Usually, you have trouble imagining something you’re not familiar with. But it’s interesting how sometimes you have trouble imagining something you are familiar with.

For example, I couldn’t come up with these names:

This is a screenshot from an old Super Nintendo baseball game, where the Japanese developers came up with fake American/English names for the imaginary players (the game didn’t have an MLB license). Here are more of the names from the different fake teams, compiled by someone on Reddit:

It reminds me of this famous Italian song which is gibberish English, meant to parody American pop music and imitate what it supposedly sounded like to Italians:

It’s really, really uncanny to read those faux-English names written by Japanese game developers: Pomlin, Newksbury, Pollins, Fearson, Lichardson. Some of them are striking because they look and feel like real names but not quite...