Sometimes we find juicy news not worthy of a full blog post, yet too darn good to not share with you. These “Tasty Tidbits” are digestible bites of news about new names and the naming industry and what we think of them here at Eat My Words. Bon Appetit!

Nordstrom’s is advertising BCBGMAXAZRIA, which we guess is some kind of clothing line that in no way wants customers to remember them.

improvA is a new online tutoring site. We’re not sure if it’s pronounced with a long or short “A”, but we are sure the name should sit in the corner with a dunce cap on. If that is not bad enough, they have a “customized personal tutoring” service called improvA+. Not so smart for a tutoring company to basically compete with themselves by saying their basic service is not that good. It reminds us of another name that makes us cringe: Learnia.

We’re not convinced that the whole crowdsuckingsourcing thing is viable, but another new entry has floated to the surface anyway. It is Authonomy, described on their site as:

“authonomy invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project – and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read.

Visitors to authonomy can comment on these submissions – and can personally recommend their favourites to the community. authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books – and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.

We hope the authonomy community will guide publishers straight to the freshest writing talent – and will give passionate and thoughtful readers a real chance to influence what’s on our shelves.”

We think it will collapse from the weight of the copyright infringement lawsuits that will abound by putting unpublished manuscripts online.

Oh, and the name is awful.

Note to Journalists:

Please stop using this headline for stories about naming:

What’s in a name?

It stopped being remotely clever about 414 years ago. Today in Google News a search for “What’s in a name” returns 183 news stories using the title in the last month alone. Some examples:

Yawn.

Namethis.com lame name of the week: “Hirelyzer“, a pre-employment screening service. We especially loved the description of the name…”This bomb name is the sum of hire + (ana)lyzer.”

We at least agree it’s a bomb.