Friendly-sounding words?
October 7, 2015 6:07 PM   Subscribe

In the “Steve Jobs” script by Aaron Sorkin, there is a little exchange between Jobs and Sculley in which the former says that the name “Apple” came from a “list of friendly-sounding words”. Regardless of why Apple is named Apple, do such lists exist? Is there any research on what makes a word sound friendly to people (phonetically, semantically, aurally, visually, ...)?
posted by omar.a to Writing & Language (8 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
AFINN-111 is a popular example of a list of English words that are semantically positive (or negative). Such lists are useful in 'sentiment analysis'. There are lots of others (e.g. the Liu Lexicon). Note these are words that are semantically positive (adjectives and adverbs mostly), rather than words like 'apple' that conjure up vague positive feelings by sounding friendly.
posted by caek at 6:17 PM on October 7, 2015 [10 favorites]


The folks at Lexicon help corporations name things.
posted by brookeb at 6:20 PM on October 7, 2015


It's not a list, but it's one of the words that is supposed to be pleasant in phonaesthetic terms: Cellar Door.
posted by guster4lovers at 7:45 PM on October 7, 2015


I named my kid Arlo because I thought it sounded friendly. Names that end in -o like Milo just seem warm somehow to me.
posted by bighappyhairydog at 8:16 PM on October 7, 2015


Bouba/kiki effect
posted by caek at 9:11 PM on October 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


Some words make you smile as you say them. Sunshine, raisin, they say pickle is a funny word.
posted by Oyéah at 9:33 PM on October 7, 2015


Potentially the friendliness of "apple" comes with the longevity of our association with it as readers. For me it was right there at the start of this (now rare) children's learn the alphabet book - as borrowed by illustrator Peter Blake for his alphabet series:
A is for apple so juicy and red
B is for baker who bakes buns for bread
C is for cat and the cot where you sleep
D is for dog on the downs with the sheep...


The old "grey elephant from Denmark" trick illustrates how clever "apple" is a choice - not only does it fall at the beginning of the alphabet - but it is the canonical representation of the letter A in English: ask somebody to very casually think of a word beginning with A and "apple" will be that word pretty often. There is really not much more friendly than that.

It's not a list, but it's one of the words that is supposed to be pleasant in phonaesthetic terms: Cellar Door.
Considering christening next kid "Cellador".
posted by rongorongo at 3:05 AM on October 8, 2015


Aside from the market research angle of this, at the time of Apple's founding most, if not all computers lacked plain english names, being either acronyms, model numbers, or made up shit from Star Trek (Altair). "Apple" was intended to stand apart from the techy/geeky naming schemes.
posted by tremspeed at 1:58 PM on October 8, 2015


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