All That Makes Gold Does Not Glitter
“Me? I’m a logotect. I make words – well, there’s lots of kinds of us, some specializing in ordinary words, some in jargon, or in seals, or in meaningful names, or whatever. Technically, I’m a euphemigen. I’m the opposite of a normal eonymic; I make words that sound unlike the thing they name.”
“Some that you’ve heard of? Spend any time in finance? I’m most well-known for the division names I cooked up for Asymptotic Alpha, a couple of hundred years back: Suprapolitan Facilities, Sovereign Liability Management, Legislative Combinatorics, and Indirect Freight Services. Not my best work, but they’ve become quite popular in the industry.”
“Well, some offworld investors get quite skittish when things are called what they actually are. My terms sound so much nicer – or easier to just quietly slide past and collect your dividends – in the annual reports than ‘company habs, tax avoidance, regulatory manipulation, and smuggling’ would be.”
“So, what do you do?”