's far far too late to tell George Lucas anything about names - he's been blessed with the most astonishing tin ear.

Most annoying for me are the would-be-clever echoes of normal words - 'Grievous' doesn't even bother to hide anything, but 'Darth Vader' gives of whiffs of 'dark/dastardly invader'.

'Calamari' I can just about handle as a joke except that a) I don't think joke species names help anything in this context and b) he's a lobster dammit, not a squid.

Oh wow, thanks, Alex!

Nope, no balloons in the WIP (up to this point, anyway) but I did get a smile out of reading the website. I made a playlist to go with the writing, and the song for the part where the hero reaches the Endless Mountains (as he calls them) is "It's Possible." (from Seussical)

I've been known to play "That's a good fantasy name!" as a road-trip game, but hopefully that hasn't impressed too many small town names on my subconscious.

There's a small town not that far from where I live named Efland, which always makes me do a double-take; I can't give up the notion that I should be able to take an exit to Elfland.

Ulrika wrote:

> But what's really not working for me is that
> "vik" is not any word I know in German, so I can't
> quite sort out why the concept of a good one would
> make a German speaker's head explode. Is it
> supposed to be slang?

German ficken 'to fuck'.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Imzadi by Peter David (one of the Trek novelizations). I was really excited to read the backstory of Will Riker and Deanna Troi...and then I saw the names of the aliens.

I laughed and I had to put the book down.

The aliens were named: Maror (he was the leader), Beitzah, Zroah, Karpas, etc.

Not Indian food, but items on the Passover seder plate.

I was laughing because it was really ridiculous and because there were probably people out there who had no idea where the names came from, possibly including the editors. :)

Peter David is a funny guy.

Also, just as another thing. Soma did not originate in Brave New World if that is what was being implied above. It's actually in the Vedas. But there it's a hallucinogen, not a sleep aid. ;)

General Motors didn't learn much from the Nova fiasco. The Buick LaCrosse is sold in Canada as the Buick Allure. Why? Because LaCrosse is Quebec slang for masturbation.

Because LaCrosse is Quebec slang for masturbation.

That explains all those snickers when I told people I was captain of my high school's lacrosse team.

> but 'Darth Vader' gives of
> whiffs of 'dark/dastardly invader'.

I think all the Darth lords used names that
were words missing a "in" prefix.

Darth (in)Vader
Darth (in)Sidious
Darth (in)Maul

oh, well, never mind....

And then there's Orlon of Osnome (E.E. Smith, Skylark Three, 1930). Synthetic fabrics weren't commercially available then (if at all), but since Smith was a chemist, I'll always wonder if he read that in a journal.

General Motors didn't learn much from the Nova fiasco.

Probably because it's an urban legend.

IIRC, there's a Colonel Shitov in War And Peace.

I confess that I am somewhat amused at a card called a "Cressida."

Not, I would think, a good name for a nice, reliable automobile . . .

Lisa Spangenberg:

Will future versions of word processors correct "Troilus and Cressida" to "Toyotas and Cressida?"

Tim, I got snopesed! Thanks for setting me straight. As for Soma, even if it didn't come from Huxley, the idea that is was used for a hallucinogen, then by Huxley, and then by a pharmaceutical company doesn't lessen the impact on me. If anything, that's even more bizarre.

Soma
SoMa
Soma

I always assumed that it was a back-formation from "somatic."

Oh, I think it's far far too late to tell George Lucas anything about names

You certainly can't say he went downhill - he started right off the bat with "Princess Leia Organa."

I seem to remember hearing that "darth vader" is pretty close to "dark father" in Dutch. Let's see... the online dictionary confirms "vader" = "father", but "dark" is "donkel". It's "dunkel" in German... something else in Danish... nope, no "darths".

"As for Lucas, I'm glad he stopped naming Darths by chopping the leading "in" off adjectives before we met Darth Sane, Darth Competent and Darth Dividualistic."

Interestingly, there is a town in Washington named Vader. I have no idea about the chronology, but one can only assume it came first.

Alfred Bester used British phonebooks (he was vacationing there at the time) to name characters in The Stars My Destination. I rather like the pseudo-Victorian sound of it, but residents of Stratham, Sheffield, etc. might disagree.

I actually liked Lucas' cheesy naming schemes. They added to the cheerful, pulp-y feel of the original movies.

(The intentional pulp also makes him somewhat impervious to Teresa's original complaint.)

I find I feel the same way about the "parsecs" comment: the blatant error added to the kitsch. The field of black holes is actually a very neat, very self-consistent explanation. Too neat, too self-consistent. Too bad.

Steve Taylor wrote:

"'Darth Vader' gives of whiffs of 'dark/dastardly invader'"

I always thought he was named "Vader" because it means "father" in old English, in which case it would have been a clever bit of foreshadowing.

Exit 58 of the NYS Thruway is helpfully signed for the towns of "IRVING GOWANDA" , which I've always thought would make a wonderful character name.

I feel the same way about "Annville Cleona" on route 81 in Pennsylvania, which is also a high school. "Cleona Annville" might be more appropriate, actually.

There are Endless Mountains, really? I put that name in my novel-in-progress, and I wasn't knowingly naming them after anything.

There isn't an actual mountain range called that; I live in that area, and it sort of vaguely refers to Bradford, Susquehanna, Sullivan and Wyoming counties, all of which are basically covered with forests and state game lands and aren't really very mountainous. I don't think it draws any tourists, it's just the name of the reason, like any other vaguely defined region ("Wyoming Valley", "Delaware Valley", "Mahoning Valley", "Inland Empire").

While it's not quite suitable for a person, I've always enjoyed the sign on the Pulaski Skyway promising "Kearney So Kearney".

There's another sign on Rt. 81, in the Endless Mountains region, that says "Lenox Lenoxville Scott" (if I remember correctly). Doesn't that sound like the perfect fop?

But my favorite exit sign is the little example of dada on 279, just north of Pittsburgh:

Cranberry
Mars

Mintichen wrote:

> I always thought he was named "Vader" because it
> means "father" in old English,

Not quite: the Old English is 'fæder'. The Middle Dutch cognate is 'vader', though.

Then there's the Army base in southern WA which I always call the Aristotelian exit:

Fort Lewis
No Fort Lewis

'Darth Vader' gives off whiffs of 'dark/dastardly invader'.

"Is that me? Fie and double fie. Muttley! Where did you put my clean filters?"

You need to be careful not to name your fictional characters after real geographic places. Like, say, Christina Lake.

One place to get names current in the later 1800's/early 1900s would be from the casts and crews of old, old movies in IMDB.

On backwards-reading: yeah, I read most unusual looking words backwards. I can't really shop at Nordstrom's for the distraction of it. Mortsdron? What's that? (Actually, that's a good fantasy villain name. Maybe he lives in Cadosia.)

It's a perfectly common last name, formed according to the Swedish practise of taking two words relating to nature and putting them together. (The result is often nonsensical.) The words in question here is "nord" (north) and "ström" (stream). My maiden name was Wikström, where "vik" means bay or gulf.

When we're talking about car names and other languages, Honda made a huge mistakes a few years ago when they named a model Fitta. It was quickly renamed to Jazz in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

One place to get names current in the later 1800's/early 1900s would be from the casts and crews of old, old movies in IMDB.

Well . . . sort of. Moving pictures go back to 1894, narrative film to 1903, and even for those few that survive (90% of all silents are lost), not much cast, and less crew, data exist from the dawn years More to the point, it's simply not that long ago in terms of social patterns; Western surnames had already lost almost all their connection to professions (you might still find Cartwrights who made wagons, but not many Fletchers were still in the arrow business). And it's an era of printing: we have to guess at how Willum Shayk Speare spelt hys name, but we have census records for the Victorians and after.

Using imdb isn't a -bad- idea, it's just not likely to be as productive as other avenues.

The worst one I've seen was in an obscure Star Trek novel: Ambassador Edentata from the planet Tandenborstel. Edentata is Latin for "toothless" and Tandenborstel is Dutch for "toothbrush".

Interesting that you mention this suffix thing....

I have a primary character in my current novel in progress, AIREALM, whose name is Tion which is short for Fluctuation. His sister's name is Bili which is short for Stability. However, both names are sort of crucial to the plot and I can't (nor do I want to) change them.

If this novel ever gets submitted to Tor, I hope you won't mind. :-)

The winners in the 'foreign oops' award were Commodore Computers.
They had consecutive product lines called PET (which is 'fart' in French) and VIC (see IKEA passim).

No matter what name you choose it's likely to have some recognition somewhere. Joan Vinge named one (minor) character "Coonabarabran" in one of her Snow Queen books - but that's the town nearest Australia's main optical astronomy observatory, Siding Spring Mountain.
Stood out like dog's balls.

I named a character in my middle grade novel THE WILD HUNT "Gerund" because he was a running, leaping, tumbling kind of kid. I bet at least one teacher got it.

About forty years ago, we found a delicious lemonady pop drink in France which they subsequently tried to bring into the US and failed. It had an onomatopoeic name for the opening of the bottle. Psssssssht. Never worked here. Hmmmm. I wonder why?

Jane

On my way to work I used to pass a couple of road signs that I always thought would make good names for fantasy characters: the villanous Ffordd Ddeuol och Blaen [1] and the heroic Arwyddion rhan Amser [2]. I suppose they might be a tad distracting for anyone who actually speaks Welsh.

[1] "Dual carriageway ahead"
[2] "Part-time traffic lights", if I recall correctly.

IKEA product name explanations can be found here.

Janeyolen: I am still mourning Orelia's name change to Orangina. I must learn to get over stuff like that.

This whole thread is reminding me of one I started up on rec.arts.sf.written a while back called "Unfortunate names in SF and Fantasy". I'll mention the ones I started off with there:

Being Tolkien doesn't entirely protect you from unfortunate naming. He sited his First Age city of Gondolin upon a hill named Túna. Also, in at least one early draft Frodo Baggins was to be named Bingo.

Orson Scott Card in his novel A Planet Called Treason named the planet's capital city Humping. I'd love to know what the heck he was thinking. (He may have fixed this in the revised version, Treason; I wouldn't know.)

I've been known to play "That's a good fantasy name!" as a road-trip game, but hopefully that hasn't impressed too many small town names on my subconscious.

We play that as "Dragaeran animal or Country-Western singer"? Valdosta, for example, is clearly a distant relative of the vallista and thus a Brustian critter; Wiota and Exira, on the other hand, would feel comfortable in the extended Judd family.

My least favorite reclaimed verb was when a wizard was -- apparently with an authorial straight face -- "going off for a wizz." Didn't need to know that, thanks.

The problem with using Finnish character names is that tyypoes staart to look quiite normaal. (Unfortunately, there's not much choice when the book is set in Finland.)

Also, in at least one early draft Frodo Baggins was to be named Bingo.

Must... resist... Wodehouse... pastiche...

Chad: I also love NORTH EAST/RISING SUN, although it's been a while since I drove past it. Emily: Yes, yes, on Efland. I always wondered if there was a King of Efland.

It strikes me that "noted in passing" is an increasingly apt title for this thread.

So Tion would make you stumble?

Also I have a fondness for certain rarely used words as names, for example Megrim and Morganatic would be names I would pick in a fantasy context.

Jonathan: If you go a little further north than Washington State, you can be on the road to Hell's Gate. (It's just beyond Hope.)

WRT the "Endless Mountains", there's an "Executive Committee Range" in the Antarctic (in Marie Byrd Land, wherever that is). There's something wonderfully... modern about that.

Paul Clarke: not to forget the over-affectionate female character Mynediad Am Ddim*

*Free Entry

I called a town "Wheatstone Bridge" after a circuit I studied in school physics. I changed it after my sister read it and laughed, and I realised that she, and numerous other potential readers, had followed the same physics syllabus as me.

I get the rest of my place names, including the new name for that town, from thorough abbreviations/acronyms/pronunciation-munging of existing words and phrases, adding likely-sounding place-name suffixes (-ton, -bury, etc.) where necessary. My places are meant to be in England, so I have to be quite careful to make them sound realistic without duplicating names that already exist.

I'm also having to avoid mentioning one of my major characters' first name and surname together, since someone with a very similar name married a celebrity recently. Maybe nobody else would make the connection, but I would.

Jane Yolen: I think it's spelled Pschitt. They were still selling it over there as of about five years ago.

On the other hand, they had to rename the Toyota MR2 for the French market, because it would have been pronounced very close to "merdeux", meaning "shitty".

Melissa - those of us from Elmira are going to have an awful time with your novel. But then again, how many of us are likely to be from Elmira?

Niall - Darth Sane, Darth Competent and Darth Dividualistic.

"Prepare to fire! No, not you, Darth Flammable!"

You are bad, bad, wicked, and evil. Thank you.

Hmmm... working on a kids story with the wicked Princess Alexia (since she's so wicked, there just aren't any words to describe her).

If I ever become a professional actor, I'd like to use Braxton Hicks, as my trade name.

The winner in trad ename medicines has to be Vagisil. Why they never used the tag line "When your vag is ill, use...", I guess I'll never know. Hmmm... name of the proud interceptor in my new space opera?

In Iain M. Banks's novel Against a Dark Background there's a minor character called Elson Roa. The name came from a broken sign for the street where Iain lived: Nelson Road. A broken sign for Colham Green gave me a name that I used years later for one of my characters, Clovis Colha Gree.

In M. John Harrison's The Pastel City the place-names in a far-future fantasy realm come from real places in the Highlands. They work remarkably well, though for years I thought Viriconium might be Inverness.

Ken, broken signs as names have been an honoured tradition ever since Piglet's grandfather Trespassers William.

The original title of my novel was that of its setting, Xalycis. Could be another of those sex drugs, I suppose. And the character with the sorta Anglo Saxon monicker Leodvin actually got his name from a compression of Leonardo da Vinci.

Other random comments: I'm always a bit nonplussed with folding my husband's Fruit of the Loom undies because of their abbreviated brand name, FTL. (No, I'm not going to joke on that one!) I don't tend to go by my married name, for then I'd have to spell *both* words when identifying myself, but he tells me that Hanscom originally meant "witches' hollow" -- pretty cool, if true. (Haggens Coomb, something like that?)

The original "you have to be old enough to get it" character names were in the James Bond books. As a grade school/junior high kid, I didn't have a clue.

Finally, a distinctive local business name that's been changed now, alas: the Bruce Weary Pain Clinic.

Thanks for the pointer to the IKEA product naming. I recognized the use of people-names. As an owner of Billy-the-Bookcase, Niklas-the-Wall-Unit and a former owner of Bjorn-the-Dresser, this was pretty obvious. But names like Malm are less obvious so I always assumed that there were nonce-words in the mix.

The Gutvik story, however, is no urban legend. I just didn't know it was a town in Norway. I can see piles of German tourists spasming with laughter on the outskirts of town by the "Welcome to Gutvik" sign.

I recognized the use of people-names. As an owner of Billy-the-Bookcase, Niklas-the-Wall-Unit and a former owner of Bjorn-the-Dresser, this was pretty obvious.

Fond memories of a college friend who named her chair Chesterfield, her sofa Davenport, her footstool Otto, and her carpet Waldo. She always had to footnote the carpet's location (sebz gur jnyy gb gur qbbe).