Journal: News & Comment

Good idea, bad result

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Personally, the word webinar bugs me. It's a useful word for "Web seminar," but somehow the result is ugly.

It reminds me of all of those lousy made-up company names (of which Terasen—formerly B.C. Gas, a much better and more useful name—is the latest abomination). They came in earnest in the wake of Lucent, which was the only neonym that really worked. Real words still have some power.

UPDATE: My former UBC colleague Alastair (no, not Alistair) and I discussed this topic a bit, and agreed that Telus (the name for the amalgam of B.C. Tel and Alberta's Telus) is a good name, even though it is (to use his term) a "frankenword." Perhaps these new words only work if they're two syllables or less? Nah, Scient and Livent still suck.

One we both despise is PricewaterhouseCoopers. Hello? This is English here, not German with its massive compound nouns. And a capital C but no capital W? Frankenword indeed.

FURTHER UPDATE: Hey look, I complained about webinar before, and didn't even remember.

 |