Brand names are all nonsense now
Start-ups have turned everything into gibberish.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
First, some housekeeping: I’m going on vacation! Paid subscribers will still get the Sunday Scroll, but otherwise I’ll be off starting Monday, June 5 through Friday, June 16. So if you want to see, among other things, what the West Scottish Highland side of TikTok is like, consider becoming a paid subscriber below. —Kate
A common existential concern of mine when I was suffering from undiagnosed anxiety as a teen (I am, of course, completely fixed and normal now) was that one day humans would run out of words. There is a finite number of words, my thinking went, and a finite number of ways to order them before we inevitably started to repeat ourselves. I’ve since traded this spiral for more tangible anxieties, but lately it’s been creeping back into my consciousness as news like this makes the rounds: “Flink, who recently acquired Cajoo, will no longer be sold to Getir.”
“Flink has acquired Cajoo” went viral in 2022. But this string of nonsense words (which describe one startup acquiring another) wasn’t a one-off. There have been many such combinations describing the same process since then—and as
recently pointed out, there was another headline from the very same day as Flink/Cajoo: “Grain trader Viterra in talks to merge with rival Bunge.”Flink has acquired Cajoo but will not be sold to Getir. Viterra might merge with Bunge. Ape holders can use multiple slurp juices on a single ape. All these very real sentences carry the whiff of a society that has completely run out of words. We’re not just creating new ones, but introducing entirely new sounds into our lexicon, and these are in turn credulously repeated in headlines in a way that, frankly, borders on gaslighting. You can’t just say “bunge” like that’s a thing we say. I’ve never said “bunge” or anything like it in my life.
Society, in other words, has abandoned words for syllables, and the tech industry is the worst offender.
“Which insanely-named alternative to Twitter is someone gonna pester me into joining today by being like, ‘I've got invitations to FlukMuck,’” Daniel Lavery joked in a recent Embedded interview. Except this turned out not to be a joke, because last week I stumbled across a new Twitter alternative called “Nostr,” and the user addresses look like your parents’ WiFi password.
This isn’t just a problem for the extremely online. The nonsensification of words is coming for every aspect of life. See: Jimmy Fallon introducing artist beabadoobee in December 2022, or literally any TikTok that names a brand.
“Tuesday to Thursday, Ghia is buying you your first Ghia cocktail at Bar CouCou,” the creator behind the TikTok account for Camber, a Los Angeles food guide app, said in a May 9 video, prompting this stitch:
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Or: “Come with us to ride the EJ Hill Run Break Helix Coaster at MassMoca,” as creator Chelsea Clough said in a May 15 video.
“No, come with me to hide the DJ pill steak bun remix toaster at bass bocca,” Connor Franta said in a stitch.
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Any word sounds like nonsense if you say it enough, but for this new breed of words, once is enough. Meanwhile, the culture of TikTok has tricked a lot of people into doing free advertising for brands, and in doing so, adopting a very specific TikTok voice that ultimately serves to emphasize just how ridiculous these words are. You should be saying “Ghia is buying you your first Ghia cocktail at Bar CouCou” with shame, not your full chest.
Taken individually, I’m sure all these companies have legitimate, thought-out reasons for the names they chose—even Bunge. I can say, having had to name this very newsletter, that it is really hard to come up with a name that hasn’t already been claimed, and likely with already established SEO. But when I Google “Bunge,” its website is the first thing to show up. Meanwhile, you have to scroll past the Dictionary definition, an NPR podcast, and an entirely different tech website before you find my Embedded, so who’s laughing now? Bunge, that’s who. Bunge.
As per their Our History page. more apt names for the B-word would Born A Bunge or perhaps Bunge-n-Born. It would save us all some confusion.