The best-dressed names!

I would like to take a moment to salute the namers at modcloth. True, blogging about my favorite dress store gives me a great excuse to "research" their latest products, but it also deserves the attention. I have to admit that while I was immediately crushing on their dress designs, I was absolutely in LOVE with their dress names from my first visit to the site.

They post a dozen new dresses a day and never seem to run out of brilliant new labels:

"Cara-melting in your Arms" for a brown and gold dress

"Give me S'more" for a design that is white on top with brown sleeves and a brown skirt

The words carry several meanings and do a great job describing different aspects of the dress. They are, to use a linguisticky term, Intertextual. The words, when placed in a new phrase, still carry something of their usual meaning while also absorbing the meaning of the context, which creates a new word or phrase that is a blend of the old individual meanings.

Modcloth's favorite naming technique seems to be the use of homonyms:

• "The Goodness Grey-cious Dress" - a grey dress that's dainty like a Southern Bell

Or near-homonyms:

• "Lace is More" for a little, sleeveless lacey number.

One of my favorite names (though the dress is not as appealing as its title), is a very clever name that is not quite a homonym in the traditional sense:

• "Eyelet up the Room Dress"

They also use imperfect rhymes (when the stressed syllables don't match up):

• "Happy to be O-live Dress" - it's dark green and a playful design

How about their use of pop culture and a half rhyme?

• "The Cliffs of Urbanity Dress" - (that's right, like the Cliffs of Insanity from the cult classic, Princess Bride) - it's a brown and grey tattered design (ironically, the dress itself looks like something a crazy person would wear.)

They also use assonance, a word I just learned, which means the vocalic sounds match:

• "Swede Dreams" - which is reminiscent of Stockholm according to the dress description.

Occasionally, they might be stretching it a little, and embarrass themselves:

• "Indescribable Blue-ty Dress" - that's right, it's a blue dress

Maybe no one else enjoys this kind of thing as much as I do. My boyfriend's and my favorite game is who can be the cheeziest with play-on-words. For example, when shopping for boring vegetables in a weak attempt to be healthy one of us might say (as we did last week), "Cucumber? More like puke-cumber!" And it never fails to make us smile and think we're clever.

Note: there are actually people who name things for a living (and work for companies like Catchword, co-founded by a linguist). Funnest career EVER.

Note2: After writing this blog, I am seeing a very unfortunate pattern: all the cutest names are for the ugliest dresses. Oh well - it works!