Languages in the Big Apple

How much thought goes into the naming of the latest fast-food concoctions? A lot.

To come up with a name for Wendy’s newest cheeseburger, a disgustingly enormous sandwich featuring two quarter-pound beef patties, two slices of cheese, and six strips of bacon, the company sought professional help. The result? The baconator.

Ew.

A recent article went behind the scenes to look at the “linguistics” in mainstream marketing.

William Lozito, CEO of Strategic Name Development, understood that in coming up with a name for the burger, he needed something “that reflected the burger’s formidable qualities.”

His wife and partner, Diane Prange, who also acts as the company’s “chief linguistics officer,” offers her own in-depth analysis:

The prefix describes the burger’s key distinction and “the suffix suggests something large and compelling, as in Terminator.”

But for all the lowest-common-denominator logic of the
baconator, Strategic Name Development is raking it in — it’s
expected to pull in $2.5 million this year alone. I want to be a
product namer, too!

The company, started by Lozito in 1993, took off three years later when he hired Prange, who is fluent in four languages and “revels in arcane data and word usage.” She confesses:

“My idea of a good time is to crawl into bed with printouts from the Oxford English Dictionary.”

Or maybe watching Terminator?