My boss forwarded this article about the naming industry (those of you who weathered the dotcom bubble/bust should have just experienced a slight chill).
The article begins as a serious exposition on said industry. Slowly, the reader realizes that the serious treatment was given to set the industry up for mockery. It is definitely worth the read.
At one point, a naming company is caught off-guard when representatives of a client recoil in disgust with the name they’ve been presented, “Jamcracker”.
“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’t know 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 we discussed the article, we came up with a name for the reaction to the name, “Jamcracker”. We decided to coin the term: “The Jamcracker Effect”. Here, we define “The Jamcracker Effect” as:
the situation wherein a concept is considered distasteful based on the sound of its name, despite the non-distasteful nature of any individual components of the name.
Some examples of the Jamcracker Effect might be:
- “Meat Waffle”
- “Street Chicken”
<EOL>