Cantillon: Any old portmanteau just won’t do

What’s in a name? A lot, apparently. Companies spend a fortune on rebranding, with the freshly-minted appellation the linchpin of the new identity.

Preferably, it has to roll off the tongue, resonate with (or at least not annoy) the customer, and perhaps most significantly, in these multilingual times, not offend anybody or, worse, end up as a joke or meme.

Car manufacturers set the bar with Qashqai and Ka (bad pun, tends to annoy after a while), words that seem to mean nothing but conform beautifully to the above standards.

The industry, after all, had to gets its act together after bringing us such classics as the Daihatsu Big Horn (enough said) and the Isuzu Mysterious Utility Wizard (random bunch of words).

Here, we are not immune to the blandishments of the rename.

Take the Irish Dairy Board, a stolid name redolent of sober men in dusty offices doing their best for milk. One quick rebrand later and Ornua is born.

See what they’ve done here? Ornua or ór nua, new gold. A name that references its benchmark brand, Kerrygold, and nods in the general direction of the first language. What’s not to like?

We also have Renua (ré nua), Lucinda Creighton’s new party, a bilingual pun which translates as new epoch and reads like renew. All good, no? Not really. We thought conflating words or names to make a new one reached its nadir with Bennifer and Brangelina, but we were wrong.

The new (or should we say nua?) words mean nothing – they’re just all sound, while also riding roughshod over the Irish language where the fada is king, not just something to be arbitrarily used. At least the car industry has an excuse with its dismal record in the naming department. And Qashqai sounds like cash cow.

Now there’s a thought for Ornua.