I recently started noticing how many products I use have martial, dangerous-sounding names. I recently bought ‘renegade’ mountaineering shoes and ‘predator’ swimming goggles (this one is really a bit of a poor naming choice if you ask me). These are good, quality products, but I really don’t get what, for instance, mountaineering has to do with being rebellious - on the contrary, indiscipline will get you killed up there. Let’s not get into swimming pool predators.

Now the obvious answer to the question of why to name your products like this is that people associate your product with action and adventure and are more likely to buy it. Really? Since when?

A quick search reveals that for 1920ies car models this is not the case. The most aggressive we get is the Rolls Royce Phantom. 25 years later there are WWII fighter planes named ‘Lightning’, ‘Thunderbolt’, ‘Warhawk’ and ‘Spitfire’. Some googling suggests this was a pretty new thing, which is supported by the fact that Axis planes did not have such names. Axis armor, on the other hand, was named after predator cats: The Tiger tank is still arguably the best-known tank of the war even though relatively few were built. It also fits a wider Nazi worldview in which the strong prey on the weak and do not only have the right, but the responsibility towards nature to do so.

It seems, after the war, these naming schemes caught on for cars, as we can see on this 60ies car model list: There we have Maserati Mistral, Ford Thunderbird, Shelby Cobra, etc. Even a Dodge Super Bee. Notably, German car makers went back to numbering their cars. Maybe, after creating several predator-cat-themed tanks, companies like Porsche did not want to draw too much attention to that history.

So there we have it - is Nazi ideology ultimately responsible for my stupid swimming goggles? Maybe. As opposing evidence we can find Jaguar, an entire car brand named after a predator cat, and see that their first production car came out in 1935. Hitler was already in power and Nazi propaganda was already a thing but the war did not start until 1939. But Nazi parties were quite popular in the UK at the time, so maybe there is some Nazi history at Jaguar? A quick Wikipedia search brings up that Jaguar was called “S.S. cars” between 1935 and 1945 when they first started using the Jaguar model name. Ouch! Look at that logo.

To some extent, this kind of animal symbolism is probably a lot older, think Roman legions carrying around eagles and so forth. But for modern consumer goods, it seems to have originated in WWII propaganda and was adopted by brands after the war.

So yeah. Each time you buy a gaming mouse you should probably cringe a little, knowing that these aggressive names may (my somewhat sloppy research leaves some uncertainty) originate in Nazi social-Darwinist ideas.