Agilent issused a press release today announcing the name of their to-be-spun-off semiconductor testing business as “Verigy”.

The Agilent / Verigy release demonstrates yet another case of reverse engineered rationale, created solely for an internal audience for the purpose of buy-in and sign-off on the name:

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jan. 12, 2006–Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) today announced it has selected a name for its upcoming semiconductor test spin-off company. The new name, Verigy, will be used when the new company separates from Agilent, which is expected to occur near mid-2006.

The name is built from the Latin prefix “veri-” (”true, genuine”), which is the root of “verification” (”to prove the truth of, substantiate”) and so ties the name to the test business. The “-gy” suffix comes from the combining form “-logy,” meaning the name of sciences or bodies of knowledge, as in biology and geology. Verigy describes a company dealing with the true nature of things. The sound of the name connotes energy.

Now that you’ve been schooled by Agilent in what Verigy communicates, will you ever forget? Of course you will, because it communicates nothing.

And it looks like another backroom bathroom bacronym to us. The bathroom humor is spilling over the bowl on this one, as they are purveyors of fine bathroom tissue products and silly domains. Check them out at www.scatissue.com

Via Gary Peare at Tesser

Madman Elliot Back has beautifully quantified the words that most commonly appear in the names of blogs:

Wondering how people name their blogs is an old question, never answered to my satisfaction. Fortunately the Blogwise directory hosts a list of 33810 blogs. Extracting the names of each blog from the directory itself took some work, but the result is this text file of blog names, one per line. Now that I got the raw data, it’s time to go to work.

Quickly coding a solution in C#, I wrote a program to tokenize the blog names by whitespace and punctuation, and place the resulting words in a hashmap for counting purposes. This gives a tab-delimited (paste into Excel!) text file of words used in blog titles and their frequency…

…The top word, used in 9.986 percent of the blogs surveyed was “blog.” The next most popular, at 2.619 percent, is “life.” Here’s the top 10 words in a blog’s name:

1. blog – 9.986%
2. life – 2.619%
3. weblog – 1.841%
4. world – 1.296%
5. from – 1.226%
6. journal – 1.139%
7. news – 1.087%
8. thoughts – 1.039%
9. with – 0.670%
10. daily – 0.660%

Elliot goes much deeper into the mire here. It’s no surprise that most blog names are intuitively descriptive, for that is the norm across all product, service and company names. The result is a manky swirl of achromatic Gesso.

The key to powerful naming is finding the metaphor less traveled.