One of the most common questions I get is, What does your name mean? Well, it’s actually a bit of a long story…

Back in 2003, when I was pretending to have a plan for my life, my Dad, my Mom and I were all sitting around the dining room table talking about possible company names. I don’t remember what my Dad suggested, but my Mom wanted names that were very “Oregon,” such as Big Green Tree Design, or Sustainable Rushing Water that Contains Happy Salmon Web Development. (She’s very sweet, so she won’t mind me writing this. Plus, she does amazing art. Actually, she often makes comments about being in labor with me for 48 hours.) Anyway, I wasn’t really happy with these names, because I felt like they were too limiting.

A brilliant idea

Brilliant, that is, if you like our company name. I decided to look up “father” and “son” in a bunch of different languages and paste them together in as many different ways as I could think of to see what we would come up with. After struggling to figure out how to do this for a while, I found the solution in a great website that will look up any word in English in hundreds of other languages: Logos Language Services. After coming up with such memorable combinations as Wawabab (Quechua and Romansch), Fizzupie (Sardinian and Galician), and Buwafi (Nepali and Wallon, whatever that is), we settled on Synotac, which comes from the Polish word for son (syn) and the Croatian word for father (otac). What do you think - how’d we do?