Velum: On the Naming of a Cocktail and Why Everything Deserves a Name That Means Something
A name is the smallest poem you will ever write.
By Mark Andrew Palmer · · 6 min read
I named a cocktail once. Not branded. Named. These are different acts, and the difference is the entire subject of this article, so let us begin there.
I named a cocktail once.
Not branded. Named. These are different acts, and the difference is the entire subject of this article, so let us begin there.
The drink is built on Balvenie 12. There is more to it, but the recipe is not the point tonight. The point is what happened when it came time to call it something. Because the easy path was right there, wide open and well-lit, the way easy paths always are. Call it something whiskey-adjacent. Something with Oak or Barrel or Smoke in it. Something a laminated menu would accept without argument. The beverage industry has an entire graveyard of these names, and they all died of the same condition, which is that nobody ever meant them.
I named it Velum. Latin. The veil. Specifically, the veil between the known and the unknown, the membrane that every mythology in human history has insisted exists between this world and whatever has the audacity to sit on the other side of it. The Greeks had their thresholds. The Celts had their thin places. The Norse had their nine worlds strung on a tree. Every culture that ever looked seriously at existence concluded that there is a curtain, and that certain things, ritual, art, grief, love, and yes, occasionally a very good Scotch, can pull it briefly aside.
That is what the drink is for. That is what the name says. One word, and the whole cosmology comes with it.
A name is the smallest poem you will ever write. Most people phone it in and then wonder why nothing they build feels like it means anything.
Mark Palmer
Here is the question worth sitting with: what does a name actually do?
A name is a compression algorithm for meaning. It takes everything a thing is, its history, its intention, its philosophy, its posture toward the world, and crushes it into a handful of syllables that have to survive being said out loud in a crowded room. It is the highest-stakes writing assignment that exists, and it is routinely handed off to a committee, a brainstorm, or a Tuesday afternoon.
Consider the scale of the compression. A novel gets eighty thousand words to make you feel something. A poem gets a page. A name gets two or three syllables, and those syllables will be spoken more times than every other word ever written about the thing combined. The name does more repetitions than any tagline, any manifesto, any about page. It is the hardest-working word in the entire enterprise, and most enterprises treat it like a formality standing between them and the logo design.
The ancients understood this in their bones. Naming was never clerical to them. It was theological. Adam’s first job in Eden was not agriculture. It was naming. The Egyptians believed the true name of a thing contained its power, which is why gods guarded theirs like state secrets. The Romans had a phrase, nomen est omen. The name is the omen. The name is destiny. They believed that what you call a thing participates in what the thing becomes.
Twenty years of building brands has convinced me the Romans were simply correct.
I named my agency Omythic. People assume it is a made-up word, and it is, in the way all the best words were made up by somebody. It carries myth in its chest, on purpose, because the entire philosophy of the place is that a brand without a mythology is a logo with anxiety. The name is the thesis. Every client who walks in the door has already been told what we believe before anyone says a word, because the word on the door said it first.
I named my art archive Kloven Arkiva. The cloven, the split, the threshold, an archive that lives at the seam between the known and the unknown, which is where all the work worth archiving actually comes from. It sounds like it was carved rather than typed. That is not an accident. Nothing about a real name is an accident.
And I named a cocktail Velum, because a drink you have at the end of a long night of making things deserves a name that admits what is actually happening at that hour, which is that the membrane gets thin and things come through.
Notice what these names have in common. None of them explain themselves on contact. All of them reward the person who asks. A name that must be explained has failed, but a name that can be explored has succeeded at the highest level available to a word. The first encounter gives you the sound. The second encounter gives you the meaning. The tenth encounter gives you the philosophy. That is not confusion. That is architecture.
Nomen est omen. The Romans said the name is destiny, and then they named an empire after a founder and lasted a thousand years. The people naming things "Innovate Solutions Group" should sit with that.
Mark Palmer
Now let us have a moment of silence for the way most things get named, because it deserves both the silence and the eulogy.
The committee gathers. The whiteboard fills. Somebody suggests a portmanteau of two category keywords. Somebody else runs it through a trademark search and an available-domain filter, which is how the modern world came to be populated by companies with names like Qelvix and Brandeon, words selected not because they mean anything but because nothing was legally in the way. The name is chosen the way a parking spot is chosen. Available. Adequate. Close to the entrance.
And then, this is my favorite part, the same organization spends the next decade and several million dollars trying to inject meaning into a name that was specifically selected for containing none. They hired emptiness for the lead role and then act surprised at the performance.
Here is the deeper thing, the thing underneath the branding conversation, the reason this piece belongs on my personal site and not just an agency blog.
The care you put into naming something is a precise measurement of how seriously you take its existence.
This is true of companies and cocktails and it is true of everything else. The painting you title Untitled #14 because titling felt like effort. The venture you call something safe because something true felt exposed. We name carelessly when we are hedging. We name seriously when we are committing. A real name is a stake in the ground that says this thing is intended, this thing has a lineage, this thing is expected to matter. Which is exactly why phoning it in is so popular. An empty name is deniable. A meaningful one is a confession of ambition, and confessions of ambition can be laughed at.
Name things like you mean them anyway. Let them laugh. The Romans are still famous.
Somewhere in my studio tonight there is a glass with a Velum in it, and a cigar going, and twenty-six unfinished paintings waiting for names they have not earned yet. When each one finishes, it will get a real one. Not a number. A name. The smallest poem I will ever write for it, and the only one that will follow it everywhere it goes after it leaves my hands.
Because everything deserves a name that means something.
And everything gets exactly the name its maker believed it deserved.
Choose accordingly. The word on the door goes first, and it never stops talking.
Tags: Branding, Life and Philosophy, Creative Process, Naming, Velum, Omythic, Kloven Arkiva, Brand Strategy, Language, Mythology, Mark Palmer