everythingistaken.com is taken
Feb 15
Has anyone else out there tried to name something lately? A new business? A website? Your e-mail address? Your dog?
Well, I’ve got some bad news for you. No matter how creative you think you are, no matter how unusual you think your name is, no matter how hard to try to come up with something original, it’s almost certainly already taken.
Unless it’s your dog, then you can name it anything you damn well please. Fido, if you must. But if your dog wants his own website, and why shouldn’t he, he probably won’t be able to get www.fido.com. (Let me know if I’m wrong.)
For me, it started with AOL. Yeah, yeah, I know, I could use one of the other browsers but hey, I got buddies. Maybe I don’t have people, but I got buddies And I just love those instant messages. They don’t replace e-mails, but e-mails don’t replace phone calls, and phone calls don’t replace face-to-face meetings, and face-to-face meetings don’t replace a weekend in the Caribbean, but I digress. The thing is, I do love my buddies and their instant messages.
So I tried to get a good e-mail address on AOL. Guess what? Couldn’t use patfortunato. Even though it’s not that common a name, so I tried pfortunato, pafortunato, pfortune, and any number of variations, including the ever-popular ms.fortune (yuk, yuk). Undaunted, I even checked out my old penname, jjfortune. No luck. And then I turned to my nickname, Auntie Pasta. Surprise! Surprise! Also taken. So I tried different spellings, including Auntypasta, Antipasta, and AuntieP. Taken, taken, and taken. Aunta Pasta in all its glorious silliness, not available. So that I, known throughout the land as Auntie Pasta, at least to my many nieces and nephews, cannot use it. The noive!
I finally settled on pat followed by four numbers, which is a kind of code for Fortunato. So far, only two people have figured it out for themselves, but if you do, it will entitle you to send me an e-mail to my personal address instead of to this site. Big hairy deal.
Then I had another challenge: helping to name an online publication for women. My first choice was Woman About Town, but of course, that was taken. I worked for hours, days even, coming up with other names. I tried ForWomen, ladyonline, womansworld, webwoman and others too numerous to mention.
Then, by some miracle, whereby the cosmic forces of the Internet merged with the phases of the moon, which happened to be in the second quarter and Jupiter was, thank Zeus, aligned with Mars (I AM an Aquarius, after all), I found a name. And the name was . . . Woman Around Town. About/Around. So near, and yet so far. Jack, who put together and maintains this site, was impressed that I found anything with just three words that wasn’t, you know, taken.
Getting sidetracked for a minute, I can’t help but wonder whether maybe finding that name had something to do with the two truly wonderful geeks from Apple who fixed my Motherboard (why does that sound so obscene?) during this period. I know. That doesn’t make sense, but does anything make about computers (or Life Itself) really make sense to those of us who aren’t Bill Gates or those cute geeks from Apple?
So what’s going on here? Could it be simply that “all the good ones are taken?” Like men. Say it ain’t so! Or are there people sitting around making up names for everything they can think of and then then registering them so that they can sell them? Which would be the American way, would it not? On the other hand, I found a pretty good name for the online paper from England, so there are entrepreneurs everywhere, it seems. The name was for sale for 700 dollars. Or pounds. We weren’t sure. We also weren’t sure it was even legal.
A great name (and site) for women is: www.wowowow.com. Sounds good, looks good, nice and short, and it really says it. I have read that the women who started that, including Liz Smith and Lesley Stahl, paid to get the name, which was originally a porn site. Nice going, ladies, but you had a pretty big budget – reported to be in the neighborhood of a million dollars. Nice neighborhood. Anyway, I guess it is legal. At least in the good old USA. (I just found out that before they came up with wowowow, Liz Smith, in desperation, wanted to name it All The Good Ones Are Taken. I feel her pain.)
By now you’re wondering why I myself have such a many-worded name for my own blog. when I worked so hard to find a short one for the paper that I merely write for. Well, I liked the name, damn it, it’s fun, and it made people laugh. So I registered it. Quick: before someone else did! But when I started actually using it, I saw that even I, the Spelling Queen who goes around the city correcting the signs, kept typing it in wrong: beleive it. So, silly me, I tried to register it with an alternate name. I wanted to keep I Can’t Believe I’m Not Bitter, which we all will get to know and love (promise), but figured it would be a good idea to make it available under a simpler form, say, I’m Not Bitter. In the words of my people, fuggedabouddit. Don’t go there. Literally.
Go instead, whenever possible, to www.i-cant-believe-im-not-bitter.com. Hypens added for readability, but you don’t have to use them. You can even make it all caps. Yes, yes, I know that on the Internet, that’s like shouting, but MAYBE YOU FEEL LIKE SHOUTING. Especially if you’ve been trying to name something yourself and are getting just a tad frustrated.
But after all this, am I bitter? No way, and to prove it I decided, just for fun, to register another name: everythingistaken.com
And of course, as you have undoubtedly guessed, it too is taken.
