What Does ‘Motate’ Even Mean?!

Mo·tate

/ ˈ mō ˌ tāt/

Rhymes with rotate.

For as long as I can remember my mom used motate in place of “getting going”. She would wake us up for school and say “c’mon girls time to motate!” or when we were doing homework it was “better get motatin’ on that homework!” and we accepted motate as another one of mom’s made up words (she had several).

So one day, my sister and I were brainstorming names for my business. I had told her I wanted just one word (like Yelp, Nike and Google) but I didn’t want anything cliche or overused. I wanted something almost made-up; not a real word. She looked at me and said “what about motate?”. I sat there for a second and thought “get your business motating” and “motate your marketing”…and that is how Motate Creative Marketing was named.

It was perfect. A word that was personal to me, without revolving around my name. A word that had a meaning, albeit seemingly made-up by my mother, that made sense for what our mission was. A word that wasn’t being used by a zillion companies already. It was the perfect word, the only word that made sense for my creative marketing business.

We looked it up and it turns out mom wasn’t quite as crazy as we thought…though she may have been the inventor of this word, who really knows?!

World wide web definition: “to move towards something immediately.”

It is said to be move and rotate put together (love a good word mashup).

Urban Dictionary definition: “to move from one location to another with slickness and style.” So really if it’s recognized by Urban Dictionary what more do we need?!

There you have it! What’s in a name? A LOT in this case. haha

Feel free to call us Mo for short. We like nicknames.

Creatively Yours,

Stacy

*Photography in this blog post taken by Hannah Schweiss Photography