Naming is harder than it looks. The idea has a character before it has a name, and the name needs to carry the character accurately enough that the person who hears it for the first time and knows nothing else about the concept receives, in the name itself, the first correct impression. Too many sailing brands go for the obvious reference, the classical navigation, the Greek mythology, the nautical terminology that signals sailing without saying anything about the specific quality of the sailing being offered. We did not want to be in this category.
We went through names. A list that started long and got shorter as we eliminated the ones that were already registered, the ones that sounded like something else, the ones that were accurate but not evocative, the ones that were evocative but not accurate.
The process was the process of the naming that takes longer than expected and produces the right answer by elimination rather than inspiration, you find the name by removing the wrong ones until the right one is what remains.
Where the Name Came From
Naora comes from the Polynesian. In several of the Pacific island languages, the languages of the people who were the greatest navigators in human history, who crossed the Pacific in outrigger canoes using the stars and the ocean swells and the bird flight patterns as navigation instruments before the European explorer had reached the Atlantic, the word carries the meaning of the horizon, the place where the ocean meets the sky, the boundary between the known and the unknown that the offshore sailor is always sailing toward.
The horizon as the beginning rather than the limit. The boundary as the thing that invites rather than the thing that stops.
When we found this, we stopped looking. The name carried the thing we were trying to build. The horizon that the Naora member sails toward on the offshore passage is the same horizon, philosophically, if not geographically, that the Polynesian navigator was sailing toward in the outrigger canoe a thousand years ago. The drive to reach what is on the other side of the known.
The willingness to commit to the ocean without the certainty of the arrival. The specific quality of the person who looks at the boundary and understands it as the starting point rather than the end of the map. Naora. The name was right. The circumnavigation was built around it.
