Monday, March 15, 2010

nameonics

nameonics = name + mnemonics

In advertising, nameonics is all about creating a memorable name for a product in some way or another. The word popped up today in a NYT article about Vanguard trying to make Vanguarding a common investment term (the way googling and xeroxing have become words in their own right).

There's an interesting article by Jerry Steuber here about how nameonics works, or at least how it could work. I don't doubt Jerry's claim that he made the word nameonics up on his own, but I doubt that he was the first to do so. Some things, like gravity and portmanteau words, are so obvious to someone who's looking for them that they can be "discovered" independently by more than one person.