X: From Twitter to X: What in heaven’s name is going on

“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet,” uttered Juliet in William Shakespeare’s eternal classic “Romeo and Juliet”. Or as they say in Hindi “naam mein kya rakha hai”. You can call it X, Y or Twitter — as long as it works, is successful, and makes money. Names, after all, are quite a personal choice. Take the case of Mithun Chakraborty’s son who is named Mimoh Chakraborty.

Mimoh’s “Mi” came from Michael Jackson and “Moh” came from Mohammed Ali — two of his father’s favourite icons. The Bengalis have a penchant for keeping rather funny or unusual “daak naam” for their kids. Though to be fair, nicknames across India are way too random as Piku, Chiku, Sonu, Monu, Babli, Chhutki would testify. Those are nicknames though and are more like terms of endearment and can be random. For brand names, it is a different story altogether.
In the last week or so, a rather iconic brand name was laid to rest by none other than one of the world’s richest men. Twitter ceases to exist anymore and is now known as X. Elon Musk’s fascination with X goes back more than decades as one of his earliest companies was called X.com — which later became PayPal. There are enough stories about Musk fighting tooth and nail over keeping the name X. Better sense prevailed and X became PayPal but not before Musk had a rather cool email ID (e@x.com).

The real question is Y
Now, Twitter is X and it is confounding on so many levels and raises so many questions. What are we supposed to say when asking someone to come on Twitter and check something? “X pe aaja” or what if you don’t want to name someone who said something on X? “X said something on X…” Or are the men who work at X called X-Men now (oops, Warner Bros. may sue once they sort out the messy writers’ strike). Twitter had Twitterati or the cringe-inducing “tweeps or tweeple”. What are they now? Xerati (sounds like a cheap copy of Maserati) or Xeeps (that sounds creepy and gives you the creeps, no?). X may or may not catch on but it is likely for a while people are still going to call it Twitter. X and Musk — the company X and not someone we didn’t want to name — are going to push hard for the name X to replace Twitter in the lexicon. X this, X that, X number of users, here an X, there an X, everywhere an X X. One more X and it would have been problematic. So much so that it would annoy you a lot and you might want someone to paraphrase the iconic Amitabh Bachchan line from “Sholay” and say “tumhaara naam kya hai , Twitter?”.
Remember the name
It’s not easy to come up with a brand name and make it catchy or something that leaves a lasting impression. Would you have a “Brad’s Drink” if it was called that? But that’s what Pepsi’s original name was. Brad’s Drink would not have been a multi-billion dollar multinational company.
There’s a famous story about Jeff Bezos who wanted to call Amazon “Cadabra”, inspired by Abracadabra – a magical new world of online shopping. He called his lawyer and told him over the phone, who heard Cadaver and not Cadabra. That sounded a bit murder-y and Bezos backed off and ultimately named it Amazon. Google actually is the incorrect spelling of GooGol –
Or the story of how Volkswagen got its name. It was sometime in the 1940s when Germany’s auto market was predominantly luxury cars. A bunch of companies decided to make affordable cars meant for common folk or a “people’s car” and hence Volkswagen (which is pronounced as “Folks-Vagen”).
Brands have boring names as well. Take the case of Intel which is short for “integrated” and “electronics”. Or Durex, which is an acronym for Durable, Reliable, Excellence.
So we are here with X. The idea Musk has is to make an “everything app” and Twitter in that sense didn’t make any sense anymore. Musk could have named it anything and he actually did. After all, if you have billions of dollars, would you really care what the company is called? “Sab chalta hai”, no?