How does someone go about picking a name for a product? Here’s my recent story. Textbook? Hope not. Enlightening? You tell me …

Last week we decided to change the name of our humor blog because of confusion with the original Funny Business blog.

Co-contributor George Ajazi and I discussed options via e-mail. Since we’d been thinking about this for awhile, we began by rehashing old ideas.

George really liked Persona non gravy, the title of one of his posts. I thought it was very funny, but maybe too weird. We wanted to give readers at least a clue about content or theme.

Nontheless, this line of thought developed into a string of Roman Empire-theme names. Why? We knew history content was coming into our editorial mix, and we were thinking about a gladiator image we’d used on a recent post. Some of our favorite options–

E pluribus gravy. (Too incomprehensible.)
Thumbs-Down Marketing. (George didn’t like.)
Hail Caesar Salad. (Too silly.)

I scoured this very cool Latin phrase site and came up with De minimis, meaning “with respect to trifles.” Too obscure.

We resurrected an old meme of ours, Mediocre at Best. I liked this one so much I actually wrote an entire post introducing it as the new name, but kept having second thoughts. Right name, wrong content–it just didn’t fit.

Feeling we had exhausted old avenues, I started scouring Warren Zevon and Beatles lyrics looking for inspiration. In the meantime, humor writer and illustrator Angie Brennan offered up two suggestions–

Shorr-lines. (I love puns, but not keen on injected my name into the title.)
The Humor Inbox. (Descriptive, memorable, but unknown to Angie, too business-oriented given our upcoming topical expansion.

Now I started thinking about what we wanted the blog name to suggest. I kept coming back to the idea that the blog was entertainment, a brief escape from the rat race. That led to …

Sitting on a Cornflake. From The Beatles song “I Am the Walrus.” George and I liked this. Intriguing and, like our content, nonsensical.

Time Can Wait. Ultimately my second-favorite. Even though it sounded like “Heaven Can Wait”, the name seemed to have the right blend of silliness and seriousness, and it was memorable and consistent with our theme. All the people we bounced this and other ideas off of liked it as well.

By this time–a few days later–we were tired of thinking about it. I was watching CSI reruns with my wife that evening and out of nowhere thought of Scrambled Toast. To me, that sounded even better than “Time Can Wait” because it seemed to have the same virtues, plus it was less abstract. When George signaled approval, we went for it.

I don’t know if this is helpful in any way, but I’m always interested to hear about how people come up with things. It’s not always a linear process. If you have a story, we’d love to hear it!

Word Sell … Scrambled Toast