tainted syllable?

A few days ago a friend of mine twittered that he had just had lunch with the folks at viewzi. With lots of friends in the internet biz, it's not uncommon to see this sort of thing fall into my twitterstream, but something caught my eye. The -zi on the end of the word looked really odd. Not just odd, but ominous.

Viewzi is a new search engine. It is alleged to be different from other search engines in some fundamental and significant ways. I won't argue any of that. I do have a problem with the name though. Look at other search engine names: Google, yahoo, ask, altavista, dogpile, metacrawler. Some of them are less than appealing, but none of them conjure visions of blonde boys in brown shirts and jack boots.

It's not so much the sound of the name (I'm sure they don't pronounce it [vjutsi]), but the graphic representation of that final syllable that gives me the willies. When I searched for words ending with -zi, I found only six that are commonly used in English. Sorted by frequency, nazi was number one, with 13 appearances per million words.

Four of the remaining five words were Italian and one was from Arabic. I would suggest that when and English speaker sees -zi appended to a word that looks native (like view), the most readily available association is not paparazzi, or intermezzi, (as sinister as these can be...) but with nazi. This is only a hypothesis mind you.

I think some market testing of the name might have been a good idea. That's all I'm saying.