Yak

Image from http://handmadebymother.blogspot.com/

I have just finished the final draft of my iPad app Cool Speech which I am developing with Firsty group. We had a fair bit of discussion about the name of the app. But one private indulgence which I did not share with them was a brief consideration of using ‘Yak’ (=chat) as the title. (I get a great kick from thinking about names and titles of publications and talks see posting of Monday 30th May 2001 ‘The Vices of Listening Comprehension‘).

‘Yak’ (illustrated above) is a nice informal title for the kind of product I had in mind. If I was decades younger, I might perhaps have the courage to use it. It has advantages: short, memorable, could work well as a ‘wierd-name-that-is-so-wierd-that-it-might-just-catch-on’. Like Twitter, or Spotify. Being so short, it can go where other longer titles cannot: on an icon in the Apple app store, on T-shirts, etc.

Always worth checking it doesn’t mean something rude, though.

My Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English iPhone app lists two meanings: the first relates to the illustration above:

an animal of central Asia that looks like a cow with long hair

and the second

to talk continuously about things that are not very serious, in a way that is annoying

Not very positive vibes. And the (not for the faint-hearted, eighteen rated, if-you-value-your-virtue-never-look-at-it) urban dictionary also provides useful but funny information. The seventh set of meanings listed is the one I expected to see first:

1. prolonged speech without empathy or edification to the listener’s subject matter; 2. conversation deemed inappropriate to a situation or the context of the discussion; 3. any conversation heard by a third party

But the urban dictionary’s preceding six meanings include ‘vomit’, ‘cognac’, and ‘cocaine’ and the wonderful (fictitious?): ‘To make out in fur coats’.

Jeepers! I had no idea!