Before the cries of big Papi in the 2000’s or the “YOUK” chants, there was a more common full throated yell at all of the Red Sox games I watched back in a former life when I was a big time baseball fan:
NOMAR!!
I mean its just fun to say, especially with that full throated Boston accent like a bad mix between Leo in the departed and Affleck in Good Will Hunting.
But for all the great sports names, Joe Montana, George Brett, Babe Ruth, how in the heck do you spell Nomar Garciaparra? How long did it take announcers to learn how to say it. Probably as long as they needed, because once he got good enough, they HAD to learn it. The same as Kevin Youkilis.
Some day I dream of writing a book just about names. How they influence life, and shape the world. Would my life have been different if I was a John the way I was supposed to be versus the Shawn (non-irish spelling) the way my mom said it was going to be ?
Nomar seemed to embrace it – Telling Sports Illustrated:
He chose to go by his middle name because, as he told Sports Illustrated in 1997, “when somebody yells out ‘Nomar,’ you don’t have to worry about five people answering.”
But that Steve Martin quote that I see so often “be so good they can’t ignore you” kind of misses one small part in this web age … don’t they have to find you first ?
Maybe now its: “be so good that google will auto-fill your name?”
Or, be so awesome that when someone asks google a question, like who is the person who always talks about the idea of [blank] – that you pop up. We do this for song lyrics all day long. Certainly people are doing it for thought ideas.
When I couldn’t remember how to spell (and couldn’t even say) the Zeignarik Effect the other day, even though I had read about it several times recently across several books, I just asked google: what is the thing that makes you remember unfinished things better than finished ones?
And of course Google nailed it.
Did google always know the answer to that? Or did it learn it the more people wrote about it in journals and books? I have no fucking idea.
One of the best things on the Internet, Farnam Street Blog just recently changed their URL to http://www.fs.blog . Their founder remarked about now people could actually find it, but I never had a problem finding it, because it was so frigging good that I just always remembered. Kind of like the sure hitting Garciaparra.
I was interviewed for a business podcast recently, and one of the hosts was talking about the interview on a different episode, but couldn’t remember the URL. So there I sit cringing as two hosts run through all of the possible URL’s .com … .net … of course its www.funcorp.biz one of my many new projects. I tried several times to no avail to get .com, and subsequently got a bit of a lesson as one of the hosts used this real time case study as an example of why you “always buy a .com”
But does it matter ? Or should the company be so good that google knows its good? That the idea is way more important than the extension? That the name or brand supersedes the fact that the extension isn’t ideal.
In 5 or 10 years will URL’s even matter? Will they still be a thing? Again I have no fucking idea.
Maybe Nomar knows …
Simpletition - Shawn D. Madden 