Bad URL's?

Choose your URL's wisely! There are many cases of unintentionally offensive web addresses out there. The classic example of this is penisland.com (read: Pen Island).

Another crappy (pardon the pun!) URL:

publishit.com


Here's an interesting story involving a bad URL:

An employee at a software company was fired for visiting a particular website. Which site was it? Experts Exchange. But why? It seems like a legitimate site that one would go to in order to find help on various topics.

However, in the URL it was expertsexchange.com, which probably triggered some filter.

That issue's been corrected now and the site is now realized as experts-exchange.com.

It's literally crap!

Poolife
Here we have Poolife, a company that sells pool cleaning products.
Seen anything wrong yet? Have you parsed the named as POO LIFE thanks to a missing L?

This especially hurts for such a product since the name now has a negative connotation (you don't want 'crap' in your pool!) and many will read it like the way described above. It certainly wouldn't hurt to double up on the L in the name...

All that Yaz

Yaz


Okay, so it sounds similar to "Yes" and is only 3 letters long, but that's all the positives there are to this name. It's got a terrible commerical too, with people singing a cover of "We're Not Gonna Take It", what were they thinking? That's gotta backfire... It also sounds too flashy ("razzle-dazzle") for a freakin' birth control pill.

EEE-nough already

The Asus EEE PC


Technically it's not spelled with all capitals, Eee. However, it is still an initialism. What it stands for is a bit redundant: easy to learn, easy to work, easy to play.

Guess they needed to resort to tripling of the letters since the i-craze, e-craze, x-craze, what have you, is so cliche now.
What's to stop someone from seeing "NEW EEE PC" and thinking it has to do a shoe size width? Also, wouldn't you want your products being AAA quality rather than low-grade sounding EEE?

Interlude: Shouldn't that be a code XXX?

Here's an interesting news item:

A Wyomissing man was charged with possessing pornography when taking his computer to Circuit City to install a new DVD drive. How did the technicians find out? They were looking for videos that were already on his hard drive so they could tell if the drive is working, and it just so happens they stumbled onto a child porn video.

Here's the best part: According to court documents, there is "something called code X" that must be installed in order for certain videos to play properly.


(They actually meant codecs.)

Have an X-treme X-mas

What better holiday than Xmas to capitalize on the "X" craze?


Not a terrible way of branding, but it only works if you actually pronounce Xmas like "eks-mas"... it sounds somewhat out of place in a formal setting.

Nobody Duz It Better

Here's an oldie from 1951:

Duz

There goes that stray X again...

Blosxom


First Sxoop, now Blosxom.

Adding X's at the beginning or end of the word is so passé ("xtreme!" this and that), so let's throw them right in the middle of the word! Note that it's Blosxom not Bloxsom, the latter would be more easily pronounced.

Should've chosen a Byetta name...

Byetta
Contrary to what one might think, this name rhymes with "beta" rather than "better", despite the double t's.

Crooks & Cons

Crooks: It's an unfortunately named city in South Dakota, isn't that bad enough?

To make matters even worse, look at the name of an accounting firm located there:

Crooks Accounting.


Q: Who would do business with them?

A: How about the manufacturer Con Labs?

To Finity and beyond

Finit Solutions

"Finit" is a common mispronunciation of finite. Most of us encounter the word infinite before seeing finite (think math class), and assume that you can remove the in- prefix and keep the same pronunciation.

In addition, the name sounds limiting, like there are only a finite amount of solutions available.

I found a wee for cheap!

Nintendo Wee


Hmmm, a DVD player named Wee... and it uses the same typeface as "Wii"!

But wait, there's more! For just $25 more, we'll throw in the Weemote:

Weemote


Nothing beats asking for a wee plus extra weemotes for under $100! Bonus: place the wee underneath your wii so you can say you have a wee-wii!

Xnergetically confusing

Xnergy

This name seems poor on two counts: the "X-" prefix is way overused by now, and it also has ambiguous pronunciation.

Take off the "X" and we're left with the dangling "-Nergy". This can be related to that awful NRG ("energy") abbreviation (wow, just spell the letters N-R-G and it sounds like energy! the letters themselves don't stand for anything)

Is it supposed to be pronounced "X - Energy" or just "X Nergy"? To further complicate things, which syllable is stressed?

This name grades itself!

Red F Marketing



That's what you get for naming your company.

Small note: It actually represents Redefining the Future, but how many people will pick up on that?

You've got some renewin' to do

Renew In

(no pic available yet)

This is yet another product in the long line of HeadOn spinoffs (Active On and Prefer On to name a few more). First of all, do we really need ANOTHER spin-off product of Head On? Secondly, the name makes no sense. Renew in what? Thirdly, it's painful to hear the guy on the commercial try too hard to be hip and pronounce it like "renewin'".

Open cutivation?

Cutivate

That's not a spelling error, it's really called Cutivate, not cultivate. It's a medication designed to relieve inflammatory skin conditions. Why it's a pun of "cultivate" is beyond me.

This pun doesn't work too well either:
It's as bad as the "scar zone" name; with "cut" in the name, you certainly don't want to emphasize the spreading of them!

Playing wee?

Moowee


Moowee is a service that lets you watch internet movies on TV. Why would they name it such? It's an obvious play on "movie", using a w sound instead of v, but changing the spelling quite a bit. Also, it lets you play movies on your Wii (!) which doesn't make the name totally useless.

As the Name Awards blog says... this name is cow piss!

Watch your typeface...

Take a look at the magazine cover below:


Its full title is CLM "College Lifestyle Magazine", but running the letters together like that only serves to make the middle look like a certain vowel.


To take this even further, look what the title of their photo section is called:


CLM shots.

Given the target demographic, do you really think that this is purely coincidental?

x² + 2xy + y² = ?

[x+1]


This name isn't *bad* per se, it's just one of the stranger names out there. Certainly more creative than e-this and i-that and -r suffixing.

No Sxoop for you!

Sxoop

Just looking at the name is headache-inducing. How can you possibly pronounce a name starting with that consonant cluster (Sx-) ?

I guess you can take the X as silent, and pronounce it as "soup" or "zoop."