What’s it like to be named Alexa, now that Amazon Alexa is well, everywhere? In this article in the Argus Leader, writer Alexa Giebink says its “both a blessing and a curse”:

Thankfully for my parents, the device’s “wake word” can be changed to ‘Amazon’ or ‘Echo.’In the first month they had the speaker, there were several unsettling instances the Echo answered my parents when they called out my name.

Giebink looks into why Amazon chose the name Alexa, and reports on the name’s decline in popularity:

My name was never really that popular to begin with, but Amazon’s device has made it less so. In 2015, the year the Echo was released, 6,050 baby girls in the United States were named Alexa, or 311 for every 100,000 female babies born. Since then, the name has declined in popularity 33 percent, according to new data from the Social Security Administration. Last year, just 3,883 baby girls were named Alexa.

Click through to read more from a real-life Alexa!

The South African city of Grahamstown, currently undergoing its 44th National Arts Festival, will soon be called Makhanda, after a Xhosa warrior. The Arts and Culture department said on Friday that there had been a 20-year call for the name change, which is going ahead because some people are opposed to the painful history the founder of Grahamstown, Colonel John Graham, epitomized.

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge: A colossal expanse linking Brooklyn and Staten Island, once the longest suspension bridge in the world and a proud symbol of New York City’s history and urban geography.

Language of origin: Italian. Part of speech: noun.

Spelling: Wrong.

The iconic bridge, with one Z, was christened in 1960 in honor of the 16th-century explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, with two Zs. After the better part of a century of wrangling over the spelling of the name, the state seems poised to finally rectify what is possibly the biggest unintentional slight in the annals of American public architecture.

Now a bill is making its way through the New York State legislature seeks to add back that truant “z”. Read more about it in this New York Times article. What do you think – one “z” or two “z”?

Anakle is a digital design agency in Nigeria. This blog by Ifeoma Jukpor, a member of their content team, looks at ingenious indigenous brand names in Nigeria – with a wonderful personal touch. Here’s a sample:

As my Uber rolled down Admiralty way in Lekki that sunny afternoon, I spotted a travel agency called WAKANOW. I said it aloud to myself twice and then I smiled as it immediately came to me. Waka is a Nigerian creole word which refers to the verb “walk”. It also has a compound form called waka-waka referring to a restless person, or in this context, an itinerant. I was quite impressed with the business owners after I did my analysis. The business could have been called Fly services, or something funky, but I cannot ignore the call to action in the business name. So, I’ll walk into a WAKANOW office with the believe that these guys can get me moving in no time.

Want to find out more? Click through to read on!

It’s happening, slowly but surely: Māori names are replacing English placenames in New Zealand.

When local newspaper the Gisborne Herald ran an online poll in February, it found that 72 per cent of the nearly 600 who voted were opposed to adding the Māori name. “Why try to change the little bit of history we have got?” was one response. Others thought the new name is too confusing and too long. Some were under the mistaken impression that the city of Gisborne itself is being renamed, which it is not.

Eloise Wallace has been watching all this with interest. As the director of Gisborne’s Tairāwhiti Museum, her submission noted that “there was similar consternation from similar parts of the community” 18 years ago when her institution changed its name from the Gisborne Museum and Art Gallery. They argued that no one will know where it is. But nearly two decades later, “the majority of people visiting the museum, locals and tourists alike, will use the name Tairāwhiti and are learning its meaning and to pronounce it correctly,” Wallace says. The Māori name translates as the great standing place of Kiwa, who came from Hawaiki on the Tākitimu canoe, according to tradition.

Want to know more? Check out this article at Stuff.co.nz to learn about the movement towards Māori names.

Who picks government code names? It varies. The C.I.A. randomly selects code names — called cryptonyms, or crypts — from a list of pre-approved names. But C.I.A. officers can skip that process and pick their own. That is most likely how the agency ended up with hacking tools named RickyBobby and EggsMayhem. Somewhere, there is a former classics scholar who can claim responsibility for choosing Anabasis, the epic Greek military tale, as the cryptonym for a C.I.A. operation in Iraq.

Military operations get code names, too, and random selection has its downsides. When a blitz on Iraqi weapons sites was randomly given the name “Operation Bolton” by the British Ministry of Defense, the name divided residents of the town of Bolton.

Want to know more? To find out all about these code names, and what Crossfire Hurricane means (and where it came from!), click through to this article at the New York Times.

Over at The Millions, author Marie Myung-Ok Lee writes about her relationship with her name – as a writer, a daughter of Korean immigrants, and as a Korean-American. She examines how her name has evolved over the years and how deeply names and identity are intertwined.

 

Here’s a sample:

Not unlike George Herbert Walker Bush, my full legal name, as it reads on my birth certificate, has four pieces, not the usual three.

Marie Myung-Ok Grace Lee.

People assume Myung-Ok is my middle name. But it’s just my name, one that was benched, like a junior varsity player, for my entire childhood, and then revived–but not for the reasons one might think–when I needed an “author name” for my novel.

…

Perhaps the author name is also a brilliant tool that should be used as such. Friends and family call me Marie, and Koreans revert to Myung-Ok—but no one uses both. Marie Myung-Ok Lee then becomes the embodiment of my writing, a protective shell that diverts the attention from that overly open, curious part of me that I need to be able to write in the first place.

 

What’s the significance of Signify? In this name review, Alex Kelley of Catchword digs into this name change for Philips.

Here’s a sample:

Signify is retaining the Philips brand for their products, like Philips Hue. You may have heard of this colorful, smart-home enabled lights platform, which is perhaps the greatest innovation in home ambience control since the dimmer switch.

The company has well over a hundred years of name equity, the products are retaining the Philips name, and, aside from GE, Philips is the most recognizable brand in bulbs … so why make the change?

Click through to read the rest!