Flight risk

A name that should have been dead in the water.

In order to figure out what makes a good name good it helps to understand what makes a bad name bad. It’s a subject I’ve devoted a great deal of time and thought to; I’ve even developed a taxonomy of bad names (gift link).

One category of bad names, however, deserves an entry of its own: Classically Bad Names. These are the borrowings from ancient languages, usually Latin or Greek, that so completely misunderstand the source as to be farcical — or tragic.

Thanks to friend Mike Pope I think I’ve discovered the ne plus ultra of this name type. Mike found it on Threads and forwarded it to me.

“The worst name possible”

Was Icarus Flying Academy an April Fools’ Day joke? Alas, no: It is a real business in Farmingdale, New York. Its unironic tagline is “Quality Instruction • Passion • Excellence.”¹

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You probably know why this is a Classically Bad Name, but I’ll break it down for you anyway. In the Greek myth, Icarus is the son of the craftsman Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth of Crete. To help Icarus escape imprisonment, Daedalus fashions a set of wings out of feathers and wax for the two of them and warns his son not to fly too low (he’ll sink) or too high (the sun will melt the wax). Elated to be soaring free, and also kind of an arrogant dick, Icarus ignores the instructions, flies too high, and plummets to his death. Moral: Listen to your father, and don’t get too cocky.

“The Fall of Icarus,” by the 17th-century Flemish painter Jacob Peter Gowy

As the title of a 2017 documentary about doping, Icarus was a perfect metaphor for ambition and folly. As the name of a flying academy, it couldn’t be worse.

As one commenter on Threads put it: “Icarus Flight, where you can soar as high as your dreams will take you … once … and briefly.”

I wish I could tell you that this Icarus was a uniquely bad mistake. Unfortunately, I found many aeronautic Icarus brands, including Icaro Air, an Ecuadorian airline; and Icarus, the Greek airline that preceded the obviously preferable Olympus Airlines².

All of the people behind these names should have known better — and should have kept reading the story beyond “Whoo-hoo, I can fly!” all the way to the tragic denouement.

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Icarus isn’t the only classical protagonist whose name has been twisted into a symbol of excellence by modern brandmongers.

King Midas turned everything he touched to gold, but that was a curse, not a blessing. (You can’t eat gold, and a golden statue of a beloved daughter is a cold, dead thing.) Nevertheless, “Midas” abounds in brandworld, from Midas auto services (originally Midas Muffler, founded in 1956) to Midas bottled water (founded in 1871; I guess it turned into gold for someone), to Meidas Touch News (pronounced Midas), the progressive media company founded in 2020 by the brothers Meiselas with “content contributions” from their 14-year-old [sic] sister.³

Want more? How about Pandora, whose name means “all gifts” in Greek. Her curiosity, or naïveté, led her to open a jar (sometimes rendered as “box”) and release countless evils into the world. Yes, “hope” was left behind as a tiny comfort (what was it doing in a box full of evil, anyway?), but the story is a tragedy nonetheless: Merriam-Webster defines “Pandora’s box” as “a prolific source of troubles.” And yet here we are with Pandora jewelry, Pandora streaming music, Pandora beauty, Pandora wine, and dozens more Pandora trademarks.⁴

I admit that I may be taking all this a little too seriously. Maybe I’m still too much under the influence of that mesmerizing, doom-warning copy of Myths and Enchantment Tales I received as a young child. I’ll concede that “Pandora” has a pleasant sound and is easy to pronounce in many languages. “Midas” contains that irresistible syllable “my.”

But I’m having a hard time making similar excuses for “Icarus,” which begins with ick, after all, and which has no silver — or golden — lining, or even that tiny residue of hope.

Next time you go to the classics for naming inspiration, be sure to read all the way to the end of the story. And don’t skip the stern moral.

1. I’m surprised they didn’t shoehorn “elevated” in there, too!

2. Actual elevation in that name!

3. I wrote about Meidas Touch shortly after its launch. I raised the same objections to the name back then that I do now.

4. My favorite may be Pandora’s Box: Lifting the Lid on Menstruation, a 2019 documentary sponsored by the menstrual-cup company Diva. This film is of course not to be confused with Pandora’s Box, the 1929 silent film starring Louise Brooks. I wrote about the latter in 2023, when it screened at Oakland’s Paramount Theater.