Syfy.
Clear your head and imagine all the wonders that word conjures up in your mind's eye. In your soul. In your imagination. In fact, why don't you Imagine greater?
(And, please, keep a lid on the backward-looking, grammar-fetishist part of your mind that might object: "Imagine greater what?")
This is the sort of nonsense being sold by corporate suits at the Sci-Fi Channel, which on July 7 changed its name to Syfy.
First, let's get something straight: I love Sci-Fi's (or Syfy's) shows. The cabler is one of the few places that value creative programming.
But after two weeks, I still can't stand the meaningless name, and I cringe whenever I hear "Imagine greater." (And, yes, I can't help but ask each time: "Greater what?")
It's all straight out of a Monty Python skit: The change in name hides the fact that there's been no change in content.
As Syfy president Dave Howe tells Channel Guide magazine, "There isn't going to be much of a major programming overhaul at all."
Um - OK! Right! Sorry to ask, but, Why rebrand at all?
"What the new brand does is make more sense of what we've already been doing," says Howe, who clearly belongs to the Stop Making Sense school of linguistics.
If Howe worries that people who see the old label will expect "space-based . . . traditional . . . kind of sci-fi," then why change it to a word pronounced exactly the same? (I say tomahto, you say tymyty?)
Syfy "gives us a point of view on the genre," Howe says - as in the view from no-where, no-thing, and no-sense. "It gives us an attitude, it gives us a personality." (I've always thought chimeras had great personalities, too.)
How does Howe describe Syfy's fare? "We're going to occupy the broad landscape of sci-fi fantasy." Yep, he said sci-fi.
He contends that the change will attract more consumers. It's a simple logic: The new name and slogan are meaningless and empty, and so they're malleable enough to fit any product, including, say, presidential candidates.
Syfy's move is another tiny step in an ongoing revolution to remake our entire world in the name of consumerism.
When every possible product, including art, must appeal to every possible person, and every idea must be understood by everyone, then anything that is different is mashed down into the same bland porridge.
Unlike new terms in science, rock and hip-hop music, or street culture, which expand language, rebranding impoverishes culture.
It also reveals the emptiness of what passes for innovation in today's corporate world. It seems that unless CEOs fiddle with their products on a regular basis, they'll be accused of ineffectiveness.
And what better way to look busy than to change labels? It's a sylly shell game. A trick to pacyfy stockholders and vyewers. And it amounts to little more than stringing together a bunch of buzzwords: rebranding, repositioning, forward-looking, and that recent standby, synergy. (Now, that's an idea! How's the Synergy Channel? Sci-Fi-Ergy? SyFynergy?)
You don't need a semiotician or a synergistic Bard to tell you this all amounts to "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."