Nu

All life begins with Nu and ends with Nu...
This is the truth! This is my belief!
...at least for now.

Nus, the spherical beings from Chrono Trigger. They have arms and legs sprouting from their bluish face-body, along with two large eyes and a huge mouth. A small crop of hair sits on the top of their heads(?)

Nus are supposedly the robotic creations of Balthasar, but that wouldn't explain the fact some were found at the earliest ages of men. Their mind patterns are truly alien, which doesn't help conversation at all.

In Chrono Trigger, the Nus have two attacks: One that docks all your HP but one, and one that knocks off a single HP. It all adds to the mystery that is Nu.

Also a word in (especially 1950s-era) produktspracht with connotations of modernity, novelty, and innovation.

Misspellings like this generally seem to imply that the manufacturer was too damn busy and important to take the time for those extra phonetically unneccesary extra letters; hence "new" becomes "nu," "bright" and "right" become "brite" and "rite." And my favourite: "ease" becomes "eze." Oh, and "easy" becomes "E-Z."

Thus the name of the product joins the package design to give a complete impression of perfect streamlined futurism.

Nu (ぬ) is an auxiliary verb suffix in Japanese that turns a verb into a negative verb. It's similar to the -nai suffix that most beginning Japanese students learn, but it's much older and more rarely used.

-Nu is appended to the same base as -nai, but conjugates differently. In the renyokei form (-naku), it becomes -zu. In the conditional form (-nakere), it becomes -ne. If that made no sense at all to you, here are some examples on how -nu is used:

Dôshite mo ikaneba naranu (= Dôshite mo ikanakereba naranai).
I have to go no matter what.

Ikenu mono wa dô shiyô ka? (= Ikenai mono wa dô shiyô ka?)
What shall we do about those who cannot go?

Shirazu aruite kita (= Shiranaku aruite kita).
In spite of myself, I walked over.

The final -n in polite -masen verbs is actually a contraction of -nu.

Nu is the French past participle verb for naked.

It is also the ISO 3166 country code Top Level Domain for the Pacific microstate of Niue (pronounced 'new-way') . This dependency of New Zealand has a population of 2,000 living on top of a coral atoll, south of Samoa and north-east of Tonga. Its isolation and miniscule population size has meant that telecommunications between Niue and the outside world depends on a expensive satellite connection.

Fortunately a visionary outsider called J. William Semich was able to associate the two uses of NU together. In 1997 he marketed use of the Top Level Domain, presumably to customers wanting to sell porn to frisky Francophones. The royalties generated have allowed Nieuans to go from a nineteenth century style phones to the world's most modern telecommunication system in barely six years. Before the telephone system based not on phone numbers but the number of rings that the caller generates when the crank is turned. Now, Nieuans not only enjoy free e-mail and phone calls on the island, but also free international phone calls as well (useful, as Nieuans are the most expatriated nationality in the world, with 90% living overseas). Furthermore, cash, and the small, flat size of Niue has allowed the island to become the first country in the world to have a nation-wide Wi-Fi internet access service.

ref: www.nunames.nu