Elusive Words

I like to name things. When projects come up at work, or I build a tool in Excel, I enjoy the challenge of assigning memorable, descriptive names. Sometimes the names come quickly, but other times they are more elusive.

I started building a data management system in Access a year and half ago (I blogged about the new application recently) and I finally named it about four months into the project, but for the longest time everyone was calling it Rob's database. I think some people are more amused by my penchant for naming than they are impressed, but I much prefer a functional name to my own on my projects.

Some of my names describe a function or key process of a product, some indicate a purpose or outcome, and others try to capture a tone, emotion, or experience. Names are particularly difficult when trying to distinguish a product or tool from several similar or related products. Even with this blog, I struggled for weeks over what I would name it (the name comes from a story in the Bible, in Luke 16...check it out.)

When I find myself at a roadblock, grappling with several possibilities, but never being impressed by anything, I usually wind up at one of my favorite websites: www.visualthesaurus.com. Most of the people on my team used to joke about how often I would hit the Merriam Webster website (www.m-w.com), which I still frequent, but the Visual Thesaurus site is the most valuable resource I've found for writers.

I couldn't do the Visual Thesaurus site justice in a short blog post like this, but suffice it to say you will find countless articles to help improve your writing, stories about writers of all genres, word etymologies (cool stuff), and ideas to inspire you. The real meat of the site, though, is their visual style thesaurus engine. It presents word relationships in a dynamic, neural-network type diagram (you have to see it for yourself). This is one of the only sites that I actually subscribe to, and it's is worth the money for the thesaurus alone.

I showed the Visual Thesaurus site to my manager one day, and she said, "So, now I know your secret!" Now you know my secret, too - or at least one of them. Next time you find yourself searching for that elusive word, point your browser to www.visualthesaurus.com and give it a try. You might just find that perfect word, or the name for your next product.

Light it up...

Rob