Amanda Peterson's job is a combination of professional brainstorming, air-traffic control, and linguistic ballet.
She's the Head of Naming at Google, which means that the appellation of every product that flies out the company's doors needs to pass her inspection first.
Creative names can require digging deep. Peterson has more than 350 reference books scattered around her desk, including ones for common names of animals, slang from the 20s, and the rules for "Dungeon and Dragons."
Aside from her affection for 'Eddystone,' Peterson is frustratingly tight-lipped when asked for what she considers to be the best names to come out of her two-year stint at Google, insisting that she simultaneously loves them all and doesn't want to take too much credit.
"I ended up having this really personable conversation with Larry about a name he thought was 'icky,'" she laughs. When she explained the strategy behind the name he still thought it sounded "gross." What she had imagined would be a 20-minute meeting went on for about an hour.
Read MoreBesides knowing the proper nomenclature of every Google product ever, Peterson's role as a professional namer means she has some special skills, like being a human thesaurus and killing it with weird random pub trivia questions (she's comparatively terrible at Scrabble because she's always spotting interesting fake words among her letters). ..
