Without rhyme or reason

I am often accused, not without reason, of making things up. Only last week, television actress Anna Friel - a close showbiz friend - called me on my mobile telephone to say, 'Tim, surely you jest about the true nature of Microsoft's attitude to DVD. And by the way, that photograph of you in PC Dealer is devilishly attractive.'

But the truth is, I can't make up stuff that's weirder than real life.

Take last week, for instance, when I was finishing a round of crazy golf with my variety buddy, computer enthusiast and occasional karaoke partner R Kelly. 'Do you know the story of how Intel came to name its low-cost chipset Celeron?' he asked, trying to distract me as I leant over the crucial putt.

I knocked the ball past the gnome, up the hill, over the tiny bridge and firmly into the hole. 'Pray tell,' I said, as I took my winnings from him.

Mr Kelly, or 'R' as we call him, related how Intel asked Lexicon Branding, the company that came up with the name Pentium, to think of a few hundred possible names. Celeron won, being a combination of the Latin Celer (speed of motion), the old English cell ('hints of a living force', says Intel) and 'on', which is apparently the sort of ending that technology words have. Also, if it had chosen 'y' for the end of the word, the processor would be named after a salad vegetable and would inevitably be confused with the Motorola Cucumber chipset, which, according to R, isn't the same thing at all.

The conclusion, says R, is that Celeron implies solidity and reliability too, as well as being suitably meaningless so that it doesn't cause offence in any language - unlike Zoob cough sweets, which, he assures me, mean something rude in Arabic ('Go suck on a Zoob' advertising is apparently jolly offensive).

'You're making it up, R,' I told him.

'No way,' he said, 'I used a branding company myself to relaunch my career.

Originally my second name was Soul.'

I rarely take a man's word for it, especially when he cheats at crazy golf. And especially when he sings about how he believes he can fly, so I checked with Intel about how it chose the name. It's all true! 'The four consonants create a smooth, flowing sound, giving it a pleasant, poetic quality,' the company says.

In an industry where we are used to naming products after relatives (Lisa) or pieces of fruit (Apple, Apricot), or randomly throwing together upper and lower case letters sprinkled with numbers (just about everything else), stringing together words poetically to hint that a processor is a living force is a welcome development.

Look out for more brand name poetry soon. Already the name consultancies have left their mark on such products as the IBM GutBucket server range (from 'Gut', representing toughness and capacity, 'buck' representing virility and youth, and 'ET' meaning something that's dropped from another planet). Okay, so I made that bit up.

Tim Phillips is a freelance IT journalist