Noo name

O.K., so I decided to start a blog, a travel blog which would not be exclusively about the Noovo van but about travel in general. Something for friends and family, and for anyone else contemplating heading in the general direction that we are heading. 

 Right away, I needed to find a catchy title. So I did what anyone would do lying awake in bed in the dark after waking up at 3 am, I asked ChatGPT 5.0 to suggest a few ideas.

Here’s what I asked:

I’m thinking of starting a new blog. It will center on travel in an RV van. Since the van brand is Noovo I thought it might be good to have the word “new” in the title, since Noovo is just an Americanized spelling of the French 

ChatGPT, after praising my sharp instincts and wisely worded prompt (AI chatbots tend to be butt-kissers), suggested these titles:

New Roads, Noovo Roads

The Noovo Journal

Always Something Noovo

Noovo Horizons

The Noovo Way

Noovo Journeys

Among others. While some of these have promise as a title of a coffee table book highlighting a brand (e.g. replace the word “Noovo” with “Airstream” to see what I mean), they wouldn’t work for my blog. First, I didn’t want the actual product name in my title—I am in no way affiliated with Noovo. Second, these are awfully long, both to say, to remember, and to type. www.alwayssomethingnoovo.com? Really?

A long conversation ensued with many suggestions and many course corrections on my end. We were brainstorming, from a biological brain to an LLM brain.

I was looking for something catchy, something that would pay homage to Noovo, but at the same time allow the blog to venture far from any specific product. I also wanted to write about travel other than van travel. Most of all, I was looking for a blog name with a beat. Something with a little forward motion.  

There are pages of transcripts—I must have chatted with the AI for an hour, and then, way at the bottom of the transcript, while we are looking at names with available URLs, she ( I think of it as a “she” for some reason) suggested a new list of possibilities, which she formatted as a chart:

Idea	Notes/Why it might help
NewRoadLife.com	Combines “new road” + life, still short.
NewVanLife.com	Directly signals van life + new.
NewVanRoads.com	Merges van + roads.
NewJourneys.com	Simple and travel-oriented.
NewRoadTrips.com	Road trip + new — signals what you do.
NewWander.com	Wander + new — evokes exploration.
NewWayLife.com	Using “New Way” + “life” to differentiate.
NewPathways.com	Adds “pathways” for breadth.
GoNewRoads.com	The “Go” helps with availability.
HelloNewRoad.com	More friendly, but potentially memorable.

And there it is. Something catchy, something punchy, second to last. GoNewRoads. GoNooRoads. It’s a little ugly in print and a little awkward to pronounce.

In parallel, I’m typing into names to Bear, my word processor. OurNewVan. OurNooVan. TheNewVan. NewVanLife (too similar to Nova’s URL, noovolife.com), NewSunriseNow.

I liked that last one, NooSunriseNow but it lacked punch, and I wanted a hint of the kind of travel the blog would be centered on, van travel. The next entry is NewVanNow. NooVanNow. That’s not bad, the alliteration of the repeating “n’s” is good, it is easy to remember, it looks good when printed. But it sounded like I was demanding a new van. Like I had an old van, maybe, and I was insisting on an upgrade. Too bossy.

And then the next line finally gets it right: NewVanGo. NooVanGo. NooVanGo.com.

It’s got charm, it’s easy to say, it looks good in print. The “Noo” both gives homage to the Noovo brand, when printed, while when spoken it will “read” simply as “new.” (NewVanGo.com will also lead to the web page.)

The “Van” will refer, of course, to our van, to the mode of travel, but van is also a word (less and less used—it is interchangeable with vanguard) that refers to being part of something fresh, something good, something that breaks with the past. And that is how we feel about both the company and the van it makes, and about our small part in this growing movement. A rethinking of how to live life, a drive to break free from the screens and the news cycle and the groupthink.

And the “Go” is the verb that gives the name action. Go, just go. Stop thinking about it, stop hemming and hawing and being distracted by all of the technologies that are specifically aiming to distract you, to “engage” you. Just go. Start living your life.

The font used in the NooVanGo logo, IBM Plex, is one I’ve been using since 2019, when I used it for my first photo book and I’ve used it for everything I do since then. It’s my font now. The colors, the bold blue, green, and orange, are chosen because blue is Lori’s favorite color, orange is mine, and green seems like the color of the travel we will be doing with the van. The pure brightness of the colors reminds me of the colors of a Van Gogh painting, straight from the tube.

NooVanGo. It captures everything I hope to achieve both with the van and with this blog.

---

What ChatGTP giveth, ChatGTP taketh away. 

Noovo is, of course, just the semi-phonetic version of the French word nouveau. In English usage, it tends to mean something newly created (perhaps the vans themselves) or something that is just gaining recognition (in my imagination, this is the importance of quality manufacturing in the RV industry). You hear the word used most often in nouveau riche (or nouveau rich), a phrase that is aimed at people who have suddenly acquired a measure of wealth but not the manners or cultural norms that go along with well-born old money. 

You also hear the word used in Art Nouveau, a design and art style popular at the turn of the last century and still commonly seen today.

I’m not sure Noovo intended either association. (Surely they didn’t want to suggest that they or their customers were out-of-their-league upstarts with too much grubby cash? And the logo for Noovo is in more of an Art Deco style, if not much later, rather than anything from the Art Nouveau movement?)

NooVanGo, as a name, has its own unintended associations. I’ve shared the reasoning behind each syllable but what I didn’t share was that I asked ChatGTP what NooVanGo would sound like in French, what it might sound like to a French-speaker. The French word nu is, according to the AI, the nearest French word to the English “new” and a French listener would likely hear “new” or “noo” as nu. Which means ‘naked” in French. And the “VanGo” part would sound like the name of the famous artist.

So this site, in an AI French translation, becomes Naked Van Gogh. Not a bad name, really.