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If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

The Dirty Word Test

You’ve carefully picked a company name, secured a nice, short domain name, made some graphics, and your website is up and running. But no one knows how to say it without sounding like they are saying a four-letter word. You used to work in Marketing (or next to the Marketing department). You overheard a lot of advice to clients, like “Don’t use any words for your company name that are swear words–or sound like swear words–in another language.” Sound advice, for sure. How about sounding like a swear word in plain old English? No one mentioned that–because it was so d*mn obvious.

What a mess! What do you do?

CafeFAQ had that exact problem. We say “had” because we are SO over it. SO FAQ’in over it. We decided to go for it, big time. Something along the lines of (and we really paraphrase here) “nice people don’t get ahead” or something like that. In our defense: we were so innocent we didn’t even hear the “f*ck” connection. (We were way more concerned with whether we should use an apostrophe for FAQ’ed or not. We decided to go ahead and get grammatically crazy and use it. Now that doesn’t mean YOU can go crazy and use an apostrophe with FAQs–but please don’t.)

Hey, it’s not exactly doing Stand Up in the nude

So you are going to stand out a little and maybe piss a few people off who can’t take a joke, or are in a bad mood (that day and everyday). If you really go wild, you might have to restrict your site to 18+ year olds. You might get “censored” (a real concern–censorship is alive and well in the US). But you also might get some true-blue followers, who dig your naive deference and subtle and not-so-subtle references to your crazy name choice. OR they just love jokes–of any kind.

Hey, it’s not like you are doing Standup Comedy naked or anything–so grow a few.

Just Do IT

We say: you EMBRACE it (does that sound dirty?). LIVE it. You OWN it. Put it on and WEAR it around (does that sounds dirty, too?). Once things sound a little dirty, EVERYTHING sounds dirty. BEARS IN THE WOODS. BEARS IN THE WOODS. DON’T THINK ABOUT BEARS IN THE WOODS. YIKES, BEARS! You can’t fight it and you shouldn’t even try. It’s your BRAND now.

You might even become a brand that is thought of as “wildly creative” like Old Spice (“If your grandfather hadn’t worn it, you wouldn’t exist”) or Dollar Shave Club (“Our blades are f***ing great”).

The Duck Test: if it FAQs like a duck…

To decide if there is a consensus on some topic, Wikipedia uses the Duck Test for their internal testing. They even use a duck template that looks like this.: {{subst:duck}}. The test is “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” We would add “sounds like duck.” The consensus is in: FAQ sounds a whole lot like f*ck a whole lot of the time. Close enough.

The Sky is Blue and So Are You

Some of us like things to be clear, like, really clear, not muddy or confusing. Some people are sensitive and serious and not always looking for a cheap laugh anywhere they can get it (like we are). These people are “sky is blue” types and to them we wholeheartedly apologize if you are hot and bothered by all this. We are sorry if you do a wrenching double take seeing our name, or hear the snickers offstage and they upset you. Actually, we want to apologize ahead of time to anyone who is bothered by the sound of our company name or who has children in the room with them right now.

To super-mean troll detractors, wherever they are, we say: And so are you! And something that rhymes with “duck you.”

BTW, “Duck Typing” is also a thing, used in computer programming. It’s a little like stereotyping by attribute.

Credits: Bullhorn by Us . Standup by Michel Grolet . Duck by Ross Sokolovski . Clouds by Henrik Dønnestad