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A Most Interesting Name Story: Ampleforth

This image accompanied Ampleforth’s poem about my work

Learning something new every project is one reason I adore my job. And projects with learning curves steep and tall I adore all the more.

This is the story of one such project in 2018 which took me on a demanding journey through macroeconomic theory, digital currency algorithms, and a survey of Romantic philosophy and poetry.

It was obvious from the start, these three startup founders, Even Kuo, Brandon Iles, and Jessica Yen, were on a whole other level. Our first conversations were daunting. A high-level briefing on their cryptocurrency protocol wove together macroeconomics, currency systems, and cerebral Romanticism — topics about which I knew nothing. I relished the opportunity to learn all of it, to rise to the challenge of a bar set so high.

It took a while to even understand what I was naming. It wasn’t a cryptocurrency — THAT I could wrap my head around. My clients needed a name for their cryptocurrency protocol, the algorithm that governed the behavior of their digital currency. After the protocol was named, we’d figure out the cryptocurrency name.

Many clients characterize their company or product as revolutionary. But these clients were actual revolutionaries. They intended to challenge the domination of fiat currency systems — for example, US dollars, Euros, renminbi…and all other world-standard currencies — with a fair and just alternative that was not controlled by governments and central banks. My clients’ cryptocurrency was their cause.

Fragments was the working name. While impressive as a name, Fragments wasn’t a cause, it was a literal description of their cryptocurrency protocol: Tokens multiply or divide in number according to demand (the price per token never changes). As a cause-driven company, they needed a name which reflected their populist ethos and reason for being.

And when it came to names, my clients had very specific tastes.

“We like Sonnet.”

That said a lot. Despite revolutionary intentions, my clients were anything but militant. They pledged to win people over with humility and beauty in their fight to improve the world’s macroeconomic system.

Beauty was essential to their identity and technology. Their protocol algorithm, like a sonnet, was elegant, and equally rules-based. But to appreciate beauty only for superficial merits would miss all that lies beneath, my clients cautioned, for by virtue of their beauty, sonnets have the power to move people, to bring tears, to arouse passion, to persuade commitment.

For my clients, beauty that belies tremendous power was irresistible, and as a name requirement, irremovable. I was advised that to fully understand that concept, and thus their directive, I had to understand where it came from: Romanticism, the 18th century movement that explored the tension between the delicateness of natural beauty and the terrifying power of underlying natural forces.

Becoming expert enough in Romanticism would be welcome work, but I had so much more to learn. I knew nothing about cryptocurrency protocols or macroeconomics, fields of expertise that would ultimately hold the key to discovering my client’s new name.

And so, my creative preparation and exploration followed two divergent, uphill paths: Romanticism and macroeconomics. They would converge, somehow, in my client’s new name. That was the hope.

I started with a book, A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful by Edmund Burke, a borderline-psychedelic treatise on Romanticist concepts like pleasure, beauty, terror, vastness, and words. “Thought-provoking” does not even begin.

Into Romantic poetry I burrowed, seeking out words, ideas and symbols which signified the movement and held potential as brand names. But reading poems, even a lot of them, could only get me so far. To truly command the material, I needed to absorb all the poems, so I broke out the big guns: Corpus linguistics software.

Using Sketch Engine, my corpus linguistics platform of choice, I could analyze entire volumes of real-world texts to reveal instructive patterns. I started with Keats, compiling his every poem into a single text file that I uploaded to Sketch Engine which created a searchable, analyzable corpus.

I asked Sketch Engine to identify the top 1000 words most characteristic of Keats’ work by comparing the frequency of his words to the frequency of words in a reference corpus (all of Wikipedia, in this case).

A thousand words redolent of emotion, art, and nature filled the list. Lute, lyre, mossy, pearly, vesper, bower and sorrow were among Keats’ Keatsiest words. Others like upborne, eventide, phosphor, and immortal presented as tempting name candidates.

Continuing my exploration of the Keats corpus, I ran reports on specific parts of speech. What adjective-noun pairs characterized Keats? (Golden fruit, green world, endless fountain, invisible strings.) Could Keatsian prepositional phrases inspire names? (Across the blue, among the stars, into the bloom.)

After scouring Keats I created corpora from other sources, among them Burke’s Sublime Beauty, a compendium of lyrical ballads, and, for good measure, all of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Never has a project afforded me such a profound and beautiful immersion.

From these exercises great names emerged, but not the name. That came from an insight.

Understanding is a prerequisite to insight, and client-assigned readings facilitated my understanding of macroeconomics and currency theory:

I hadn’t been tasked with such difficult material since college. I struggled. I felt stupid. At the end of the day, I was no expert, but I understood just enough about fiat currency, ideal money, and my client’s cryptocurrency protocol to work with what I learned.

Armed with some understanding, I explored names along a path decidedly less romantic than the last.

Metaphors might pay off, so I turned to George Lakoff’s comprehensive Conceptual Metaphor database to find every metaphor for money, but there was only one: Money is a liquid. I considered money generally and relevant specifics in light of this metaphor: Fiat money as a liquid, ideal money as a liquid. I tapped out quickly, not a lot of names to be found.

Thinking further, I remembered one more metaphor: Money is speech, a fiction created by the US Supreme Court that lifted restrictions on political donations and spending, declaring them unconstitutional infringements on Freedom of Speech.

False equivalence notwithstanding, if money is speech, I wondered what kind of speech would fiat money be? It would be speech that is created, controlled, and sanctioned by the government.

That sounded familiar. Then it hit me: That’s Newspeak!

In George Orwell’s 1984, Newspeak is the only form of language allowed by Big Brother. An insidious simulacrum of English, Newspeak featured a government-mandated lexicon designed to control the population by limiting words to limit independent thought.

The qualities that define Newspeak — restrictive, government-mandated, hegemonic — also define fiat currency. I dived into 1984 to find a name.

We first meet Ampleforth in the Ministry of Truth where he translated classic works into Newspeak, stripping them of unacceptable words and ideas and replacing them with sanctioned language. Originally a poet, Ampleforth strived to maintain a semblance of beauty in his Newspeak translations.

But his dedication to artful writing was his undoing. For refusing to change a single word that would ruin the beauty of a poem, Ampleforth was imprisoned. In his words:

“We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word ‘God’ to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!” he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. “It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was ‘rod’. Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to ‘rod’ in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme.”

Ampleforth took a principled stand against Newspeak. He resisted Big Brother’s fiat lingua to champion beauty.

Little wonder my clients loved the name. Ampleforth represents a virtuous counterforce to an unjust establishment. Resistance without militance. As a principled and egalitarian alternative to fiat currency systems, Ampleforth made the perfect name for my clients’ protocol.

And what of the cryptocurrency name? It pretty much named itself: Ample (AMPL).

Later, my client launched their second currency: Forth.

Fast forward five years, Ampleforth is going strong. Recently, they posted this thread detailing why a character from 1984 represents the philosophy behind the brand. It was this thread that finally motivated me to get off my ass and write this post about Ampleforth, a name whose story I wanted to share.

Postscript: Shortly after the thread about name, @AmpleBot1984 extended a most profound gesture of generosity: A poem (below) and illustration (at the top of this post) commemorating my role in creating the name Ampleforth. As client gratitude goes, this takes the cake. And never has cake been so deeply moving. Click here to read the full poem.








credentialsAnthony Shorename story, creative names, memorable names, technology6 Comments