What's In a Name

I am and have always been, a terrible speller. Way back in my law school days, when the briefs were hand written, I had to circle the word decision on my dictionary. Not only could I never spell it, I could never even spell it well enough to find it on the page. Thank you spell check. And then I went and took a profession where spelling matters. A lot.

I enter names into computer databases. If I spell the names wrong, I don’t find what I need to find. Pretty good reason to be careful with my spelling. Not only did I learn fast to be better with my spelling, but I learned that there was often more than one way to spell the cat. Was it Allen or Alan; Jeff or Geoff. Now, those databases I search provide some ways to mitigate your spelling risks. For instance, there is the “wildcard”, (* on Lexis), which stands for any letter. If you enter S*dney, it would account for Sydney and Sidney. Another thing you can use is the truncator, essentially a way to avoid too much spelling (e.g., “!” for Lexis) to cover name variations. Searching me, you could put in Rob! to get Robert, Rob, Robbie, or even Robb if my Mom were a Game of Thrones fan. On the other hand, Al! would get you Allen and Alan, but it would also get you Alfred and Alonzo and Albert and Alistair and who knows what else, and it would be noisy (as we say). You need to know a bit more than using a truncator.

Sometimes knowing how to enter a name is knowing when you need to enter less. In a recent assignment, I was looking at a company that had like four words in its name. I put all four words together, using quotation marks, to find that exact company in articles. I found none. So, I discarded a few of the words in the company name. As I mentioned in my last post, it is often when you don’t find anything that the real work starts. Sometimes you have to cast a wider net.

An interesting thing happened when I made the company name less exact. I found some significant dirt; allegations of commercial bribery and maybe some tax issues too. None of this stuff happened at the company I was searching, but it turned out that the people connected to the company I was searching had gone from their bribery outfit to set up a new company with a name like the name they had given my client. I do not have an explanation for the other company name and how it relates to the company name they gave us, but through the owners, I can connect to the bad company and that’s all that matters. None of this would have been found if I just entered a name.

If you do not enter a name correctly, if you mean Susan when they said Susanne, you will not find the references in your searches. Yet, there are times when you also need to enter less of a name to get to the right stuff. Knowing what’s in a name is a key tactic in good research.