The peppollas to blame for the weird names

October 2014

It was a crisp Sunday morning and I was taking a leisurely hike into Hedgesville to buy the paper.

I noticed that the side door to the old apple warehouse was standing open. I peeked in.

“Hello?” I called.

My voice echoed through the dark, cavernous building. “Hello?”

“Who are you? How did you get in?” a young man yelled as he came running to the door.

“I was just walking by and…”

“Go away,” he said. “Nobody’s supposed to…”

“What is this place?” I asked.

“It’s wEird wErd wErx, wIncorporated, and it’s secret,” he said.

“I won’t tell anybody, I promise,” I said. “I don’t know anybody. What do you do here?”

“Well,” he said, “we invent words. Names for new products, mostly. Medicine, cosmetics, other stuff. Even cars. We came up with ‘Volt’. With ‘Viagra’ and ‘Levitra’ too.”

“In Hedgesville, West Virginia?” I asked.

“Manhattan got too expensive,” he said. “And we wanted some quiet. Dreaming up new words is hard work. You have to concentrate.”

He was warming up a bit, so I decided to push a little. “Fascinating,” I said. “I wondered where all those funny names came from.”

“I did ‘Abilify’,” he said proudly, “and ‘Avodart’. I helped with 'Ambien'. I’m assigned to the front end of the alphabet."

“I'm a 'D,' for ‘Dave’,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand. “I think it’s got a nice ring to it. How about you? What’s your name?”

“I’m ‘Harmonia’,” he replied. “I used to be ‘Harman Harold Hotchkiss’, but ‘Harmonia’ sounds so much warmer, don’t you think?”

“Yes, it sure does,” I agreed. “How about the other people who work here?”

Harmonia hesitated a minute, closed the door behind me and whispered, “Are you sure you can keep a secret?”

“Cross my heart,” I said.

“Follow me.”

We walked toward a stairway in the dusky distance. “There’s a bunch of us here today -- Larria, Janava, Maggiemala, Frankovia -- working the weekend. We’re way behind.  A lot of new mediciines  both over-the-counter and prescription, are coming out for the flu season and they all need names.”

The top of the stairs opened up into a big, softly lit room divided into large cubicles marked “A through D,” “E through I” and so on, down to “X through Z”.

“Those folks at the tail end must have a tough time of it,” I said as we walked among the hushed, pastel  studios.

“No, no, they’re the ones who have all the fun,” Harmonia said. “Ever hear of ‘Zetia’, 'Zocor' or 'Zithromax'? How about ‘Xifaxan’ or ‘Xanax’? What a hoot!

"'Yohimbine' is a little awkward, I admit," he continued. "But it gets your attention."

"Yeah, 'Y' has to be a hard one," I said.

"Without a doubt. The people here who have to work with the vowels are the ones who get headaches," Harmonia said. "The folks stuck with 'I' suffer a lot of heartburn. 'U' actually causes ulcers. We try to avoid it."

We turned into a hallway that led to a small room filled with the soft sound of the ABC song, as recorded by the Hedgesville Elementary School afternoon kindergarten class. "This is our beginners' workshop," Harmonia said. "New hires work on easy stuff here, mostly automotive names. Way back when – we were still in New York then -- we came up with 'Mustang', believe it or not, and 'Impala' too. We're doing a lot of SUVs now."

"Did you do 'Corvette'?" I asked.

"No, Chevy came up with that one on their own," he said. "Corvair, Camero, Chevette and Chevelle, too. Some companies have their own name departmentsand get it right."

He handed me a hardhat and a neon chartreuse vest, and motioned for me to follow him down a stairway to the basement.

"This is our rehab division," Harmonia said, pulling a heavy metal door open. "We're trying to rejuvenate some old-timers, but there's some really tough cases down here."

In big steel cases with little, double-glass windows I saw the names "Pepto Bismol", "Listerine" and "Absorbine Jr." floating in midair, like holograms. "These are toughies, really in need of juicing," Harmonia said. "We're bombarding them with Higgs bosons to soften them up."

"By the way," he said in a confidential tone, "we didn't invent 'Higgs boson'. What a dog that one is. Somebody must have had a hangover."

"Do you ever just give up on a name, figuring it's hopeless and time to let it disappear?" I asked.

"Yeah, once in a while. We had to trash 'Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root', 'Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound' and 'Bonnore's Electro Magnetic Bathing Fluid'. They were just impossible. But nobody was buying the stuff anyway, so erasing them from public memory wasn’t hard."

His phone beeped. "Hey, sorry, I've got to get back to the grind. But it's been nice talking to you. What did you say your name was?"

"Davivana," I said. "Davivana Elliovolo. And thanks for the tourella."

“Remember, you promised to keep this secret. They find out I let you in here and I’ll be toastodoto.”

“My lips are seely-weelied,” I replied. “Nobody would believe me anyway. They’d think I was just making this up.”