The Department of Nomenclature

The offices of the Ministry of Communications are situated, I think, somewhere near Victoria Station, in a vast stone building in a 1960s minimalist style that tells you nothing except how minimal its original architect and clients were.

Somewhere on the fifth floor is a long corridor on either side of which are big rooms housing rows of desks, each equipped with a computer and all other mod office cons. There are similar rooms on the sixth and seventh floors too, but we are referring here to those of the Department of Nomenclature, and in particular to the Fabrics and Medications division with its two units, usually abbreviated ‘Manmadfabs’ and ‘Dispensimarks’.

‘Dispensimarks’ is the office where the names for new drugs are created. A few years ago it was done by a small team of men, known as nomenclators, with a dictionary. The men would think up new and fairly predictable names like Throatex and Constipan and Pimplol, and one of the senior women secretaries would look in the dictionary to ensure that there was no such word already, and if the whole team thought the name was a good one, it was listed in the Official Index (HMSO) and in due course licensed to any manufacturer who thought they might use it.

Then computers were introduced, but they were so prolific of new names that the team of nomenclators had to be trebled in size, merely in order to rule out silly names like Prtotgn%_dz and HjTi#fbnaaa. This took up far more time than the old team needed to produce a similar flow of more serviceable names, so recently the procedure has been simplified.

Now the process begins at the ‘syllabary’, where new word-bits are concocted, mostly out of the heads of specially chosen young graduates with an ear for words and a poetical (but not too poetical) imagination. They prepare ‘pools’ of suitable short syllables such as -tri- and -pol- and -clor- and -zyn-, which are fed into a computer which treats them rather like the machine with numbered ping-pong balls that deliver the lottery winners. The syllables are produced in random order in batches of anything from three to six. These are passed across the screens of a battery of monitors, each watched by a senior nomenclator who clicks an ‘approval rating’ of 0 - 9 on the side of the screen. The scores are totted up by another computer, and only the top ten out of every hundred (you can see that the level of scrutiny is pretty severe) are passed to a ‘Referral Officer’ who takes each day’s list to be vetted by the Minister of Communications’s Senior Nomenclature Advisor who eliminates the ones he doesn’t like* with a blue pencil and refers it back to the Dispensimarks office to be typed up.

* ‘Tritoblerone’, for instance, he rejected because it might be read as an advertisement.

There is such a demand for newly licensed names for newly licensed products that the Dispensimarks staff can only just keep up with it. Names like Phlognostican and Drigoblin, Cratulopsipan and Plantospitrol, Sillimoxlin and Ganjospermadsidate, actually bring in millions of pounds a year to the Treasury.

There has, of course, been a black market in names. This was inevitable. Some have been produced in large quantities in innocent looking sheds on city allotments, or the cellars of houses in Islington. Many are imported illegally by word-smugglers who copy the names on to the back of the little round paper discs that you find at the bottom of tins of cough sweets, or are written on cigarette papers and then rolled and carried casually between the lips of day trippers returning from the continent. The following list was found by British Rail police on a small piece of paper secured to a bunch of daffodils with a rubber band in the left hand of an eight-year-old girl whose right hand was in the hand of her mother on platform 16 at Waterloo:

Vamstatsinim
Thrandestine
Preposterol
Polyphrasterin
Phytoglysterol
Dispralocalculaburol
Glyxtrocyclone
Crepuscinofozil
Pyglixiphogratulate
Brentiligropatine
Aspidoxipral
Spiflitoxin
Centrofigoblin
Fibrillipantimon
Propesterol
Hexodorodistine
Aspidoxapril

There is money in this business.

The Department of Nomenclature