(no subject)

[timelets]

“...the Special Products Division next called in Foote, Cone & Belding, the advertising agency that had lately been signed up to handle the E-Car account. With characteristic Madison Avenue vigor, Foote, Cone & Belding organized a competition among the employees of its New York, London, and Chicago offices, offering nothing less than one of the brand-new cars as a prize to whoever thought up an acceptable name.

...Suspecting that the bosses of the Special Products Division might regard this list [18K names] as a trifle unwieldy, the agency got to work and cut it down to six thousand names, which it presented to them in executive session. “There you are,” a Foote, Cone man said triumphantly, flopping a sheaf of papers on the table. “Six thousand names, all alphabetized and cross-referenced.”
A gasp escaped Krafve. “But we don’t want six thousand names,” he said. “We only want one.”

“Edsel” was a disastrously unfortunate combination of syllables. What were its free associations? Pretzel, diesel, hard sell. What was its opposite? It didn’t seem to have any. Still, the matter was settled, and there was nothing to do but put the best possible face on it. ”

--- John Brooks. “Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street.” Apple Books.

Idea generation is useless when there's no rigorous selection process. I feel that it can be modeled as a topos because the codomain for the names is 1.