Here’s A Car That Sounds Like It Was Named The Way I Think Sith Lords Are Named: Cold Start

Our partner Beau has told me that naming cars is “the sport of kings,” and I’ve always liked that idea. Both because I like imagining a bunch of portly, regal monarchs in ermine and crowns shouting out names like “Vanguard!” and “Cormorant!” when shown pictures of family SUVs and also because he’s right. It’s not easy to name cars. Sometimes I’ll encounter a car’s name and I know the associations I get in my mind are definitely not what the car-naming-kings intended. Like the Renault Fluence.

We never got the Renault Fluence here in America; it was introduced in 2009 and used the same Renault-Nissan C platform that we saw in the US as the Nissans Rogue and Sentra, for example. It was also sold under the strange Renault Samsung brand in South Korea, and was built in Turkey and India and South Korea and Russia and Argentina – a true world car, as long as your world isn’t in America.

Anyway, the name of the Fluence reminded me of something; a theory I vaguely remember hearing or thinking of, I honestly can’t recall the origin, but it definitely popped into my head. It was a theory about how villains in the Star Wars series, specifically villains associated with the Dark Side of the Force known as the Sith, pick their names.

See, the first real Sith baddie we encountered, way back in 1977, was the famous Darth Vader. “Darth” seems to be a sort of title, like “Deacon” or “Viscount” or “Lady,” and this was confirmed when we finally learned that the Emperor, known as Emperor Palpatine, was really Darth Sidious!

Darth Vader was in the first Star Wars movie in 1977, the Emperor/Darth Sidious shows up in 1980 (though I don’t remember when we learned his Sith name?) but these two were the first Darths, and so I thought that maybe Siths picked names by finding some generally negatively-connoted word in English that begins with “in-” and then lopped off the first two letters.

So, invader becomes Vader, insidious becomes Sidious. That leads to all sorts of other fun Sith name possibilities, like Darth Ept, Darth Sane, Darth Capable, Darth Surance, Darth Grate, Darth Flamed, Darth Perious, Darth Sipid, and my favorite, Darth Continent.

That’s also why the Renault Fluence sounds like a Sith name to me. Darth Fluence.

Of course, my theory was blown to shit when we met Darths Maul, Bane, Plagueis, and Tyranus and a whole bunch of others, I don’t know. Oh well.

Man, what a ridiculous Cold Start I’ve given you today! Still, if you’re bored today, I think you should try and think up other in- based Sith lord names! It’ll be fun! You can see a friend and say, “Hey, how’s it hanging, Darth Jurious?” or something like that!

Tell me that’s not a good time.