by Garrison Frost

Some time ago, back in 1999, the organizers of the struggling Hermosa Beach Film Festival were looking for a way to breathe some life into their failing venture. They came up with a new name, one they were sure would electrify visitors into attending. From now on, they pronounced (not knowing that "from now on" meant something like a month), the festival would be called SilverSands Film Festival at Hermosa Beach. That's when I knew the festival was dead, finished, kaput, put asunder not by poor tickets sales or industry indifference, but rather by the Convoluted Name Disease.

It wasn't the first time the dreaded Convoluted Name Disease had reared its ugly head in the South Bay. Not long before, some idiot on the Redondo Beach Harbor Commission actually suggested renaming the pier The Pier at Redondo Beach. The idea went nowhere, but just the fact that it was proposed meant that something was wrong, horribly wrong.

The pier survived its bout with Convoluted Name Disease, but there was no way the film festival would make it. And sure enough, after one last horrible outing, the festival died a quiet death. It was lucky. Other local institutions haven't been so fortunate. They've been afflicted with the disease and gone on living. A short list of these include the Avenue of the Peninsula (formerly called the Shops and Palos Verdes), the Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities, the Lakes at El Segundo and Beach House at Hermosa (formerly Ocean Lofts at Beach House).

One should be mindful that the disease is not limited to the South Bay, not by any stretch. In the larger Los Angeles area, one will find The Grove at Farmer's Market, The Shops at Rodeo Drive. Lawry's The Prime Rib. Ivy at the Shore, Bistro Garden at Coldwater and The Promenade at Howard Hughes Center. One of my eternal favorites is the restaurant at the Getty Center, which is called Restaurant at the Getty Center.

Lots of places and things don't have names anymore, they have whole sentences. They have directions. They are the Something at Something-Something. How long can it be before they start giving names like this to cities? Can you imagine The Beach City at Hermosa? Or The Sort of Mountain at Palos Verdes?

Some time ago, we asked Ed Zoerner, a professor of Linguistics at UC Irvine, if these names were really as wacky as they seemed. He assured us that while the names were grammatically correct, they violated several rules of normal communication.

"You don't normally have prepositional phrases in proper names," he said. "They're also avoiding the obvious compounds, which is anti-economical. Linguists hold that language exists on the principals of economy."

Which is to say that any normal person would call it the South Bay Civic Light Opera rather than the Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities.

"I would suppose that people are trying to establish themselves as a point of destination," suggested Michele Lando, one of the professionals at Skilset Communications, a Pasadena-based marketing and branding consultant firm. "They're probably trying to create a sense of space, a grandeur and experience."

But it's not just the awkwardness of these names that is so alarming, it's the lack of specificity, particularly with the use of the prepositions. For instance, the "at" in The Lakes at El Segundo. Certainly "at" can mean "in," but doesn't the choice of "at" instead of "in" imply that the writer meant "at" but not "in"? As if the Lakes weren't in El Segundo, but merely right up against it, waiting for someone to let them in.

Of course, no one ever said that commercial proper names have to make much sense. The landscape has always had its share of Speedees, Qwikees and Redeez. And just look at all the non-words that modern companies are using these days: Cingular, Verizon, Sav-On, just to name a few. I've always been particularly intrigued by Rite-Aid. Is it "rite" as in ritual, or "rite" as in "right" as in correct?

Of course, to a professional, the names make perfect sense. For instance, Lando explains the non-words as the result of big companies looking for domain names that haven't been registered already. "Real words are just no longer available," she says.

"I don't think people have a clue what it takes to come up with a name these days," Lando added, noting that the criteria for branding and naming can include everything from the competition to how it looks graphically to pronounceability to corporate philosophy.

"When people think that people in my business are just going to sit around a room and shoot out ideas, that's just not the case," she says.

That's all fine and good, but it's still disconcerting to have to take a breath before one is finished saying a name

Fortunately, as my linguist friend Zoerner pointed out, people are rarely fooled into thinking that something is more upper-crust or interesting just because it has a laborious name.

And sometimes the people who are victimized by Convoluted Name Disease come to their senses. Just recently, the owners of the Galleria at South Bay announced that they would soon change the name to the South Bay Galleria. After all, according to a spokeswoman, that's what people had been calling it anyway.

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