co-op naming

[nibot]

So we need a name for our dear nascient rochester_coop! We have a few ideas but nothing really awesome. I think a name of the form [Cool Sounding Noun] Co-op/Cooperative/Collective would be great, like Robot Co-op or Oktogon Co-op or something. Or a cool animal. Or a historial person who is awesome. Or a neat foreign metro station. Or some kind of literary allusion. Ideas? We want to decide on a name for this thing tomorrow. Any/all suggestions would be appreciated. (-: Maybe our mission will be suggestive.

[Poll #458955]

Unfortunately Livejournal will only record your most recent answer to this. So if you have more than one suggestion (I hope so!) then you'll have to write them in a comment.

Comments

[nibot.livejournal.com]

I feel like making a reference to something in your name puts a lot of prejudice on the conception of the organization.

I think that's true to some extent, but also that it can be a power used for good and for awesome, if the thing you find has the right connotation. Oscar Wilde House has very little to do with Oscar Wilde, except that he was gay (and full of wit!). Lothlorian (also in Berkeley) has nothing really to do with Tolkien except that the residents are sometimes referred to as elves (in the same way that there are Cloyne Clones, Ridge Ridglings, Wildebeasts (!), ...); it's the vegetarian theme house and they have a treehouse. The names serve as a sort of lite theme that gives everyone something to rally around, but it certainly doesn't dominate the spirit of the place.

Feynmen, Rivendell, Ant Farm

Well, I don't think anything having to do with Feynman is appropriate unless we want to have something to do with one of the awesomest physicists of the 20th century—which, you're right, probably isn't appropriate. But Rivendell is a fairly harmless Tolkien reference, and Tolkien is hardly "obscure." I'm very fond of the Ant Farm idea, but I don't intend to force it upon this co-op. I think Ant Farm is an awesome name because of the image of a bunch of people living in a social colony like ants, but also because there was a group that I think was very awesome during the 70's that went by that name. Were we to have a theme resembling in any way what Ant Farm did, I think it would be great to be Ant Farm II. I would love to start Ant Farm II, but this co-op is probably not it.

f you call your co-op lothlorian, outsiders will think of RPGs and elves before anything else.

Isn't that true of anything? Red Octopus? I think of a Soviet sea monster.

I think literary references are great because they can convey a vague idea without being too specific. Maybe I also like the idea of adopting a faux sense of history from the get-go. Whatever the house is named, though, it will develop its own traditions and its own history. All of the houses in Berkeley have their own characters which have developed organically; the three that have chartered "themes" (lgbt, vegetarian, afro-american) are merely suggestive. I like the idea of a theme and I think we have one, even though we haven't quite figured out how to put it into words.

I'm fine with a "random" name too, though. I could warm up to "Red Octopus" but at the moment I think it sounds weird. Its main redeaming qualities are that Octopi are kind of cool, and it has the initials ROC. Red Mouse has neither feature. We should move beyond Color*Animal names I think.

What do you think of the local native plant idea?

I thought Sam Patch Collective was pretty cool.

EcoHouse's name is, of course, perfect: their theme (Eco*) and what they are (House) rolled into a single word.

I do think we should come up with two names: one for the corporation and one for the house itself. It's only the corporation we need to name ASAP.