So this topic seems to be on the brain lately, actually been meaning to do a prompt like this for a while because I’m very much a stupid name enjoyer, but this seems like the right time. What are some organization names, or names in general, in your world that your characters think is stupid? Do people still actually use the name or do they have an informal substitute?
In my science-fantasy world with intelligent animals trying to live in harmony, the Felines have a few really verbose names, mainly because they were trying to nationalize and consolidate private businesses after the revolution as much as possible, so they just slapped something together to identify the new publicly-owned companies.
Their flag airline is called the Feline Ministry of Transportation Air Transport Service (FMT-ATS), which, yes, uses the word “transport” twice. Their public transportation agency and regulator is called the Feline Ministry of Transportation, and the airline is a department within it. Everyone thinks the name is really stupid just calls it Feline Air for short, they’re probably going to rebrand it to Feline Air at some point but they have more pressing things on their to-do list, like actually building and operating enough hovercrafts to satisfy the sharp increase in demand for transportation following the revolution.
My world literally has a Redundant Department of Redundancy Department. It exists solely to provide temporary staffing to the Redundancy Department when the Redundancy Department has a work shortage.
The Redundancy Department, of course, only exists to provide temp staffing to various government offices.
Both exist as a joke and as a critique of bureaucracy.
I’m very bad at naming stuff, so instead of trying to find good names… I find “good” reasons for the names being bad.
For a concrete example: I have a place named NML (Noon Moon Loom), which is an mouthful to actually say, and only slightly less so to say with initials. So I plan to, eventually, have a character note how horrible the name is, and another explaining that it came to be because people didn’t want to refer to the place with its actual name (since it is a brothel), so they referred to it with other names: moon, loom, and others. During a rebranding the brothel decided to go with those instead, but as the management couldn’t settle on one, they compromised by choosing some similar names each liked, and using them all. Now the building has neon signs that sequentially say either “Noon,” “Moon,” and “Loom,” and eventually, as new people got to know the place, they started calling it NML.
I’m honestly in a similar boat with my worldbuilding. I’m really bad at truly creative names and tend to have names that that just describe what it is. I blame Warrior Cats for getting me obsessed with this naming style, and for getting me obsessed with cats in general.
-
The Feline capital city in my world is called Moonpeak, because it’s on the top of a mountain and you can see the moon really clearly from there, and the moon has cultural significance to the cats in this world. The metro area/county that Moonpeak is situated in is called Moon District.
-
The Unified Territories capital city is called Central Valley. Valley is obvious, it’s situated between two mountain ranges for protection, and central is symbolic because it’s where all the government agencies are based out of, not because it’s in the geographic centre. It’s in the metro area called Central District.
I’ve fully embraced this naming format and am now pretty much naming all the cities in this world this way. The Feline Ministry of Transportation Air Transport Service is me deliberately playing into this naming system for what I hope is humour.
Another place that my story partly takes place in is called Whisker Valley, which is the valley directly below and to the north of Moonpeak. Whiskers are important sensory organs for cats, and Whisker Valley once played host to various radar and other early warning systems for an air attack on Moonpeak by the Unified Territories. But nowadays their relationship has gotten way better and the Felines might actually want flights coming from the UT, so Whisker Valley has pivoted from hosting mostly aircraft defence systems to aircraft navigation aids (there is still a military presence to guard against enemy aircraft, but it is now a very busy flight corridor feeding traffic to and from Moonpeak). Which many cats think is an ever more accurate use of the name because whiskers are primarily range finding organs, not early warning organs.
-
There’s an evil capitalist woman who monopolizes intercontinental shipping and transport and is extremely fickle and binds people into cruel deals. People sarcastically call her the Ferry Queen
A little excerpt from my current manuscript:
The largest and flattest island, which was home to the City of Strangleroot, was blocked by these outer islands, so Fenicia could not see it. […] The entire region had an unfairly negative reputation, on account of the strangleroot vine being popularly recognized as the ideal material to fashion a garrotte. Of course the vine had dozens or even hundreds of uses beyond choking animals to death, but the City’s inhabitants were uncomfortable enough to start the petition to change its name to “Tangletown.” The measure was actually gaining traction, which Fenicia found preposterous.
