NUON Say it a few times. Roll it around on your tongue. Nnnnnnn. Nnnnnnuon. Nuuuuon. Oooooh.
Hmmmm....
How does that feel? Does it feel cutting edge? Does it feel futuristic? Does it feel authentic? Would you drive it? Would you buy running tights made out of it? Would you order it in a bar? Would you use it to charge a major purchase? Would you take it for a migraine? Would you play video games with it.

If you answered yes to the last question, you've justified a five-figure fee paid to Lexicon, a professional naming agency, by VM Labs, a technology company whose microchip, the newly christened Noon, will be powering DVD players and set-top boxes in 1999.

The idea behind Nuon is to piggy-back a video game platform on top of a digital video system so people who might never buy a Nintendo 64 or Sony Playstation will suddenly find themselves in possession of a video game machine. And once they own it, why not buy a game or two, just for kicks? The Nuon audience (Nuonites?) are not hard-core gamers. But then, neither are the hundreds of thousands of people who made Deer Hunter the best-selling computer game in North America.

But if a rose is a rose is a rose, a consumer electronics device by any other name does not smell as sweet. There are, in the patois of marketing "branding considerations."

For instance, the name of this new product needs to be short because it has to fit inside a stamp-size space, along with a logo, on the front of a smallish device. "We needed something under five letters to make a good graphic impact on the front of the panel," said Greg Labrec, VM Labs' vice president for marketing, describing the name game as a high-stakes corporate crossword puzzle. "Under five letters, describes our chip and the operating system and the architecture as a whole. Something that somebody would want to have in a high-tech device.

"We had a bunch of combinations like Intervision, which combined interactive and vision, and Active DVD, which sort of gave a sense of active as opposed to passive DVD. On our own, we hit about 400 different names over the course of a year and a half. Actually, there were at least double that - I disqualified a lot of them. Like, there was one that everybody really, really liked, Actavid. And after I said it sounded like an aspirin, no one could get that out of their mind. As soon as I said that, it was like, boom, off the list."

After 18 months of beer-fueled brainstorming, the team determined that it could not shuffle the English language skillfully enough to produce the magic moniker, the golden open-sesame word whose very sound would persuade consumers to part with hundreds of dollars.

Clearly, this was a job for professionals. Namely, the squad of linguists at Lexicon, who named Intel's Pentium chip, Oldsmobile's Alero sports coupe, Vibrance shampoo, Slates dress slacks, Embassy Suites Hotels, an osteoporosis drug called Evista and a sassy clear malt beverage for the younger set. Yes - Zima.

"You make up some word," said David Placek, Lexicon's chief executive, whose vocal timbre and speech rhythms bear a strong resemblance to Dana Carvey's caricature of George Bush. "Let's say we take a word like zoka. Z-o-k-a, zoka. Now we'll just change one letter in there. We'll change zoka to vaka to loka, and m and n. And we'll show four or five names, all from that similar zoka structure. And we'll tell someone 'Think about pain relief. Think that you have a headache right now. Now, you can take any one of these for that aspirin. Pick it. whether it's zoka, voka, whatever, pick it., And then you probe why. What is it? Is it faster? Is it harder?

THEN we take those same names, and we go to another group of people and say: 'Think about a sports car. I'm going to give you one of these sports cars. Which one are you going to take?' And you probe again as to why. And if you do that with enough people in enough languages. you can begin to identify certain phonetic properties. For example, I can tell you that 'z' is one of the fastest sounds in the alphabet. So if speed would have been the only important thing, we might have ended up with zunos or something like that. I can tell you that the sound of p and b, as in Powerbook, another brand we created, those are very dependable sound properties. So if you're out there with a lightweight portable, one of the underlying requirements will be dependability, reliability. If it drops, will it work again. So those sound properties go to work for you.

"In the case of Nuon, the word starts with an n and it ends with an n, Mr. Placek continued. "That's called consonant harmony. It has a quick start and a quick stop to it. Noon. And that, we felt, gave it precision. So we started working with that n in front and the n on the back. And we wanted to open it up. 0 is one of the fullest sounds, so we started experimenting with that. And we took a look at that 'nu' for newness there, which is quite appropriate and convenient, and we took that 'on,' as in interactive, as in playing a game, and we put them together. And interestingly enough, there's a very tiny elementary particle called a muon. And then there's neon, which is this bright gas. And then you also have things like proton and neutron. So we felt that it would deliver performance."

In that respect, Nuon is a phonetic sibling to Xeon, Intel's high-performance workstation chip, which Lexicon also named. "You have a faster thing there," Mr. Placek explained, emphasizing the linguistic nuance. "You have the x there, pronounced like z, so it's fast. It's got a lot of power there. That was about power versus - you can see how Nuon was more interactive, a little subtler, a little more approachable."

And indeed it is. If Nuon were a car, it would be a small, egg-shaped, electric one, a mid-21st-century version of the Dodge Neon, whose name includes an exuberant squeal (eeeeee'.'.!!) between the friendly edges of beveled n's. It's fun to say. Nnnnnn. Oooooooh. Noodle. It's toothsome. Sounds consumable. lt's new!

I'm sold, and Orwell was dead wrong. The language isn't being crushed under the weight of oppression. It is experiencing an algal bloom of new vocabulary. Synthetic words. Words with no history - and no historical baggage. Words that are globally palatable, bred as they are in the petri dish of international market research. Words that make new things, especially technology and pharmaceuticals, seem tasty. Words that are about pleasure (Viagra). health (Slimfast) and entertainment (Web TV). Words that have no meaning outside the commercial sphere.

Our language, like our food supply, has become a triumph of genetic engineering and synthetic additives. Perhaps a video game machine is the epitome of this process, this shift to a virtual economy and a virtual language. Because video games are a product whose material existence is vestigial: ones and zeroes stored on a disk, for now, until that goes away and they become streams of code on a network: pure experience, purely spatial and kinesthetic and imaginary, and beyond language.

by J.C. Herz
New York Times
November 26, 1998