I don’t care what Elon Musk says, I’m not calling “Twitter” by the new name “X”. So what if he paid $44 billion for the company? Does that give him the right to confuse our brains like that? And, as far as I’m concerned, Facebook is still Facebook and not “Meta”. So there.
Did you know that Google was originally named “Backrub”? Jeff Bezos first named his company “Cadabra”—as in the magic word “abracadabra” but he was told it looked too much like the word “cadaver” so he changed it to Amazon. “Pepsi” was originally called “Brad’s Drink” after its inventor Caleb Bradham but became Pepsi which was short for “dyspepsia” – indigestion, a condition the soda was supposed to cure. Still, why bring up indigestion—so to speak?
Cedar Rapids was originally called “Columbus” by a squatter by the name of Wilbert Stone who jumped the claim of Osgood Shepherd, a horse thief and himself a squatter who tried to run Stone off his land until he was threatened with an ax by Robert Ellis while he was chopping wood. Somebody liked the cedar trees by the river and renamed the place Cedar Rapids.
Kenora, Ontario was originally “Rat Portage”. There is no record of why they changed the name. Maybe the local high school couldn’t get anybody to be the Rat Portage homecoming queen. Regina, Saskatchewan used to be “Pile Of Bones”. Puddletown, Great Briton may sound like an insulting name for a city. But it used to be “Piddletown.” In order to honor its indigenous people, Barrow, Alaska is now “Utqiagvik”. And if you know how to pronounce it, you’re entitled to live there. With Ukraine in the news lately, broadcasters have been struggling with the pronunciation of the capitol city, Kyiv. It seems that the old name, pronounced, “Kee-ev” is the way Russians said it—which Ukrainians don’t like. So broadcasters are calling Kyiv, “Keev”. Which Ukrainians still don’t like. But, it seems, only Ukrainians know how to say it correctly.
Sam Smith from London was tired of being just another one of many Sam Smiths. So he changed his name to “Bacon Double Cheeseburger”. He admits the change has its drawbacks. “My fiancée is fairly reluctant,” he said, “about marrying a Cheeseburger”. (What will they name their first child, “Frieswiththat”?) Tim Price, also of the UK was tired of being pestered by telemarketers so he changed his name to “Tim Pppppppppprice.” He figured when they saw his unpronounceable name, they’d skip over him. (Now Tim’s friends just call him “10P”).
I blame Adam for all this renaming business. He named the animals. Oh, and Eve, too. At first, she was called “ishah”, woman. Later, she became Hawwah, Hebrew for Eve and possibly also “snake”—which seems a snarky name for your wife, especially considering the general shortage of women at the time–even though she was known to chat with a certain serpent. But he might have been in real trouble if he had tried to rename her “Twitter.”