It was the late Robert Hughes's remarkable TV series and book on modern art, The Shock of the New, first seen in the early 1980s, that with its title so deftly captured the both the excitement and the puzzlement to the beholder of creative novelty and innovation. And it is in many ways a self-fulfilling phrase, since epigrammatic, yet meaning-laden titles and names are the stuff of the broadcast programmer and the namer of new products. The new can indeed be shocking to the beholder, and Hughes's title says it in a sharp, monosyllabic manner whose five-word cadence has both balance and rhythm. Shuffle the words – or render them in a different grammatical format (‘novelty shocks’, for example) – and it falls apart. Words applied to new things and events matter, because they need to be repeated and, the makers hope, be talked about; resonance and repeatability are important to original things being launched on an unsuspecting public.

I recall with a wry smile when, as a BBC producer, I was making for Radio 4 a major millennial series about a thousand years of the English language. Melvyn Bragg was already signed up as presenter, the first couple of programmes were in the can and busily being edited, when the wonderful Marion Greenwood, then running the Radio 4 publicity machine, worriedly convened a meeting of a host of people with interests in the series. The Controller, James Boyle, was there, so were heads of department, editors and people from the burgeoning online team. ‘We must,’ begged Marion, ‘settle on the title. The programme needs to go out to radio critics for preview this week, or we'll get no coverage!’

It wasn't as if we'd not been thinking of what to call the series. We'd spent many, many meetings doing just that. But in time-honoured fashion, we couldn't decide. And now I had in my hand a sheaf of papers for the team to review with about 25 different possibilities. I'd deliberately inserted some rogue titles that wouldn't, in even a thousand years of spoken English, be suitable. However there were many decent and credible examples in the list. For about ten minutes we pondered, and then each in turn offered their preference. After some typical not-me-first shuffling, we all blurted out together that one title, lodged somewhere around number 20 on the list, was our preferred name: The Routes of English. It had rhythm and repeatability, we said, and above all a punning use of language (routes/roots) that was both true to the subject (Melvyn Bragg was travelling to linguistically significant locations–and following the many metaphorical ‘routes’ the language had taken across 1000 years) and made you sit up and notice. It also worked as a visual/auditory brain-tickler as, in the mouth of a Radio 4 continuity announcer, ‘routes’ automatically became ‘roots’, whereas on the page in Radio Times and in the books of the series it remained indelibly ‘routes’...

And the irony was that – after all the deliberations and meetings – it was the first title I'd thought of.

I was remembering that moment of creative hesitation when pondering recently the rash of neologisms being applied to big corporations and their products as the world's tectonic business plates shudder and shift. Neologisms are legion, of course, as the regular bulletins by the great dictionaries make clear and with which our newspapers have such fun in observing the tidal flows of linguistic fashion. But the making of a new word that doesn't stem from some Californian startup slamming together two words to make a fresh concept, but one that is hewn, fully formed and deliberately without obvious origins from the tissue of language, is what fascinates me most.

What are our raw materials? Well, there are morphemes and phonemes (names have to be pronounced and heard as well as read), there's stress and syntax too, up to a point. Then – vital, this – there's what I'll call ‘provenance’: the distant, ghostly echo of other adjacent concepts, etymologies and linguistic traditions. This is the world of metaphor, of half-sensed references, that operate linguistically rather like the synthetic baking smells that reputedly some supermarkets waft around the bread counter to make people want to buy a microwave-reheated ‘crusty’ loaf. Dog-whistle memories of flat-cap Hovis streets.

It is of course, too, in higher-flown mode, the stuff of poetry.

Philip Larkin's Whitsun Weddings train (Thwaite, Reference Thwaite2003) makes its way south in a ‘slow and stopping curve’ through heat that is ‘tall’ and ‘slept’. Of course the heat isn't tall, nor does it sleep. But the metaphors extract feelings in us that recall such heat-infused afternoons on slow-moving trains that stop and start, inducing drowsiness.

So what to say about these wonderful new names that suddenly burst upon our world. When British Gas in a trice becomes Centrica, when Andersen Consulting becomes Accenture, when Norwich Union becomes Aviva? The reasons for the name changes are usually business-driven, resulting from acquisitions, demergers or changes of status or company disambiguation; they don't interest me here. It's the front-end that fascinates: the name that emerges, butterfly-like, from the pupa of brand consultancies and focus-groups, fluttering out its creased wings in the full glare of an often puzzled and frequently critical public.

I recall the uncomprehending response to ‘Accenture’ when it first appeared in public. Wikipedia explains that the name came from employee Kim Petersen in the company's Danish office, who submitted it as part of an internal competition, ‘supposedly derived from “Accent on the future”’, though I suspect the first two letters, AC, were a conscious echo of the name's predecessor, Andersen Consulting. The aim, they say, was also to avoid the sorts of naming-hell that produced those famous horror stories of petroleum companies whose names mean ‘stalled car’ in some language or other, or the celebrated UK launch of the Fiat Argenta model just as the Falklands/Malvinas Islands were being invaded by Argentine forces. The Falklands war apparently put paid to UK sales of this particular model (where the ‘provenance’ component in the name was the innocent and rather splendid ‘argent’ – heraldic and glittery silver in the English-speaking world, and likewise silvery amongst Francophones and, naturally, Italians).

So what of Accenture? And of Centrica and Aviva? Accenture is a particular puzzle to me – yes, I get the ‘accent on the future’ bit (sort of), but it feels rather like one of those attempts at snappy English made by people whose native tongue is not English that proliferate in the international arena. Where, for a start, should one stress the word? Fine in French: Accenture [aksɑ̃:tyR] but in English? [akˈsεnʧʊə]? Or [ˈaksεnʧʊə]. And that pesky ending –ture. Is it said like ‘adventure’ and ‘debenture’ [–ʧə] or as some slightly foreign-sound [-tjʊə] as in ‘mature’? And if it's meant to suggest things to come, I reckon an Anglo brain would summon ‘adventure’ ahead of ‘future’. For me, linguistically it's a mess. A sort of Euro-pudding that doesn't produce any proper resonances, and especially none associated with accountancy services.

I like to think that with this stream of newly-minted names, the brain encounters them with the kit it has to hand – memories of other, like, words; echoes of older roots buried in the Indo-European linguistic soil; and the bakery-smell apparatus of metaphor. Thus the cerebral search-engine gets to work on the name and tries to find matches, and if it doesn't find obvious, accidental ones (‘stalled car’ or Argentines) it throws up fuzzy matches. So Aviva – an insurance conglomerate previously trading in the UK under the name Norwich Union – suggests vivacity and, possibly to those with operatic leanings, the exclamation ‘Evviva!’ (Long Live...!) Echoes here too of ‘viva voce’, ‘Vive la France’ and ‘vivid’. Perhaps, too, a slight mis-connection with vita (Latin ‘life’) and its derivatives – no-one ever said the brain obeys strict etymological rules. But, to me, whatever its strengths, Aviva still doesn't suggest insurance. Now try ‘Norwich Union’ in the search engine, and I guarantee you don't get much back. ‘Nor-witch’ for US-dwellers perhaps, union = strikes for others, maybe. But for insurance services (with a logo of Norwich Cathedral, as I recall) it offers only a certain solidity as a brand image (not bad for an insurer, mind you). Certainly not international dynamism. And Aviva has the advantage of having a stress-pattern for Anglophones that is immediately acceptable: [əˈviːvə] – Italianate words stressing most naturally in British English on the second-syllable.

So what about British international drinks conglomerate Diageo, apparently derived by a branding consultancy from ‘dies’ (Latin: ‘day’) and ‘geo’ (Greek: ‘world’) with an inference that the company's products give pleasure throughout the world every day? It has, for this writer, no such resonance. It's chunky and sits comfortably on the tongue, but has no ‘provenance’, no metaphorical resonances, conjures no echoes of any parallel word-forms or places or experiences. It's solid wood through-and-through. Nothing wrong with that, of course. No bad associations either. A true neologism that pushes no point of view – it just is.

But then – if you don't already know – how on earth do you set about pronouncing it? Again, the cerebral search engine looks for analogues – stereo? diagram? ‘Geo’ looks pretty harmless and pronounceable, but what of ‘dia’? Do we speakers of British English, with its Gallo-Italian influences, pronounce the latinate derivative [ˈdiːə] (dies irae, per diem), or do we go for the more robustly Brit [ˈdʌɪə] (diamond, diatribe, diagram, dialect...)? And then again, that pesky stress that we in English need to locate for every word: are there two stressed syllables [ˈdi:əˈdʒi:əʊ] or just one? And, if so, where does the emphasis fall? Oh dear. In the end, you have to ask someone from the consultancy that dreamed it up – and then, naturally, as the name gathers momentum, it's out there in the business media and people just know it's [dɪˈadʒɪəʊ].

A recent kid-on-the-block has been the octopus-like services company that seems to be finding its way into many outsourced corners of UK daily life. It's called Mitie and, it turns out, this is a simple acronym, for Management Incentive Through Investment Equity. But, presented with the neologism for the first time, how to pronounce it? Look for the analogues: ah, those delicious biscuits made by McVitie's [məkˈvitɪz] perhaps? So shall we say, along with James Thurber's character, it's (Walter) Mitty? No, it turns out, the company rhymes itself with ‘mighty’. All righty. But just wait until there's some corporate cockup and the newspapers are tempted to headline ‘How Are the Mitie Fallen’.

So, they are a problem, these commercial neologisms. And it all becomes a lot more complex when the companies are not based in the Anglosphere. Take the hotel company Accor. All the old puzzlements occur – what does it mean, for a start? Nothing signposting ‘hotels’ there, unless ‘accommodation’. Nah. Accord? Acorn? (Interestingly, in early summer of 2015, as a result of yet another rebranding, the group is now known as AccorHotels, maybe partly to resolve this.) And how do you say it? Something like ‘accord’, probably. Naturally, once you say it with its original French accent, you get it immediately: accord = agreement, harmony, chord… the company's hoped-for values laid bare for all to understand. Unless you don't speak French.

More successful are the overseas companies that look to channel more obviously Latinate connections. Latin = old = established = reputable. And also = not caught up in the linguistic brambles of local speech. So the Swedish security firm AB Hälsingborgs Nattvakt simply adopted the Latin word ‘securitas’, meaning ‘safety’ (also the name of the Roman Goddess of stability and security), and bob's your brand uncle. It also happened to be the name of one of their main products, the Securitas alarm. So it was – like The Shock of the New – a self-describing winner too.

How, then, about the latinizing Centrica and Capita? The latter was originally a division of the UK Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), but gave itself the name Capita in 1984. Again it's Latin – the plural of the word for ‘head’ – caput – but (cleverly?) also evoking the world of finance (‘capital’: remember its origins) and, I guess, vaguely echoing the acronym of the Institute from which it sprang. And not too many pronunciation issues either, as (per) capita and capital both take word-primary stress: [kəˈpiːtə] would be a stretch. Unfortunately, as this now monster services company, with interests stretching from education, transport, health, pensions, insurance to financial services, has run into some professional headwinds. And been dubbed ‘crapita’ by Private Eye magazine; ah, the perils of a name.

Centrica was an invented name for a division of the demerged British Gas business: as with Capita, the pronunciation doesn't present, for the British English speaker, too many issues – word-primary stress would be first choice for most (though there is a tradition of brands that have a similar morphology placing the stress in word-penultimate position, viz the old SLR camera, the Praktica, frequently, though not exclusively, pronounced [prakˈtiːkə]).

But, oh dear, the meaning… What on earth is Centrica when it's at home? I understand the need to get away from ‘British Gas’ (particularly in 1997 when the formerly nationalised company's reputation wasn't particularly starry). The search engine whirs and finds... Nothing. ‘Central’, ‘concentric’? Hopeless. And maybe that's what the company wanted – one of those completely wooden names that offend no-one (except linguists, maybe), but sound vaguely classical. Rather as, many decades ago in my youth, the cinema advertising company Pearl & Dean used to use a randomised Greek temple as a backdrop to its title frame: solid, old values projected on screen.

So finally, to new brand-names that don't present pronunciation problems but are pure ‘bakery-smell’ names, full of ‘provenance’. Remember the invented name for a new make of mass-produced cheese called ‘Lymeswold’. Not a success, nor was the cheese; you're better off with ‘Cathedral City’ cheddar. And then, in similar vein, we have the lovely JD Wetherspoon name, for a large chain of British pubs. ‘JD Wetherspoon’ is a very clever piece of name-concoction, with its slightly stiff use of initials (perhaps somewhere channelling ‘Fly Fishing by JR Hartley’), and the slightly archaic Wetherspoon name – nothing fancy – like the brand. Incidentally, Wetherspoon himself did exist, but not in the pub business. He was apparently a Kiwi teacher who taught the chain's founder Tim Martin, and who was poor at class control. He fatally told Martin he'd not succeed in business. Wetherspoon's has over 800 pubs in the UK.

Recently a rash of different, cosy, chummy restaurant names have appeared on my local high street, called ‘Bill's’ and ‘Maggie's’... And I don't need to tell you that they are brands too, not William or Margaret's little local café businesses.

The final step in this complex business of new names comes when the origins of companies get screened from immediate associations by the dull pillars of an acronym – the inverse Centrica model, as it were. Group 4 Security was originally another division of our Swedish friends at AB Hälsingborgs Nattvakt, otherwise known as Securitas. Spun off from its Swedish parent, it gathered together four previously existing British security firms, hence the name. Subsequently, Group 4, awarded a prisoner escort service contract by the British government, found itself embarrassed by a sequence of security blunders that tarnished its reputation. However, It subsequently merged with a Danish company Falck, which conglomerate now lies at the heart of what is apparently the world's biggest security company, and goes by the anonymous – and very helpfully different – ‘G4S’.

Equally usefully anonymous, perhaps, is the identity of the operator of a set of bus routes in London. Its discreet acronym ‘RATP Group’ appears in not-very big letters on the backs of these buses. I just wonder what most Londoners would think if they knew just who RATP are. Because anyone who's been to Paris cannot have failed to notice that the state-run operator of the metro and buses in the city is the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens, or RATP. Sometimes it's best not to look too far beneath the new names that are constantly appearing over the horizon.

And what on earth is a Qashqai? (Google it to find out!)