Quote Originally Posted by griffin View Post
Unfortunately, the flaw of all this is saying that the humans gave him his name... when obviously he should have had his own name before he came to earth. Or if he was built here, the Cybertronians who built him would have given him a more Cybertronian name.
In other words, when and how did he come to Earth, and why would the humans name him... unless it was like a nickname, and he adopted it as his own name because he liked it.
↑This!

Also, "cog" just means 'tooth,' so in the context of Medieval language I'm not sure if the word "cog" would have an immediate connection with gears. :/ While gears have been around for at least 2500 years (in China), it was until the late fourteenth century that people in Western Europe devised mechanical gears with the advent of cathedral clocks. Although Islam did develop geared machines during the early thirteenth century and I suppose if there were any members of the Order of the Witwiccans who either went on the Crusades or had contact with a Crusader, that they may have had contact with Muslim technology. Gah... this is creating more questions than it's answering.

Quote Originally Posted by FatalityPitt View Post
When I was a kid, I thought Insecticon was a pretty bad name for a Transformer. It made the toy seem so generic that I lost interest in it as soon as I read the name. Sure, there's Dinobot, but the lack of a 'real' name was compensated for by the character's starting role in the BW cartoons.
I was in uni when BW came out and I gotta tell ya...

...I agree. I also thought that the use of sub-group names was incredibly lame. I still think it's lame. One thing that Beast Wars generally wasn't great for (at first) was names. They were pretty Gobot-esque in just describing their beast modes.
Cheetah Man → Cheetor
Rhinoceros Man → Rhinox
Dinosaur Man → Dinobot
Insect Man → Insecticon
Tarantula Man → Tarantulas (that's not a name, it's a plural!)
Tiger Man → Tigatron (they couldn't even call him "Tigertron"?)
Baboon Man → B'Boom
Mosquito Man → Transquito
Wolf Man → Wolfang
Wasp Man → Waspinator
etc.

But these names were devised by Kenner toy staff, just as the Machine Men names were created by Tonka staff (not sure if it was Tonka or Hanna Barbera who created the Gobot names - but Hanna Barbera characters often didn't have very creative names either... look at the Smurfs ). G1 TFs had better names because they were created by Marvel writers like Bob Budiansky etc. I think Beast Wars names started getting better when Mainframe Entertainment writers (Larry DiTillio, Bob Forward) started getting involved. Because we know that it was their idea to introduce female Transformers and they asked Kenner/Hasbro if Blackarachnia and Airazor could be female and they agreed (hence why their tech specs bios use female pronouns). And of course, Airazor and Blackarachnia are arguably better names than most of the others. Hasbro did start making an effort here and there to create better names - Quickstrike, Air Hammer, Noctorro, Sonar, Scarem, Nightglider, Jawbreaker etc. It was hit and miss as there were certainly still some shoddy names too (e.g. Injector, Spittor, K-9 etc.).

I'm discounting reuse of G1/G2 names like Buzz Saw, Inferno, Jetstorm, Sky Shadow etc. for obvious reasons. I personally think that the best new name to come from Beast Wars was Depth Charge. Inferno would be the best reuse of an existing name.

But yeah, as incredibly awesome as Dinobot is as a toy and character, it's a pretty underwhelming name. It feels so... PlaySkool. Reminds me of the Go-Bots (aka Transformers Big Adventures) from PlaySkool.
Buzzerbot
Gorillabot
Beastbot
Dinobot
.....etc.