OK, so ... I hate domain squatting. I'm not sure anyone likes to get a faceful of spam when they think they're going to one site but end up at another site, put up by a subsequent owner of the domain and usually just spam. The whole process seems wrong, but I'm not sure I have any suggestions at the moment to make it better, overall. There do seem to be people who don't much care, who take squatting for granted, and so who will register a domain at the drop of a hat and then drop it just as quickly. That doesn't work for me. I think it feeds the problem, but making anyone care, especially these folks, is not a priority for me.
So, that's the attitude that informs my own approach. I think people should probably secure access for themselves to a domain or two, for personal use, and should be able to get domains for their businesses. The trick is to do so in a way that's sustainable on the one hand if you keep them, or doesn't feed into the squatting industry if you don't.
Ages ago, more naive to the fact that one of the great problems of
computer science is naming, I tried to come up with a domain name for
myself, and settled on etrumeus.com. This was a weak attempt to make an
oblique reference to Linux: The Linux mascot is a penguin, in the Linux
world contentedly well-fed penguins dine on copious herring, and the genus
name for herring is Etrumeus. Done, for better or worse.
The better part is that the domain was available in one of the at-the-time fashionable top-level domains, searches for it still pretty much only turn up either the original usage or my domain, and I've managed to hang onto it over the years.
The worse part is that etrumeus is murder to spell aloud when giving
someone either an email address or a URL, and it is easy to misspell in
writing: It has too many e's and t's, and when spelling it out the second e
comes along right as the listener's brain is catching up to the distinction
between the first two letters, an e and a t. Just as they get that sorted
there's the double vowel and the final s. The last part is spelled not at
all like the same sound in 'copious' or 'garrulous' or 'envious'. It's a
word no one recognizes or knows how to say. Its little joke only makes
sense ever so obliquely. It is quite worse than useless in many respects.
So, I've been playing the "what would be an ok domain to use that doesn't have so many of these problems" for years, now. It doesn't necessarily have to be a dictionary word, but it should be pronounceable, and it should be reasonably clear to spell aloud, and its pronunciation and its verbal spelling should be ... tractable. And, it should have reasonably neutral connotations, so I can use it widely.
Within the last year (I could look up the registration date right now but don't want to get distracted from writing this by whatever yaks I find might need shaving in the process) I finally decided to pick something so that I could begin the process of diversifying my self-hosting stack all the way back to the domain registrar (eg, N>1 each of domain registrars, DNS hosting, and all the rest). I wanted a greenfield domain that didn't already have associations like my rocfoss.org domain has.
So, that's when I settled on ploxbot.com. I thought of the name as a spoonerism of 'boxplot'. It has two syllables to etrumeus's four, seven letters to etrumeus's eight, and overall a more pronounceable and spellable structure. The three-letter contraction "bot" for "robot" is now reasonably commonplace and in any case easy enough to spell.
I looked up "plox" and as best I can tell the worst, most channish currency that syllable has is as a weird, typing-challenged way to shorten the word "please". Which, you know, I'm ok with. It's sort of funny. A bot that says "please". I could think of worse things.
Maybe the worst part about this, functionally, is the difficulty in distinguishing between spoken p's and b's. Even here though there's an internal reference: A p at the front and a b in the middle.
There are several "boxplot" domains available, still. And maybe I should register bloxpot and poxblot. Neither of those sound nice, tbh. So, why not no.