Nom de shoe, part I
I bought a pair of Naturalizer shoes last week–I don’t even know what they call these kinds of shoes, but they’re the ones that are sort of like a cross between a ballerina flat and an athletic shoe. They were so comfortable, and reminded me so greatly of my high level of satisfaction with all the Naturalizer shoes that I have owned, that I decided to go on Zappos late one night and see what else they had.
What Naturalizer has, apparently, is someone in charge of their shoe-naming department for whom English is not a native language. An un-Naturalizered citizen. Or perhaps they just pick words randomly from the dictionary. I mean, I understand Buckled–
because it is. Uninspired, but accurate. As an etiquette writer I suppose I have to appreciate this shoe:
although its social skills don’t seem to be noticeably superior to those of its solemates. (Sorry.) But this?
And these?
If you’re a company trying to sex up your sturdy and sensible brand, I don’t think “Let’s start a Bureaucracy Club line of products!” is exactly the way to go about it.
At least this shoe has a locomotion-relevant name:
although it doesn’t look quite sturdy enough to stampede in. And surely if velocity is your goal you aren’t going to be wearing mules:
Even odder names coming in part II!
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That reminds me of the many times we’re driving along and criticizing car names. “WTF is a Yaris/Camry/Touaraeg/whatever?”
I mean, at least Pinto and Gremlin were real words.
Kate and I noticed recently that they also have a “Prissy” shoe, which naturally led us to suggest the following models:
Harpy
Slutty
Airhead
Maenad
She-Devil
Banshee
Ballbuster
and so on. I didn’t realize at the time that they were just pairing random words with the shoes, though.