Get out of my namespace...

There's an interesting article by James Gleick about the nature of namespaces (I'm not linking to the New York Times where the article originated because I hate them). It reminds me of another article I read some years back in Salon about companies that come up with names -- the article was written back in the go-go 90s (as opposed to the no-go 00s). The best was "JamCracker":

It seems that when Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don'tknow what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."

As it happens, not long after the article appeared, a company did end up using the name Jamcracker. The article also alludes to computer generated programs (which is what I would do) that automatically generates candidate names. Every language has N-gram probibilities that indicate the prior probibility that a given set of N characters will occur. For example, in English e-r is alot more common than e-g and q is always followed by u (this is much of the reason why you can swap the letters in words and they are still readable -- languages are very redundant. So now, come up with names that are combinations of these letters and you will come up with "English sounding" word -- ignoring the N-gram probibilities is a good way to come up with a word that no one can pronounce, spell and/or remember. I'd come up with some examples but I can't remember any.