11d (edited) • Domaining
A note on "spelling"
Name-type domainers!
When I go through my morning routine of skimming my list, I always come to think of some simple fact that is not really obvious unless you stop to consider it. (Language is packed to the brim with these things we do all the time without thinking about it.)
When we learn to read, it's laborious at first. As we keep reading however, our reading speed increases. Some can read very fast. How?
Turns out that the brain learns to anticipate and skip the parts that would impede comprehension. We don't read letter for letter, we use something called "word-pictures".
At the word level, this means that we visually gauge the specific word, wordpart (or set of words), and spelling really only becomes an issue if there is ambiguity in terms of meaning. That is *if* it is likely that the mis-spelling can be interpreted in some other way, that would change the overall interpretation. We may pause for an instant, perhaps re-read the sentence, but if the meaning is sufficiently clear then we carry on.
(This is also why logos and fonts are important. They underline some aspect and can this way build a bridge to understanding the whole concept.)
In all other cases, getting hung up on "correct spelling" is more of a way to feel superior. To know better. Basically table-manners.
Now, in fact, brand naming intentionally utilizes that mental pause effect instead. Breaks those particular rules. (When you don't have a full sentence to consider, the role of spelling changes since there is only one or two words to focus on; it becomes more influential) Sometimes brand-naming even uses ambiguity in terms of meaning to grab attention.
The pause effect is valuable. It can create what's called "salience" - that something jumps out at you. (Or rather - what you see and what you ignore since it just aligns with what you would expect.)
There are other effects of spelling that relate to pronunciation, and I think those are also misinterpreted. Basically, in language, there are words and there are rules. Words in this sense is what we memorize. Rules are how we string and inflect things together. Phonology is the "sound rules" of the language. It is not based on letters. Letters are for writing.
I think domainers often misguidedly think of specific letters instead of word-pictures, the way they would normally read. And they confuse words and rules, even though if they stopped and just did what they normally do, they would not.
The way language works, even when reading, depends on the way the mind works. Yours too.
An effect of that is that one single letter can alter the entirety of the name in more ways than one. Another single letter, perhaps somewhere else, may not.
It is therefore *only* the overall impression that matters. One way to gauge it is to simply read and not overanalyze or pre-impose some simplistic mold like a set of suffixes and prefixes or whatever.
You can do that, but only as long as you in the end (or right away) assess the overall.
The way I see it, names really can't be mis-spelled. "Maria" is not a more "correct spelling" than "Mariah". They can however cross the line and become too cryptic, like "Ma'rihah" or something.
That is part of the balance between novelty and familarity that I have mentioned.
I hope this helps.
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A note on "spelling"
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