Fritinancy

The Right Words

Who knew that lexicographers had so much fun? Certainly not I. If only someone had told me, I’d have made a sharp detour away from journalism, my chosen (and doomed) profession, and headed straight for the great big tomes in the Reference section, which I actually enjoyed reading a lot more than city council reports and budget-negotiation recaps. With luck, I’d have ended up in a job like Kory Stamper’s: associate editor at Merriam-Webster.

Happily, there is now consolation in the form of Kory’s smart and funny new blog, which she describes as “a journeyman lexicographer’s look at the language as it grows and changes.”

The blog is called Harmless Drudgery—the title comes from Samuel Johnson, whose 1755 dictionary defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge.” Here’s a bit of the first post, in which Stamper tells how she became a lexicographer:

You see, I love words. I love all of them, even the nasty bastardized ones—yes, I even have a love/hate thing for “irregardless.” Their histories, who they’ve been with, where they came from, where they are going. Reading is not just an escape or a hobby; it is a compulsion. I am that person you see on the subway who, upon finishing her newspaper or magazine, begins carefully reading all the ads and graffiti on the train and then moves on to the receipts in her pockets.  If I run out of reading material, I start fidgeting like a coke fiend needing a line or ten. Do not come between me and my words.

Pre-Harmless Drudgery, Kory Stamper’s claim to fame(217,044 views!) was her two-minute video about the correct plural of “octopus.”

 

See more “Ask the Editor” videos on the Merriam-Webster YouTube channel. You may also follow Kory Stamper on Twitter.

December Linkfest

The A.V. Club looks back at the year in band names. It was a good year for punctuation themes: W-H-I-T-E, Friend Slash Lover, TL;DR. (Hat tip: Henry Alpert.)

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In Word Routes, Ben Zimmer looks at the year in words. His list partially overlaps mine, but he also singles out a few I didn’t catch: twinkling, lip dub, and narb, for starters.

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A different take on words of the year: Merriam-Webster reports on the words that spiked in online lookups over the last 12 months. From April 15: ersatz, after the US Postal Service admitted that the new Statue of Liberty stamp mistakenly features a photograph of the half-size replica at the New York New York Casino and Resort in Las Vegas.

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Laura Wattenberg of  Baby Name Wizard announces the name of the year for 2011. It represents, she writes, “the rise of the virtual name.”

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Why are informers called “rats” and spies called “moles”? The Explainer, at Slate.com, explains.

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Buzzfeed picks the 90 best Twitter accounts of 2011. Yeah, they overlooked Fritinancy again.

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Trendwatching’s list of “12 crucial consumer trends for 2012” includes, as usual, some over-the-top coinages, including flaw-some (“To consumers, brands that behave more humanly, including exposing their flaws, will be awesome”), eco-cycology (“Brands will increasingly take back all of their products for recycling … and recycle them responsibly and innovatively”), and emerging maturialism (“Expect frank, risqué or non-corporate products, services and campaigns from emerging markets to be on the rise”).

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Last year the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that lobbies for government transparency, published a tongue-in-cheek name generator for political action committees (PACs). The generator randomly spews out names like Fanciful Floridians Against Cruella de Vil and Captains of Industry for Growth—names you’d never expect to see in real life. Except … it turns out that dozens of real PACs lifted their names from the Sunlight Foundation generator.

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Linguist Lauren Gawne, who blogs as Superlinguo, recently presented what may be the world’s first academic paper on LOLcats and language. (“Don’t call it kitty pidgin!”) Watch the presentation.

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Speaking of linguists doing cool stuff, Erin McKean wrote earlier this month about “the secret language of bros”—aka the dudeification of English—for the Boston Globe. “Perhaps the most unlikely bro- blend,” she reports, “is Bronies, used to refer to male fans of the ‘My Little Pony’ television cartoon and toys.”

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And speaking of manly lingo, Old Spice has a new holiday ad campaign that brings back the original “man your man could smell like,” Isaiah Mustafa. As “MANta Claus,” Mustafa promises to buy gifts for all 7 billion people on Earth. See all 36 MANta Claus videos here, and read my February 2010 post on Mustafa’s original work for Old Spice.

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Lowering the Bar, the legal blog, reports (in a post titled “Assorted Stupidity #32”) on two new government-project names. PRODIGAL is being developed by Georgia Tech for the Pentagon; the name is an acronym for “Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning.” (LtB: “Translation: it reads your mail.”) And Palantir is the name of a company that’s working with the CIA on data-mining. LtB: “Nerds like myself will know that palantir is taken from ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ in which a palantir is a crystal-ball-type item that was created with good intentions but virtually always deceived and corrupted the user. And that’s the name they picked.”

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Real Android phone name or silly, randomly generated Android phone name? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. (Via @ahundredmonkeys.)

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Where does the term “stocking stuffer” come from? Former Boston Globe language columnist Jan Freeman investigates.

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“There is nothing inherently disrespectful about Xmas,” writes Dawn McIlvain Stahl at Copyediting.com. “Those who use it are not putting an X where Christ used to be. You could even say that those who use Christmas are putting a Christ where X used to be.”

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On the other hand:

Via John McChesney Young; also here.

Tech Jargon of Yore

Here’s an amusing artifact from the late 20th century: Jargon Watch: A Pocket Dictionary for the Jitterati, by Gareth Branwyn. Published in 1997, it’s a collection of words that originally appeared in Wired magazine’s popular (and continuing) Jargon Watch feature.

This little dictionary, sturdily bound in chipboard*, captures a fascinating cultural moment when, as the Introduction puts it, “the boundaries between jargon and slang” were “smudged,” and “accelerated cross-pollination” between jargon and slang was occurring “through newsgroups, email, BBSes, Web pages, and trade shows.” To keep up, you needed a pocket-size reference book like Jargon Watch. 

Let me set the scene. When the book was published in 1997, Wired was just four years old. The Web as we know it was almost as youthful: Netscape Navigator, then the big name in browsers, was just three years old. There was no Google, no Facebook, no Flickr, no Wikipedia, no YouTube, no Twitter. Mobile phones were rare. There were just a handful of blogs. (Blogger, the first blogging software for non-techies, was founded in 1999.)

So what were the trendy terms between May 1993 and December 1996, the period captured in the book?

I’ll start with the handful of words and phrases that have survived: astroturfing (cited in the book as “astroturf campaign”), barfogenesis, bio break, brain fart, cybrarian, data mining, drill down, facetime**, going postal, hive mind, permalancer***, quants, road rage, Silicon Alley, trolling, Webmaster, and YMMV.

Then there are the rest of the words, the linguistic curios and white elephants that remind or enlighten us about the demands, annoyances, and fixations of that not-so-long-ago era, the mid-1990s. Here are some of my favorites:

September Linkfest

Case study: The rebranding of Hell. Logo, tagline, the works. From Chris Herron Design.

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What’s a pump? A ballet shoe? A trainer? Depends which side of the Atlantic you’re on. Linguist Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language offers some British-to-American translation tips for shoe buyers; her commenters provide even more.

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Brave New Malden, “freelance copywriter with over a million years’ experience,” spots a trend in ad copy: “At A, we know how important B is. That’s why we C, which gives you D.” The two key words: “That’s why.”

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That’s why you’re sad: You’re suffering from jalopia, “fatigue with the laborious maintenance of having a body, a piñata of meat that’s incompatible with the Legoland rationality of the modern world, which was built for beings whose indestructible parts lock onto the Earth with a satisfying ‘click,’ whose emotions are standardized, whose mistakes are best measured in parts per million.” More flavors of melancholy—all invented, all invaluable—at the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. (Via @Wordnik and @Bookbench.)

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The reviewer calls the book “edgy,” “unflinching,” and “long-awaited.” What he means: “contains no adult voices of reason,” “has a lot of bad words,” and “late.” A helpful lexicon of publishing buzzwords from Janice Harayda and friends at One-Minute Book Reviews. (A few years ago I attempted a similar decoder for film-festival buzzwords like “haunting” and “bleakly beautiful.”)

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Linguist Geoffrey Pullum, the author of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, responds in Lingua Franca to the latest nonsensical rant about the (mythical) decline of the English language:

What on earth comes over people when they write about language? It’s not just their ability to use dictionaries that disappears, it’s their acumen, their numeracy, their common sense. Show some people a single unfamiliar word and they’ll whip themselves into a paroxysm of fury, shaking their fist at what they see as a tsunami of black lexical filth sweeping in to destroy the whole of their native tongue.

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The entire Facebook terms of service in bro-speak. (“This is the Internet, bro; it’s like the fucking Wild West out there.”)

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This one’s for real: In 1986, Disney’s executives changed the title of the studio’s next animated feature from Basil of Baker Street to The Great Mouse Detective. In pissed-off response, reports Letters of Note, the film’s animators issued a fake memo announcing “the retroactive renaming of the entire Disney back catalogue, bar The Aristocats, in a similarly bland style.” Guess which title became The Girl with the See-Through Shoes? Via The Hairpin.

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Mashable reveals how Hipmunk, Zynga, and seven other tech businesses got their names. Most startups flop in this department, reports tech analyst Jeremiah Owyang, who attended TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco earlier this week and brought back dispiriting news from the branding front: “I strolled down the aisle with one VC friend of the 200 startups, we noticed they had ridiculous company names missing vowels and cutesy logos. The biggest set back, is the lack of positioning or even tag lines. A majority of the banners lacked a descriptor of what the company did. This is a big opportunity for PR firms to assist this early market.” (Spelling and grammar errors are Mr. Owyang’s. And by “PR firms,” he mostly means “name developers and design agencies.”)

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Finally, a name game to carry you through the weekend: Name That Thing, a visual vocabulary  test from Merriam-Webster. Each time you play, you get a new set of questions. “Addiction counseling not included,” warns M-W lexicographer Peter Sokolowski.

Word of the Week: Hunker

Hunker: To crouch or squat; to sit on one’s heels; to take shelter; to take a defensive posture. Usually in combination with down: “hunker down to avoid the icy wind.” Possibly from Old Norse hokra, to crouch; may be related to haunch (upper hip and thigh). The OED traces hunker to a 1720 Scottish usage; Etymology Online says hunker down is American Southern dialect popularized circa 1965.

There was a lot of hunkering down in the headlines during the days preceding Hurricane Irene’s landfall on the East Coast of the United States. “Quinnipiac University is preparing to hunker down for Hurricane Irene and the aftermath of the storm” read the lede of an August 26 story in The Quad News, the Connecticut college’s student newspaper.  “Find a safe place to hunker down,” Delaware Governor Jack Markell advised residents of his state on August 27.

Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, tweeted this on August 28:

And this headline appeared in the Washington Post on August 26:

 

Hunker also has a history as a noun. “Originally, a nickname for a member of the conservative section of the Democratic party in New York; hence, one opposed to progress in general; a fogy” is one definition at Wordnik. The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia goes into greater detail:

In American politics, a conservative; one who opposes innovation or change; a fogy: first applied in the State of New York as a name to the conservative section of the Democratic party who opposed the Barnburners or radical section, about 1845. Also used adjectively.

Although hunker is no longer used as a nominative political epithet, the sense of “opposes innovation or change” still lingers in some usages. “Holds stubbornly to a position” is another Wordnik definition, with this sentence example: “As the White House hunkered down, G.O.P. congressional unity started crumbling” (Time).

August Linkfest

My new favorite online dictionary:

Samosapedia is based in New York, but its turf is South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, from Bangladesh to the Bay Area. The lexicon is essential for deciphering passages such as this one, from the biography of one Samosapedia founder:

Vik B.was once a total buddhu from Bangalore. During SUPW periods at St Joseph’s he created so much galata and tamasha that he was subjected to routine thapads from admonishing teachers and priests.

Sign up to receive a “daily dose of chutney” via email from “General Samosa.” See also this blog post about Samosapedia at Johnson, written by a native speaker of Indian-English. (Hat tip: @MacDictionary.)

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My new favorite parody site: The Proper English Foundation (motto: “Proper English is a subjective concept which we have taken to extremes”). All rules are enforced by the Académie von anglais, whose name is “a blend of French and German, the two languages that begat English more than 1,000 years ago.” (Via Bradshaw of the Future. And yes, it’s a spoof of the ridiculous Queen’s English Society.) UPDATE: On his blog, Sentence First, Stan Carey takes a skeptical look (or sceptical, as he'd put it) at the Queen's English Society and its spoofers. 

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How does the sound of a flavor name influence the way we experience ice cream? “The fact that consumers think of brand names with back vowels as heavy, thick, richer products suggests that they might prefer to name ice cream with back vowels, since ice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be heavy and rich,” writes Dan Jurafsky in a fascinating (long) essay at The Language of Food. Jurafsky also connects ice cream with gunpowder.

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A list of English words that can be spelled using elements in the periodic table. One of the longest: thermophosphorescence. Via Wordnik.

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How 50 big companies got their names. Many are eponyms in disguise: Taco Bell is named for founder Dave Bell; Hasbro is a truncated blend of Hassenfeld Brothers. Via Name Inspector.

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FAIL: Why most brand names suck. An excellent 20-minute video presentation by Minneapolis branding consultancy Pollywog.

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Fauxgo, a collection of the fake logos used in movies and TV shows. (Via Swiss Miss.)

Oceanic Airlines, Lost.

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Last week’s theme at A Word a Day was the origins and meanings of five car names: Paseo, Accord, Prius, Impresa, and Corolla. (I wish AWAD had included my favorite bad example: the Toyota Cressida. In the Iliad—and in Chaucer and Shakespeare—Cressida was the vixen who fell in love with Troilus and then betrayed him with Diomedes. Homer always called her “faithless Cressida.”)

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Did you know that the Twitter bird has a name? Via +Rich Levin.

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And because it’s that time of year, here’s a golden oldie from Literal Minded: The nouning of back to school.

Poster from here.

How Twitter and Square Got Their Names

Twitter was almost named Twitch. The mobile-payment company Square was originally called Squirrel.

Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter and later founded Square, talked about both companies in an interview with WNYC’s Lisa Chow and Jim Colgan.

On the origins of the Twitter name (punctuation and capitalization sic from the interview transcript):

DORSEY: We wanted a name that evoked what we did. We wanted something that was tangible. And we looked at what we were doing and when you received a tweet over SMS, your phone would buzz. It would jitter. It would twitch. And those were the early names, Jitter and Twitch. And neither one of them really inspired the best sort of imagery.

COLGAN: They were the names of the company?

DORSEY: They were the names we were considering for Twitter at the time.

COLGAN: So we could all be talking about Jitter.

DORSEY: Exactly. One of the guys who was helping us build and create the system, Noah Glass, took the word Twitch, and he went down the dictionary. And we all looked at the Oxford English dictionary at the T-W’s, and we found the word Twitter. And Twitter means a short inconsequential burst of information, chirps from birds. And we were like, that describes exactly what we’re doing here. So it was an easy choice, and we got twitter.com for some very low price, and we named the company Twitter.

(Actually, they named it Twttr. They bought the vowel-enhanced domain later.)

On having second thoughts:

DORSEY: When we came up with the name Twitter, we were like, maybe this isn’t the best name for us because in certain cultures it could be demeaning. For example, Twit is not necessarily associated with the best things. But it has been amazing in terms of building the brand because the users have taken it and invented their own vernacular around it, like tweet and twitterpated.

CHOW: I haven’t heard of twitterpated. What does that mean?

DORSEY: Twitterpated is when you’re overwhelmed with information or you’re just so excited that you forget to tweet or forget to share.

(Chow must never have seen Bambi. I refer you to “Bambi Learns About Twitterpated.”)

On the origins of the Square name:

COLGAN: Do you think it’s possible to change the name as you go along?

DORSEY: Yes and that’s what we found with Square. So naming Square was a different experiment. It had some similar themes. Square is a little tiny cube that plugs into your phone or ipad or ipod, and it allows anyone to accept a credit card immediately from wherever they are. So again, we wanted something that evoked a physical tangible thing.

We were actually discussing the idea without a name in the middle of the woods up in Marin County around San Francisco. It was nighttime, and there were all these squirrels moving back and forth, and I saw a squirrel and I was like, "Squirrel! They go around and collect acorns. They squirrel things away. And that’s perfect because people are going around, and they’re accepting payments, and they’re squirreling away money. Let’s name it Squirrel, and the device can be an acorn, and you can swipe a credit card through the acorn and plug it into your mobile phone. It’s perfect." And we were calling the company Squirrel and all the code was named Squirrel.

Two months later, we were demoing it at a company, and I was in their cafeteria and I was checking out for my lunch, and I saw this little squirrel logo, and it was at their point of sale system. And I said to my colleague, “What’s that?” And he worked at this company and said, “Oh that’s our point of sale. It’s called Squirrel Systems.” And I was like, well we’ve got to change that name.

So we went to the whiteboard. We went through every single name we could imagine for a payments company, and we came up with a bunch of them. We went to Seashell, which was the first currency ever used, but our lawyer was worried that Shell oil company would sue us so that was a no. Then we went to Flow and a bunch of other things that evoked that sensation.

And then I just remembered what we did at Twitter with the dictionary. So I looked up the word Squirrel and I went down the S-Q’s and I came across Square. And I looked at the definition, and of course it’s geometry but also there’s a phrase “square up,” which means to settle. [SquareUp.com became the company’s URL.] There’s “fair and square,” which means that we’ve settled up. And then there’s “we’re square,” which means we’re good. We’ve paid our dues.

CHOW: Or you’re so square.

COLGAN: Dork.

DORSEY: Well we ignored that part.

CHOW: Just like you ignored the twit part.

DORSEY: Exactly.

That last point is important. If you look hard enough—or even if you look just a little—you’ll find something negative about every name. So ask yourself: Do the positives outweigh the negatives? Can you—and your customers—ignore the negatives? And can you turn the positives into a viable brand?

Read the rest of the interview.

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(Hat tip: Grammarsnipe.)

June Linkfest

The job of a lexicographer may often be sedentary, but it’s hardly lazy, what with words being invented, repurposed, and upcycled on a daily basis. For proof, see Oxford Dictionaries Online, which recently announced some of the most recent additions to the venerable word-hoard, including baby bump, man cave, unfollow, and ZOMG. Completely new to me: schmick, an Australian slang term, dating back to the 1980s, that means “stylish.”

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Speaking of the OED, and speaking of venerable, Wordorigins.org has been posting weekly lists of  words that first appeared in a particular year. The first list, of words whose  first appearance was in 1911, includes allergen, floozy, ivory tower, and taupe, and quite a few surprises. Go to the home page to search for additional entries in the series.

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There are new words, and there are newsy words. Newswordy, a newish blog, is a collection of buzzwords in the news. One word is presented (handsomely) each day, along with a quote, a definition, and news and Twitter feeds on the subject. Yesterday’s word was pernicious: “having a harmful effect, esp. in a gradual or subtle way.”

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Over at Ironic Sans, a source of excellent why-didn’t-I-think-of-that ideas, David Friedman (no relation) proposes a new top-level Internet domain, .ugh, “for websites that can only be parody, complainy, or snarky.”

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And speaking of complainy and snarky, Paul McFedries, writing for IEEE Spectrum, presents a roster of insults for the technological age: pajamahadeen, slacktivist, meh-sayer, and more. (McFedries also runs the very enjoyable and informative Word Spy website.)

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Remember Sylvia Trench? Kissy Suzuki? Xenia Onatopp? Drew Mackie, of the Back of the Cereal Box blog, certainly does. For your edification, he provides “a list of Bond girls whose names serve as a pun, a sexual reference or something else with meaning beyond what a ‘straight’ character name does.”

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Something serious now: Pollywog, a naming and branding agency in Minneapolis, reminds us that nonprofit organizations aren’t exempt from trademark challenges. Case in point: a feud between the Susan G. Komen “Race for the Cure” and a smaller, Minnesota-based group that was using “Mush for the Cure” for a sled-dog race.

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More serious stuff: “Before you start trying to come up with a name, you have to get real,” writes The Name Inspector. Here are his five hard truths of naming—essential reading for all entrepreneurs.

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Linguist Arnold Zwicky takes a semi-playful look at how foods with a “yuck factor”—such as lab-grown meat—get rebranded. By the way, if you love language—and if you’re reading this blog, I gather you have at least a passing interest in the subject—you’ll want to check out Zwicky’s great big list of language blogs and resources.

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And because I can’t allow this month to pass without linking to something Weineriffic, please enjoy Fragments from “Weiner! The Musical,” brought to you by the impresarios at McSweeney’s.

December Linkfest

Because you’ve been good all year, I have a blogsack full of links for you. Happy solstice!

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Literary society

Give Me Something to Read selects the best long-form essays of 2010. I’d already read a few of them, and am looking forward to catching up on the rest. (Via Kottke.)

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Just about everyone knows that Shakespeare invented many words and idioms we consider indispensable today. But the great poet John Milton (1608-1674) was also a prolific neologist. Read about Milton’s coinages, which include dreary, terrific, and fragrance.

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Buzzwords, jargon, and clichés

If you haven’t yet seen Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s mesmerizing, enraging documentary about the financial crisis, I recommend you do so. This lexicon of the film’s financial jargon will prove helpful.

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“Extensive experience,” “innovative,” and “motivated” top the list of LinkedIn’s overused buzzwords of 2010. I was surprised and gratified not to see “passion” on the list.

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Brave New Malden, one of my new favorite language blogs, has been collecting a certain type of sloganclone: the kind the fits the formula “X-ing the world, one Y at a time.” See his very long list, which includes a teeny Fritinancy contribution and a game at the end. (I wrote about sloganclones, including “X-ing the world,” back in 2007.)

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Here’s what appears to be a comprehensive lexicon of computer jargon. It’s far from humorless: see the entry for “I for one welcome our new X overlords.” The home page provides links to a rich trove of information on hacker culture, hacker slang, hacker speech style (“dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly flippant attitude are highly valued”), and much more.

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Good lists

From Forbes.com, 50 names you need to know in 2011. More precisely, names and concepts—the list includes malaria vaccine, floating bicycle, and urban farming and well as Tan Le, Robert Khuzami, and Honestly.com. There’s even a Friedman: Milton’s grandson Patri, who wants to build “‘start-up countries’: autonomous dwellings in the middle of the ocean, starting with a brand new independent city-state off the California coast.”

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“Food writer and dilettante” Gary Allen wondered why they were so many collective nouns for animals—an exaltation of larks, a murder of crows, et al.—and so few collective nouns for plants. So he set about creating his own list. Among the best: a cliché of chestnuts, a duke of daisies, a pursing of tulips. Read the complete list, titled “A Wreck of Hesperus.”

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You’re fired: Nine of the most absurd trademark attempts in recent U.S. history. Via BeautyMarks.

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End-of-year traditions

The UK word of the year, chosen by Oxford University Press, is “big society.” 

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The top 10 Japanese phrases of 2010. (“Munchable chili oil”?)

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Baby Name Wizard’s name of the year for 2010 is . . . a doozy.

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In his word of the year nomination, linguist Geoff Nunberg says nay to vuvuzela, refudiate, and guidette.

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Language arts

How’s about some video tutorials on how to speak Hoosier? (That’s Indiana-talk, for you auslanders.)

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Or maybe you’d rather learn to speak Canadian English, “the offspring of a queen and a cowboy”? (By Sherry Noik of SherryGrammarian.)

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If you’re headed south rather than north, you’ll want to bookmark The Antarctic Dictionary: A Complete Guide to Antarctic English, Bernadette Hince’s comprehensively researched reference. The first entry—“aaaa, aaaaah, aaahh, ah (see ahh)”—turns out to be a sled-dog command, “usually softly called,” that translates to “halt.” Via Kottke.

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On boredom and writing

I was thrilled to discover that the incomparable William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, is posting a weekly contribution to The American Scholar’s website. Here’s a recent Zinsser essay, “Bring Back Boredom!” Via word maestro John McIntyre, whose own blog, You Don’t Say, is also well worth reading and bookmarking.

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And speaking of boredom, here’s the always-delightful Normalarkey (Nancy Davis Kho) on “Boredom and the White Cloth of Surrender”:

I regard a bored child as I do a youngster who coughs on me without covering his mouth or touches all the cookies on a plate before selecting one. It’s not necessarily the child’s fault; they just need some redirection from an attentive adult.

September Linkfest

Some of what I’ve been reading this month:

 

“Sure, slogans should be as short as possible,” writes veteran marketing man Al Ries, “but there's a trade-off. Slogans should be long enough to contain some words that knock on the right side of the consumer's brain. The emotional side of the brain as opposed to the left side, the logical, analytical side.” Read more at AdAge.

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An A-to-Z of naming schemes, with lists for Aztec gods (I can’t wait to name something Chiconahuiehecatl), bunnies, curries, and much more. The authors write: “The purpose of these naming schemes is to name network computers, but it [sic] can also be used to name projects, variables, streets, pets, kids, or any other project where unique names and rememberable [sic] names are required.” Via Anthony Shore.

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How six tech companies got their names. I knew about most of them (in fact, I’ve written about Asus myself), but the Go Daddy and Fark stories were new to me. (Via On the Button.)

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In honor of New York Fashion Week—pardonnez-moi, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week—Charles McGrath gives us his version of fashion week phone sex. Cracked me up. (Via Maud Newton.)

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One more for Fashion Week, from the perennially fabulous Nancy Nall: “The Dresses Speak,” in which NN reveals the only adjectives a fashion writer needs to know.

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I’d rather be keelhauled than ever spend a single minute at Burning Man, the annual desert spectacle that combines many of my least-favorite things, e.g., 130-degree heat + no running water + public nudity + experimental art + nonstop music + “recreational” drugs + wacky costumes + forced socializing. But I did enjoy this Burning Man glossary, which provides a glimpse into a subculture that many people (my next-door neighbor, for one) seem to relish. Two definitions may help you understand why I choose to avoid the playa: “Fire jumping: A technique of jumping over a burning fire, sometimes with negative results when two opposing jumpers collide in mid-air,” and “Nose Tators: Playa dust nostril plugs that form during the event.” As film mogul Samuel Goldwyn reportedly said, “Include me out.” (Via Fashion for Nerds, who is a Burning Man fan and participant. But hey, I don’t judge.)