"Mottonyms are both inscriptions, based on people’s experiences, on Ghanaian commercial vehicles and ‘names’ by which drivers of such vehicles are called. Prior research on mottonyms implicitly affirms how these inscriptions are embedded in human interpersonal relationships and on careful reflection, in personal social experience. Guided by a phenomenological perspective, I explore, through interviews with vehicle owners, the specific life experiences that spurred them to coin these mottonyms. Overall, I analyze two major themes about drivers’ incentives for their inscriptions: innuendo mottonyms and philosophical mottonyms. Through this research, I respond to recent calls for a phenomenological approach to investigate media uses in everyday life (Moores 2009). This approach provides a grounded understanding into “embodied sets of activities that humans perform with varying degrees of regularity, competence and flair” (Postill 2010: 1). Thus, it helps us understand how cultural forms are not just “mental, meaningful circulation of ideas” (Zito 2008: 71) but concrete mediated practices. Furthermore, the paper responds to scholars’ advocacy for a broader understanding of ‘media’ that transcend narrowly defined traditional mass media formats (Downing 1996), and novel ways of examining such formats (Moores, 2009; Meyer, 2009)." (Abstract)