July Linkfest

Back of the Cereal Box shares my twin obsessions with The Simpsons and baby-name trends. Here he catalogs the offspring of those picturesque country yokels Cletus and Brandine Spuckler. Of the 36 (!) names on the list, my favorite has to be Rubella Scabies. (Hint to Simpsons writers: Malaria and Salmonella would be nice for the next litter.) And a hat tip to Back of the Cereal Box to introducing me to Stuff White Trash People Like, a parody of this well-documented site, itself a sort of parody.

Editrix has been publishing a series of amusing and illuminating interviews called "5 Questions with..." Among the interview subjects: Tom Ruprecht (author of George W. Bush: An Unauthorized Oral History), Stephen J. Dubner (Freakonomics and the Freakonomics blog), and Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty. From the interview with humorist Dave Barry:

Q: What punctuation mark are you fondest of?

A: I am most fond of the comma, because when you see it on a check, it means there are more numbers coming.

The Name Inspector writes about business names like Zlio and Vlingo "that don't toe the line of normal English phonotactics." Phonotactics was new to me; it's "the study of sound sequences that do and do not occur in a given language."

The Pollywog Blog passes along this sobering lesson in how not to name a product. Dual-N-Band what-what?

Thsrs is an interesting twist on the conventional thesaurus: enter a word, and it suggests shorter synonyms only. Why should you care? Well, it's useful for Twitter posts, where you're limited to 140 characters. (Via All This Chittah Chattah.)

And speaking of shortening, here's Mike Pope on "URL tinyfication" products such as TinyURL, which tranform long URLs into itty-bitty ones--again, handy for Twitter posts and anywhere else a long URL might be broken over two lines. I knew about several of these products, but hadn't known there were at least 41 of them.

By the way, if it's text rather than a URL that you need to condense, TinyPaste is just the thing. Paste your text block into the window--there seems to be no length limit--and TinyPaste will reduce it to a single short URL.

Finally, Goofy noted in a recent comment that he thinks "it's weird how much we fetishize the apostrophe." If that's your vice, indulge it at OUP Blog, where Anatoly Liberman examines the history and function(s) of the little squiggle, and observes, "It was not the brightest day for the English speaking world when the apostrophe invaded its books." And it's a problem not just for Anglophones: here's a site that documents German apostrophe abuse.