Every now and then, I come across a product that has an utterly ridiculous name – the kind of name that belongs on The Onion and not on the market. For example, there’s the Time Timer: it’s supposed to be an advanced kitchen timer with a few extra functions thrown in. According to customer reviews, that overpriced ($21!!!) monstrosity doesn’t really work all that well. Worse yet, “Time Timer” is not just a horribly named product – no, it’s the actual company’s name. Somewhere, someone must have thought it was a great idea…

Moving on, we have a fairly cheap tablet computer (“only” $449!) from ASUS, entitled ASUS Eee Pad Transformer. I don’t even know where to begin with this one. First of all, what does “Eee” mean? Is it supposed to be pronounced in a shrieking voice at the top of one’s lungs? (“Eeeeek!!!”) What is that mysterious “Pad” and how does it transform? Does the tablet make a shrieking sound as it defies all known laws of physics and transforms into a bachelor pad? Does it transform pads into something else? Or is it a cleverly disguised transformer named Pad who lives off EEE batteries? (As opposed to, say, AAA batteries.) Looks like this gadget’s power is only exceeded by its mystery.

And of course, one can’t talk about horrible product names without mentioning Apple. It seems like their marketing department has either been playing a prank on all of us for the past few years, or has been outsourced to some third-world country that doesn’t understand the many intricacies of the English language. Case in point: iPad. As in “intelligent pad.” Pad, people – do we all know what that means? Makes me wonder how many women work at Apple’s marketing department… It gets worse, though: the video-chat feature that was introduced in the new iPhone is called – brace yourselves! – “face time.” Yep, they went ahead and called it “face time.” If you don’t know what that means, I won’t ruin your innocence. Go play some flash games or something. Deep inside, I hope that this was all intentional and that Apple is just having a ball: no matter how ridiculous their new invention is named, legions of Apple fanboys will line up and buy it as soon as they can. When you have a monopoly, why bother with things like product names?

The absolutely worst thing about this is that I’m pretty sure each of those product names was created by a PR and/or marketing team, and the “masterminds” responsible for those linguistic atrocities probably got paid for their heroic efforts. Given the caliber of ASUS and Apple (Time Timer seems to be a start-up), they probably got paid quite well. *le sigh* I should have majored in marketing…