The "What's a good name for this?" thread

Ideas for the last unnamed nazi supervillains' names in Red Revenge?

In-universe, the names are for propaganda purposes, and supposed to sound cool, intimidating, "heroic" or otherwise impressive. I'm trying to avoid single-word names that are just in a dictionary and the name of some existing thing, trying to rather go for word combinations, references to something relevant, or wordplay.

• Jan Messerschmidt, a german teenage boy who doesn't really have superpowers. He's a member of the Hitlerjugend and his single father was a soldier who died inna training accident in the 1920s. He's sort of the team leader Der Lichtträger's adopted son (age difference is only a few years), and accompanies Der Lichtträger when the team isn't gathered. He's a sniper whose official job is to give cover fire, and watches the whole team's backs when they're together. He doesn't have any powers, but is used in propaganda because he's there and closely associated with Der Lichtträger.

  • Adlerauge? Schutzadler?

• Romano Marchegiano, an italian man encountered in Rome before the war and manipulated into joining the team, which worked because everybody else ostracized him and he'd never had friends. He's a human/freshwater semi-Apparently Human Merfolk hybrid, with gills and webbing between his fingers and toes (plus cold tolerance, water-adapted senses, and Making a Splash powers), though the official propaganda story is that he's from Atlantis. He's a Kriegsmarine frogman and propably has a trident, at least for show, besides normal frogman weapons. The least evil one.
• Byron Ashford, an english man who would've been Lord Dover if he hadn't been exposed as a nazi spy, which forced him to flee Britain. He did, however, take the super soldier serum he was meant to steal before jumping into the channel so he wouldn't outlive his usefulness to the nazis. Despite playing hostage to blackmail his own father and indirectly causing his death with his plan B, Byron is mad about his death and wants revenge. Plus the nazis say they'll make him a lord after conquering Britain. Pretty generic low-level super strenght, endurance, and durability.

  • Schwarzer Drache, or something different from his father?

  • Algernon Ashford, Lord Dover, was Byron's father and a Central Powers super-spy in WWI, mostly because he had lost his fortune and needed money at any cost. Both to keep up appearances that everything was fine, and because he didn't want to lower himself into having a job. The Allies may have known he was british, and may have had an entirely different name for him. [He wasn't a nazi or connected to the team, but he also needs a german code name and Byron could decide to use the same codename instead of a new one]
    • Schwarzer Drache?

(The other nazi supervillains' names are Der Lichtträger^note  (an intentional devil allusion on meta level, in-universe it refers to him carrying the ""light"" of the ideology (is it plausible for the nazis who named him to be unaware that "Lucifer" translates as "Lichtträger"?)), Fegefeuer, Blitzkrieger, and Mutter Germania)

Edited by Nukeli on Feb 4th 2024 at 7:48:39 PM

Since I started participating in this thread, I feel like I'm losing my grip on the meaning of seemingly simple words like "bauen" and "fegen". Just another way how TV Tropes ruins lives, I guess...

So, as a general disclaimer for everything I say here: I am not a linguist, I am not a German teacher, I am not a professional translator, I am not a marketing person, I am not a World War historian. I am just a sample size of one person. Maybe we need to find a way to recruit more German speakers to this thread (though tropers in general are probably screwed towards "spends a lot of time on the anglophone part of the internet" and thus, not a perfect sample of native speakers).

~Marq FJA

Yes... kinda?

I don't know what an exact translation of "building the future" would be, and I think it works just fine as an English slogan for marketing purposes. But you can make similar statements if you allow for prepositions and prefixes. Just, once you do that, you can also get a completely contradictory meaning.

Hypothetical sales pitch:

This roughly translates to:

You see why I'm confusing myself?

~Nukeli

You... have a lot going on here.

Re: animal names

You obviously can name the cat and dog whatever you want, it doesn't have to be 100% correct German.

"Blaukopfhaut" sounds to me like something a young child or a cloudcuckoolander type of character came up with that everyone else thinks is a bizarre name. My brain, at least, parses it more like "bluehead skin" than "blue headskin". Which is what "Kopfhaut" means, it's literally the skin on your head, usually in the context of people who still have hair (bald head is "Glatze").

Alternative name suggestions: "Blaukäppchen" (diminutive of blue cap, reference to Rotkäppchen, a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hood), Blauköpfchen (diminutive of blue head), Herr/Frau/Fräulein Blauhaar (Mr/Mrs/Miss Bluehair). Or maybe something completely different?

"Rotstrümpfe" works grammatically because it is a name. If you are literally referring to a pair of red socks/stockings, then it's "rote Strümpfe". A group (gang, tribe, movement, military unit) that consists of people wearing red socks, particularly of the over-ankle or over-knee variety, could call themselves the "Rotstrümpfe". It is a plural word, though ("der Rotstrumpf" -> "die Rotstrümpfe", or, keeping with the Little Red Riding Hood theme, diminutive is "das Rotstrümpfchen" -> "die Rotstrümpfchen"). If you want to have your one dog referred to by a plural word or if you want to have your multiple-legged dog referred to by only one stocking is ultimately up to preference. Maybe using a plural word as a pet's name is more common in English? But that is probably subject to language shifts, and I have no idea how people did this in the 1940s.

(As a child, I once bought a toy horse at a flea market and named it "Drei schwarze Monde", three black moons. So I'm really not in a position to tell people whether their pets' names make sense.)

Re: code names

For context, Nukeli sent me a list of heroes' and villains' code names via DM that I won't repeat here unless relevant to the discussion.

All the names are correct on a language level. The language used in the 1940s might have some additional pitfalls. We still had the distinction of Frau vs. Fräulein back then (same as Mrs. vs. Miss in English), so Frau [last name] signifies a married or widowed woman or at least someone of somewhat advanced age. If people - witnesses, authorities - view the character as a girl or young-ish woman, they might use Fräulein as a descriptive name. Also, people paid more attention to nouns changing due to casus back then. You don't have to do this in a non-German text, but technically, you get constructions like, "der Drache" -> "des Drachen" -> "dem Drachen" -> "den Drachen", "der Rächer" -> "des Rächers" -> "dem Rächer" -> "den Rächer" (I could come up with example sentences, but again, you don't have to do this). Oh, and also, grammatical genders are fun. Dragons and eagles get male pronouns and articles, so do words that describe a man's occupation like carrier or warrior, but fire is grammatically neutral (though people who know that it is a code name for a person would probably use male pronouns by default).

Having "Adleraugen" (plural) or being an "Adlerauge" (singular) is an existing expression for having good eyesight and/or an eye for difficult-to-spot things. It might have been used as a name before - it sounds to me like a very stereotypical made-up Native American name, and most of those stereotypes go back to Karl May and his imitators one way or another -, but it is not a bad name. Your other eagle-related idea maybe gets the image of a very German symbol across better? But that might be just me.

Side note on names used before, has nothing to do with German: Ashford is a name in the A Song of Ice and Fire universe, both a minor noble family and a castle. I guess there are only so many realistic-sounding English names that authors can come up with.

For the Nazi code name that you are still missing, maybe look at the things the Nazis were fond of? They were generally bad at coming up with their own ideas and good at applying Misaimed Fandom to things they didn't really understand (e.g. Norse Mythology, norse runes, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, genetics), besides stuff where the fandom might not have been that misaimed, though this is usually a controversial discussion (e.g. Richard Wagner).

Just out of interest. Is anyone currently participating in this thread even a native English speaker or are we all ESL-folks around here? Do you write your books, comics etc. in English or in your own language?

Edited by prinzessinnen-und-raben on Feb 8th 2024 at 12:12:21 PM

I'm a native English speaker. (And write in English.)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Feb 8th 2024 at 4:22:25 PM

I see that the German language is more complicated than I had expected. Maybe I should swap Bau- for something else — perhaps a German word that would help evoke the Germanic Efficiency stereotype.

How about Fleisshansa, after the Prussian virtue of Fleiß (diligence), which also happens to be a German surname? It could even double as indicating that the megacorp was named after the founder / someone that it deems to be the most important figure in its history, which is a common naming practice among German companies.

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 8th 2024 at 5:46:10 PM

Yes, "Fleiß"/"Fleiss" is a stereotypical German thing. The Boring, but Practical, Germanic Efficiency, hard-working, humorless stereotype. Not that we are all like that, obviously, but some people do take pride in it, including as a strategy in industry and politics.

Word of caution: "Fleiß" is diligence, "Fleisch" is meat or flesh (German "sch" is pronounced similar to English "sh"). So a company name like Fleisshansa could benefit from an alternative spelling to avoid accidental misreadings. For example, they could use the German spelling with the "ß" letter domestically and switch to a hyphen or space internationally. Or maybe you want to get a Black Humor Running Gag out of people misreading the name? Or maybe this is just me being bad at pronouncing words again (see above, sample size of one person).

Ohh, a real English speaker! Now, if you were also an expert in sixteenth century England names and living conditions... you would probably disillusion me because my setting is so unrealistic (I talked a bit about my made-up names in the latter half of this post).

Hahah, I am far from being an expert in... well, any historical naming, 16th century or otherwise! XD;

Anyway, let me say that being a native speaker doesn't make me more a "real" English-speaker than a second-language speaker.

Even if we go by skill—and I don't hold that such confers greater validity—I recall at least one person who had English as a second language who, by her writing at least, you wouldn't know was so unless she told you.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that, as far as I'm concerned, you're just as "real" an English-speaker as am I! ^_^

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Feb 8th 2024 at 8:43:19 PM

No, no, you do have a point. That said, rather than using a hyphen, I'm thinking of following either of two kinds of stylization based on real-life examples:

• Unconventional letter case, exemplified by FRoSTA. For example, "FLeissHANSA".
• Adding punctuation, exemplified by E.ON. For example, "Fleiss·hansa".

Which of these looks better? Personally, I'm leaning towards the first.

And are there any alternative ways to stylize the name that could serve the same purpose?

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 9th 2024 at 2:42:54 PM

okay what single words exist that translate into "the Clean Ones" and "the Unclean Ones"? I'm looking into making fantasy Puritans and I need a name for those and a counterpart for derogatory purposes.

Perhaps either "Pūrōrum" or "Mundōrum" for Clean and "Immundus" for Unclean?

The translation isn't exactly the Clean Ones and the Unclean Ones but Pūrōrum and Mundōrum are Latin words that mean clean and not dirty respectively while Immundus is one of the top Latin translations for unclean.

Edited by Cutegirl920fire on Feb 9th 2024 at 7:09:03 AM

Do you want the word(s) to be English of Greco-Latin origin (i.e. comparable to "Puritan"), or actual Greco-Latin (i.e. comparable to Fidei Defensor)?

For my superhero setting, our SHIELD equivalent has a special division that deals exclusively with magic and the paranormal. It has an official designation, but most of the ones who know of its existence simply refer to it as “The Haunted House”.

I also wanted to include a division that dealt with aliens, and another for handling “weird” sciences (time travel, machines with lots of Kirby Dots, GEL Fs, etc.) Any suggestions for nicknames?

Either is fine.

"The Flying Saucer" for aliens, "The Teller's Booth" for Psychics and "the Motherboard" for robots.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Feb 9th 2024 at 8:07:55 AM

The "pure" in Puritan is from Latin already (purus); comparable names from Greek would derive from agnos or agneia (so something like Agneides in Greek, or Agneists in anglicised form) or katharos (but the Cathars were a different Christian sect that called themselves that).

@Starbug:

For the "Weird Sciences" division, maybe "The Lab", or "The Machine"?

For the "Aliens" division, maybe "The Mothership"?

Both work for this purpose. Both ALL CAPS and non-standard punctuation can make the word stand out a bit when glancing at the whole page. Maybe write a bit of prose with either name and look how you like the effect?

Side note. Whenever you use a real company as an example for something for your fictional MegaCorp, I have an internal reaction like, "I don't think that this particular company plans to become our future dystopian overlords... or at, least, I hope so." Paranoia Fuel indeed.

Probably? I don't have any ideas at the moment, though.

Question. Want to use translation of the name Alice fir an Alice Allusion. I want to vet the following names to that end:

• Aliki (Greek)
• Aliza (Basque, but with a Hebrew cognac meaning joy)
• Adelhide (German/Dutch)

I think it is spelled Adelheid (see Heidi). Don't know if it's an exact translation of Alice, though. For someone in the typical Troper Demographics today, it would be a rather old-fashioned name.

it apparently isn't, but it's derived from the same root as Alice iirc. Hence why I brought it up here.

I suppose that my question is this: how apparent do you want the allusion to be?

Of those, "Aliza" and "Aliki" are perhaps the most like "Alice"—although "Aliza" I feel incurs the risk of suggesting "Eliza" instead.

"Adelhide"/"Adelheid" is—to me at least—a little less clearly a relative of "Alice", and so might result in the allusion being more hidden.

What could be a good name for the village that's full of refugees, minorities and other people escaping prosecution, especially from an Alien Empire occupying Earth?

Sanctuary, in reference to sanctuary cities as well as the idea of succor itself.

"The Foxhole"

Why?

Because then they have a backdoor out to escape if trouble comes crawling down after them. Also, foxes are incredibly clever when it comes to survival and outplaying the ones hunting them.

Besides, it can always be made anew if the old one is compromised.

Edited by Trainbarrel on Feb 17th 2024 at 6:22:31 PM

I'm trying to come up with a good name for a plant whose juicy fluid acts as a naturally occurring alcoholic beverage; the name is intended to be used in the Animal Talk-like language of animalistic Frazetta Men, so it makes sense to derive from a combination of simple English words to reflect the characters' primitive nature.

Any suggestions?

Maybe something like "buzzfruit", or, slightly more derived, "colfruit"? (The latter being derived from "alcohol-fruit".)

How good are their grasp of the English language?

Do they understand the meaning of the simple words or do they understand more but can't put it into better words due to not knowing any better ones?