Can i say "quest it" (imperative)?

I'm Italian and I'm trying to create an english name for a cultural club, whose mission is "seeking for knowledge together". I need a short, evocative, memorizable yet correct phrase, and I wonder if "QUEST IT" could satisfy all these requirements. Or if it is a nonsense for native english. Thanks for your help.

kurt19xx said:

I'm Italian and I'm trying to create an English name for a cultural club, whose mission is "seeking for knowledge together". I need a short, evocative, memorizable yet correct phrase, and I wonder if "QUEST IT" could satisfy all these requirements. Or if it is [STRIKE]a[/STRIKE] nonsense for native English ​speakers. Thanks for your help.

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"Quest" isn't used very often as a verb but there's no reason why it shouldn't be used in the imperative. It really depends whether you want everyone to immediately understand the meaning of the club's name without having to check a dictionary. Note that your mission should be "seeking knowledge together" (not "seeking for knowledge").

It sounds odd to me. You quest for things, or after things.

Perhaps you could call your club simply "Quest", so the name can embody both the noun and the verb, the search and to search.

not a teacher

SoothingDave said:

It sounds odd to me.

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When you say "odd" do you mean "wrong" and "not appealing"? Or may "quest it" have some chance to sound "archaic", "adventurous" or "intriguing"?

kurt19xx said:

When you say "odd" do you mean "wrong" and "not appealing"? Or may "quest it" have some chance to sound "archaic", "adventurous" or "intriguing"?

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It does sound odd because, exactly as SoothingDave said, we normally "quest for" or "quest after" something. So it would more naturally be "Quest after it" although that sounds like you're saying "The word QUEST comes after the word IT".

Between "wrong, not appealing, archaic, adventurous, intriguing", I would have to choose "wrong", I'm afraid.

Having said that, the titles of companies and groups are frequently ungrammatical (Toys R Us, for example, would be very odd in normal English even if they had spelt "Are" correctly).

The simple answer is that you can call your group anything you like - it just depends on whether you want people to understand what the group is about simply from reading the name. If not, you can make it as unclear or intriguing as you like.

It sounds no odder than many another web name, including the very useful fraze.it site. You could employ that eye-catching trick of using phonetic spelling by calling your site kwest.it.

emsr2d2 said:

Having said that, the titles of companies and groups are frequently ungrammatical (Toys R Us, for example, would be very odd in normal English even if they had spelt "Are" correctly).

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They even reversed the R.

Rover

Rover_KE said:

They even reversed the R.

Rover

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They did indeed but I couldn't work out how to do that on screen.

JMurray said:

Perhaps you could call your club simply "Quest", so the name can embody both the noun and the verb, the search and to search.

not a teacher

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:up: I agree. As emsr2d2 said 'quest' is rarely a verb; and when it is, it doesn't take a direct object.

b

emsr2d2 said:

They did indeed but I couldn't work out how to do that on screen.

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Would this help? я

kurt19xx said:

When you say "odd" do you mean "wrong" and "not appealing"? Or may "quest it" have some chance to sound "archaic", "adventurous" or "intriguing"?

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I can't say that I would make those associations; I think JMurray's suggestion does more of that as quest has some of those associations already- the Questing Beast in King Arthur, for example. Quest it is not a natural usage and, while it might work, risks being seen as an error or oddity rather than a creative usage IMO.

Rover_KE said:

It sounds no odder than many another web name, including the very useful fraze.it site. You could employ that eye-catching trick of using phonetic spelling by calling your site kwest.it.

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phrase -> fraze
quest -> kwest

Interesting tricks. How do you call this kind of transformations? In italian we can't do them, because when you change the letters, you change the sound also.

PS: fraze.it is fantastic

I really don't know. If I had to name them, I'd have to coin something like 'heteronymous homophones', or 'orthographically distinct homophones! ;-) But normally we just call it spelling.

b