Here’s the latest on company branding from the more-properly named Howard Davidson Marketing Consultant (formerly HoDaDingoBingo, and almost named Zzyxx, except it turns out that’s a shoe company).

Weird names are gone. No more. Ceased to be. Expired and gone to meet their maker. Stiff. Bereft of life, resting in peace. Pushing up the daisies. History. Off the twig. Kicked the bucket, Shuffled off their mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.

This is an ex-trend.

You remember the good old days of funky new tech company names. Yahoo! Mozilla. Ask Jeeves. KaZaA. Ruumi. Peeple. Airbnb. Uber. Heck, we’ve only gotten used to Google, but it was as weird as your Uncle Ernie when we first heard it. (Of course, BackRub would have been odder. And maybe actionable.)

What America knew first about tech companies was that, while their owners and employees might have been geniuses, they were terrible spellers and had limited vocabularies.

The graphics are changing, too. Yahoo! and Google used to have funkier typefaces. They were disruptors before disrupting was a Thing. The latest? GoDaddy – a company whose name had nothing to do with what it did and whose logo employed both funky lettering and a weird graphic of a mad scientist (or geek meth head?) – has sans-serifed itself into blandness.

Companies used to have reliable names. Solid names that told you what they did – International Harvester. General Motors. General Electric (sorry about that Dow Industrial thing, by the way). Or you knew who was running them, and that you could rely on them. Young & Rubicam. Ford Motor Company. Boeing Aircraft Company.

I actually blame advertising for this. We’ve gone from NW Ayer & Son to Razorfish, Wexley School for Girls, and G&M Plumbing. It’s as if everyone in the communication business wishes he had started a band. Drummers get all the chicks. (Except the ones who spontaneously combust.)

So yes, during this time, I must confess, I considered branding my consultancy as HoDaBingoDingo. Wait. HoDaDingoBingo. Or was it DingoBingoHoDa? HoDa Kotb?

In the end, I settled for Howard Davidson Marketing. But I’m toying with camel-casing “Davidson.” Or maybe just putting “Howard” in all caps. Or replacing all the vowels with their Greek counterparts and the consonants with hashtags. But then you’ll be able to figure out my password.

Howard Davidson