What's In A Name

If current trends mean anything, I'd like to request that people take a bit more time in choosing their company and/or product names. I came up with this topic while browsing a site that lets you customise your own boots or sneakers. They claimed to have the pinnacle of tomorrow's technology, so I wanted to check it out. It did seem cool, but something struck me as odd when I chose their black boots. Now I've had at least one pair of black boots of military-type, Doc Martens, or similar since 1989. But a sensitive note was struck in me when I found they had named their black boots "Zieg Heil". Maybe I'm oversensitive to something like this from being raised Jewish, but I found the name of that product to be a bit of a turn off. The boots don't even seem like stereotypical skinhead fare to me, but it made me think: somebody somewhere either at this company or some company from whom they get their product decided this was the perfect name for this product. Reminds me of comedian Eddie Izzard's bit about wishing he'd been there when Jerry Dorsey was given the stage name "Englebert Humperdinck." What did they reject if they picked that name! :)

In a message board on this company's site, I asked about how this name came to chosen. The answer I got seemed to address more why they chose "Think Tank" as the name of the style of boots, and not specifically why they chose "Zieg Heil" for the black boots. The guy continued:

Naming shoes, however, is one of the cooler things about the shoe creation process. The inspiration comes in a variety of forms ...from the "reflecting the personality of the shoe" to trying to get it approved by an overly nervous legal department to a nod to your favorite bar, city, running trail, first girlfriend's street, dog, etc. People designing shoes at [this company] are way into naming and describing their shoes and we will gladly adopt as many of the good ones as possible. If we pick some lame ones at times, don't read too much into it and hopefully there are plenty of better ones to choose from. Or, create your own.

I can dig what he's saying. I know how things get sometimes odd, sometimes great names. And now we know their legal department OK'ed "Zieg Heil" for that boot, which is also interesting. My response was that unless there's an inside joke that they all live on "Zieg Heil Street," I couldn't really figure out why they'd pick a name that many people might associate with Nazis or Hitler. I think there's plenty of room for creative and neato names that may not hearken back to WW2.

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