At Jog we’ve been involved in more than a few naming projects. We’ve minted names for several clients and helped many others in the process of arriving at an apt moniker. It’s wordsmithery with the most minimal output (often just a single word). Yet seldom is it an easy process. So it interests us when names are coined or adapted through use.

For example, when was the last time you travelled on ‘The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway (BS&WR)’? Believe it or not there was a brief struggle to maintain that name, driven by the then editor of Railway Magazine who found the unofficial but commonly-used ‘Bakerloo Line’ undignified. He failed (obviously). Just as Norman Foster had to admit defeat in his lonely crusade to resist 30 St. Mary Axe being ubiquitously called ‘The Gherkin’.

Closer to home our client Addition Plus (an online advertising specialist) was tautologically renamed by popular opinion.

Originally our client simply called their brand ‘Addition’. Our simple logo placed a series of plus symbols after the word Addition, and thereafter clients referred to the business as Addition Plus. It is now the official name.

You could call this crowd-coining. The results of which are nearly always better than what went before. But it’s a process that really only works if it’s informal. It’s not about naming competitions, judging committees and photos in the local paper. And it’s often hard to pin the origin of the idea to a specific individual. Even where you can identify the original wordsmith it is adoption by the crowd that holds the true power.

Crowd-coining just happens. And when it does, resistance is futile.