(Inc) — Eli Altman has been naming things for most of his life. At age 6, he helped his father, Danny Altman, the founder of the San Francisco branding consultancy A Hundred Monkeys, on a naming project for the toy store FAO Schwarz. He has named 400 companies and brands since and joined his dad’s business in 2002. But a couple of years ago, Altman started noticing what he saw as a distasteful trend: a wave of nonsensical names. Whereas the rules of English usage dictate that an e or an o usually precedes an r, entrepreneurs were starting companies with names such as Flickr, Socializr, and Touristr. Others were doubling or even tripling theiro’s, i’s, and u’s — as in Zooomr, Rowdii, Yuuguu, and even Oooooc. With the rise of the Internet, names made of words that mean something, like Apple Computer, went out of favor. “Everyone wants these short, catchy names,” says Altman.
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