Even now you ask questions

 About a year ago I compiled a list of silly names bestowed on cars by their manufacturers for my frankly, rather brilliant, series,  101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die . These monickers were sufficiently off-putting and ludicrous for me to safely avouch that I would never buy the wretched vehicles. That should have been the end of the matter. 

I am at the moment a satisfied driver of the Skoda Octavia. (Now there's a nice, sensible name. Easy to pronounce and no head-scratching about what it means). Sadly the worthy folk at Skoda did not see fit to follow their own, fine, example. Today they emailed me to suggest I take an interest in their latest electric SUV (yes, it had to be an SUV like most of the cars with stupid names that I excoriated back in October 2019). This one is called the ENYAQ IV and it looks like this:

I'm glad they are excited. I'd love to be able to proceed to the excited stage. Even a mild frisson of interest would be nice in these difficult times. But I am, naturally, held frozen by contemplation of the name chosen for this little, boxy thing.

First, what is this mysterious word? I have something of a background in IT and am aware that the first commercial computer, built soon after WWII ended, was called ENIAC (the Electronic Numeral and Integrated Computer). It does seem that Skoda have chosen a name remarkably similar, albeit they have shoe-horned a Y and a Q into places that they really do not belong. The use of the Q, in particular, is of course terribly fashionable amongst designers, especially when they drop the normally-accompanying U (Yes, Nissan Qashqai, hang your head in shame).

But what on earth does ENYAQ stand for? It must be an acronym for it is presented in block capitals. (We shall have to pass over consideration of how on earth I missed the preceding three versions). Here are some suggestions, proposed by the top-level emergency quick-think-of-something team here at Ramblings Central.

• Effervescent Natural Youth Alliance of Quebec
• Enthusiastically Neurotic Yet Audaciously Quixotic
• Extremely Nice Yet Awfully Quick
• Every Night You Are Quaint
  

And if you have any suggestions do please send them in to the usual address, where we shall glance cursorily over them and promptly send them back. Meanwhile, shall I take up the offer to keep up-to-date with the latest "straight to my inbox"? Gosh, I don't know, I like it when emails meander around a bit, get classified as spam and are rejected, have all their special characters stripped out, get reformatted, translated into classical Urdu, spend some time in someone else's inbox, return for a rest to the transmitting server and then finally drift in, yawning a bit and ready to settle down. Gives them a bit of style, teaches them the ways of the world and how to smile through every misadventure. But I wager that, even after all those capers in cyberspace, we will still be no wiser as to what the hell ENYAQ means.