Fritinancy

Not Keeping Up

When “Jones” is the first word in your brand name, shouldn’t you know how to conjugate the word properly?

That seems not to be the case with Jones New York, the namesake brand of a Fortune 500 retail conglomerate.

 

Screen shot from the Jones New York website.*

The same image and headline appear in a two-page ad in the September issue of Vogue (pages 190-191). Lavish styling, pricey photography, expensive ad buy. Too bad a few dollars weren’t left over to pay a proofreader.

 

Here’s the thing: The idiom is “Keeping up with the Joneses.”** Joneses is the plural of Jones, and it follows the rule about regular plural formation: If a word ends in a pronounced S—as opposed to the silent S of some French names like “Dumas”—add -es.

Not an apostrophe.

So maybe this apostrophized name is a possessive? According to some usage guides (notably the Associated Press Stylebook), words that end an S become possessives with the addition of an apostrophe. According to others (notably the Chicago Manual of Style), they need an apostrophe and an S: Kansas’s, Dickens’s, Morris’s.

But whichever guide you follow, a possessive noun has to possess something. We might say, for example, that we’re keeping up with the Joneses' circus skills. In the ad, however, nothing is being possessed.

Enough? Enough. After all, I still have 770 pages of the Vogue September issue to plow through. Who knows how many usage goofs lie ahead?

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* The dress is $399, comes in sizes 2, 4, and 6 only, and won’t ship until September 14—and then it’s a final sale (no refunds or exchanges).

** According to the biographer of the novelist Edith Wharton, “keeping up with the Joneses” was coined in reference to Wharton’s very wealthy aunt, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones.

August Linkfest

Crowdsourcing a name for a new apple-flavored Mountain Dew beverage seemed like such a good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, plenty. “Suddenly, its gallery of suggestions featured such winners as ‘Gushing Granny,’ ‘Diabeetus,’ and my personal favorite, ‘Fapple’.” Mountain Dew now says the campaign was created by a local customer, not the company; the “offensive content”—created by unknown pranksters—has been scrubbed from the “Dub the Dew” website.

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My two posts about the origins of the expression “the whole nine yards” (here and here) continue to be among the most-searched entries on this blog. But the story isn’t finished: New research has unearthed a couple of citations that go back to the 1950s, a full decade earlier than previously assumed. Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the new findings, “Stretching Out ‘The Whole Nine Yards’.”

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Speaking of idioms: Absolutely nobody knows where the phrase “round robin” comes from.

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The most-loathed words in the English language, according to readers of The Atlantic, include moist (of course!), curate, slacks, and artisanal.

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Love logos? Love data? Check out Emblemetric, a new blog by James I. Bowie about trends in logo design. No seat-of-the-pants stuff, this: Bowie bases his reports on more than 1.2 million logos in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database. Sample finding: “The use of two stars as a design element in US logos increased by 170 percent in 2011 over the preceding five-year period. Looking back over time, we can see that, following a pronounced dip in the 1970s, logos with two stars have been claiming an increasing share of new trademark filings for the last three decades.” Be still, my geekish heart.

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Set aside several hours to wander happily through the History of Advertising Trust, “the largest archive of British advertising in the world.” There’s also a lovely gallery of ghost signs. (Via @boswellaffleck.)

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At Union Square Café, a “K1” is a diner who will be proposing to his date. At Michael’s New York, “Lawn” is a chopped salad chopped extra fine. Ben Schott deciphers these and other secret codes used in the dining rooms and kitchens of some well-known New York City restaurants, .

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Eleven wonderful words with no precise equivalent in English. Quite a few are new to me, including bilita mpash (Bantu for “the opposite of a nightmare”) and ya-arburnee (Arabic for “may you bury me,” i.e., the expressed hope that you die before your beloved does). (Hat tip: @ourboldhero).

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What’s the nerdiest preposition of them all? Nope, not “notwithstanding.” Not even close.

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Lexicographer Kory Stamper on color definitions in Webster’s Third International Dictionary: “You could spend an hour alone getting lost in ‘cerise’ (‘a moderate red that is slightly darker than claret (sense 3a), slightly lighter than Harvard crimson (sense 1), very slightly bluer and duller than average strawberry (sense 2a), and bluer and very slightly lighter than Turkey red’). No doubt people did. That may explain why we don’t define colors this way anymore.”

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I want a wall-size poster of this Is the New diagram, which documents “every instance of the phrase ‘is the new’ encountered from various sources in 2005.” Samples: “October is the new December,” “staying in is the new going out,” and “flat is the new round.” (Via Diane Fischler.)

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“Ms. and Mrs.,” a small personal-care-products company, was constantly being misidentified, usually as “Mr. and Mrs.” So the founders hired professionals to come up with a new name. Smart move. (Via @alanbrew.)

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A wonderful list of paradoxes from virtually every discipline. I’m still pondering the Service Recovery Paradox: “Successfully fixing a problem with a defective product may lead to higher consumer satisfaction than in the case where no problem occurred at all.” (Via @operativewords.)

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I’m sure you’ll have quibbles and additions, but this Digital Trends list of “The top 10 worst car names of all times” includes some incontestable champions, like the Studebaker Dictator and Isuzu’s Mysterious Utility Wizard. (Via @lexiconbranding.)

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From the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Mary Norris on “Semicolons; So Tricky”: “I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.”

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From the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Ben Yagoda on “The Point of Exclamation”: “A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, ‘Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.’”

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Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and transformative editor of Cosmopolitan, died Monday. From the New York Times front-page obit: “She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.” Ouch. It’s easy to mock Brown, and Cosmo, but let’s not forget that in the early years of Brown’s editorship the magazine published work by Patricia Highsmith, John Fowles, and Tom Wolfe, as these covers from the 1960s attest. And brava to Brown for saying this in 1964:

I personally don’t feel that the world is going to the dogs or that young people are inferior to their counterparts of a previous generation. Our moral codes have changed slightly, but what we have now is a lot better than the days of stricter moral codes when there was child labor, no equality for women, no federal aid for destitute people, plenty of robber barons and lynching.

Source: Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon’s 2009 biography of Brown. (Hat tip: The Hairpin.)

Title Nine Scores, Fouls

I had some errands nearby, so I stopped into the Title Nine store in Berkeley over the weekend to see what was new with this local brand. 

A bit of background: Title Nine was founded in 1989, taking its name from Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex to any person seeking the benefits of any federally funded education program. Title IX opened doors to girls and women who wanted to play sports in school; Title Nine sells non-technical sports gear and clothing. The company has 19 retail stores—none in malls, the website boasts—243 employees, and a manifesto.

Appropriately, there’s a lot of playful, you-go-girl energy in a Title Nine store. This poster typifies the spirit:

“You are so busted!” is very cute. The medallion touts the company’s “bravangelists”: also nice.

I actually laughed out loud at this sign displayed above the entrance to the bra department—excuse me, the “Home for Unruly Girls Support Center.”

If you don’t get the joke in “unruly girls,” see the Online Slang Dictionary.

So far, so good. By the evidence, Title Nine is a company that makes a big investment in copywriting, and that’s a good thing. The attention to words carries over into the dressing rooms—or so I thought until I encountered this sign:

 

“Have a Fit!” is fun. So are the other headings: Containment, Mind the Strap, Be Smooth, Know the Terrain, and Think Straight. Then I read the very last sentence: “The bra should lay straight.”

Aha! So Title Nine’s editorial department has an Achilles heel after all: the lay/lie fault. The bra should lie straight, if you please.

(Listen, I get that a lot of people mix up lay and lie, and in fact I tolerate “lay” for “lie” in casual speech. But I can’t condone its appearance in published prose. And that includes marketing copy: See my critiques of the Hanes Lay Flat Collar, the SpeedSleep ad, the Back2Life back-pain “solution.” This is why professional copyeditors were invented. They know this stuff. They can help.)

I picked up a fall catalog to see whether the dressing-room sign was anomalous. Nope: The error is even worse in the catalog (insert, page 7), where in addition to the lay/lie error we have a comma splice:

“The bra should lay straight, if it rides up, it’s still too loose.”

There needs to be a period—a colon would be OK, too—after “straight.”

The “lay” error persists on the website:

I leafed through the catalog to distract myself from all this lay-ola. Unfortunately, my eye fell on an even bigger boo-boo—in a name with a trademark symbol, no less:

 

Page 19, fall catalog.

I was drawn to that “Wooliscious” headline because in all the time I’ve been tracking -licious compounds—see here, here, here, and here—I’d never come across a -liscious. It looked odd, and I wondered whether it was a clumsy attempt at a portmanteau with “luscious.” Nope again: In the product copy—and on the Web—the word is spelled “Woolicious.”

I’m guessing Title Nine’s lawyers have already pitched a fit over this mistake, so I’ll leave it at that.

In my crappy photo you can just barely make out the name of this garment: “The Swacket.” It’s “more than a sweater—not quite a jacket,” the copy says. Honestly, is that the best they could come up with? Because all I can think of is the poor sacrificial fracket.

I’ll have another post about Title Nine later this week.

Unleash Deadly

Just in time for Life-or-Death Week here at Fritinancy, Karen sent me this photo of a display at Dick's Sporting Goods in Natick, Massachusetts:

Predator Lethal Zones soccer footwear.

 

Deadly? Those candy-colored shoes look pretty cheerful to me. The lethality is more overt in an Adidas video that shows the shoes (“boots” in the UK) being shot from artillery.

But what about the slogan, “Unleash Deadly”? Rest assured  that the grammar is deliberately off. Yes, transitive “unleash” normally takes a noun as object (“Unleash the hounds!”). Despite its -ly suffix, “deadly” is an adjective here, which makes “Unleash Deadly” parallel in structure to another famously iconoclastic slogan, Apple’s “Think Different.”

 

Adidas is using the #unleash hashtag in social media.

 

To those of you who are wringing your hands over this evidence of the decline and fall of “good grammar,” here’s a gentle reminder: Advertising is supposed to command your attention, not lull you with predictability. “Unleash the Predator LZ” or “Unleash Deadly Force” would be grammatically correct but undistinguished. “Unleash Deadly”—clipped, memorable, ominous—makes you look twice.

And, as you’ve noticed, it does that by incorporating the D-word—formerly off limits in branding, now a hot trend.

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Previously on Life-or-Death Week: Thanatourism, Death to Branding, Lifelike.

 

July Linkfest

If you’ve been following the big science news of the month/year/century/millennium, you know that the “Higgs” in “Higgs boson” is British physicist Peter Higgs. But you may not be aware that“boson” was named for an Indian scientist, Satyendranath Bose. (Note: The Higgs boson is not to be confused with the Higgs bos’n or the Herrgs berson.)

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Ten weird rules that control how planets are named.

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Five words with surprising etymologies. I knew the “California” story, but was indeed surprised by “partridge.”

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Guest-blogging at Midlife Mixtape, Alexandra Rosas of Good Day, Regular People teaches us some useful Colombian idioms. I’m partial to ¿Y quién pidió el pollo? which translates literally to “And who ordered the chicken?” but is infinitely more versatile.

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Moving north of the border now: Studio360Redesigns assigned Toronto-based Bruce Mau Design the job of rebranding the Canadian national identity. The Brand New blog reports on Mau’s “Know Canada” redesign.

I think “Know Canada” is a brilliant slogan. Inexplicably, though, Studio360Redesigns conducted a separate contest, open to nonprofessionals, and chose a different slogan. I can’t say I share the judges’ enthusiasm for “Canada: We’re Not Just Colder, We’re Cooler.” Meh.

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“I call them the Liquid Names: they flow smoothly, like water down a glass streambed with no rocks or branches to impede its path.” Baby Name Wizard reports on “a new class of girls’ names” that has “taken hold in the past generation.”

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What if language magazines were sold at supermarket checkouts? Two hypotheticals, one from Mignon (Grammar Girl) Fogarty (pictured below), the other from an opinion piece by John McWhorter in theNew York Times.

I especially like “What to do when he ‘begs the question’.”

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“On Newsroom, every word is expertly crafted by an genuine genius of dialogue. In a newsroom, people alternate between exhaustion and caffeinated hysteria.” And other differences between the HBO seriesThe Newsroom and an actual newsroom.

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Need a rhyme or a near-rhyme? RhymeBrain is one of the better online dictionaries I’ve seen. (Hat tip: John McChesney-Young.)

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Destination weddings, destination birthdays, destination funerals: How did “destination” become a modifier, anyway?

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The Project Twins’ illustrated dictionary of “unusual words,"     from acersecomic to zugzwang. (Via Culture Desk.)

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This is swellacious: The Oxford English Fictionary, “Defining words that aren’t real. Yet.” (Via this tweet from Our Bold Hero.)

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Spin magazine’s list of the 40 greatest band names of all time. (Via@VerbID.)

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How well do you know carny lingo? Trucker lingo? Show-biz lingo?

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Q: What’s the correct pronunciation of “Moleskine”? A: Whatever you like.

 

Speaking Truth About Power

I was surprised, as many regular New Yorker readers were, to see a long essay by Joan Acocella, “The Language Wars,” in the magazine’s May 14 issue. Acocella is the New Yorker’s long-time dance critic; I hadn’t known she was also a language maven. Yet there she was, using a new book by Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, as an excuse to disparage language descriptivists—that is to say, pretty much all contemporary linguists and lexicographers—as flame-throwing anarchists who are also, paradoxically, elitists. (Or as the New Yorker prefers it, élitists.) One of the descriptivists she singled out, Steven Pinker, wrote a stinging response that has been published in the current issue.*

But apparently that wasn’t enough merde-stirring for the New Yorker. Yesterday, the magazine’s Page-Turner blog published a post by Ryan Bloom with the finger-wagging title “Inescapably, You’re Judged by Your Language.” After a pass at talking about appropriate register and dialect (“Know thy audience, know thy friends”), Bloom cuts to the chase. “Why should we bother to learn prescriptive English—the grade-school rules—if it isn’t our natural dialect?” he asks, rhetorically. Because:

Repugnant as it may be, the simple answer is that we need to learn prescriptive English because that’s the way the people in power communicate. As far as daily survival is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether the origins of this linguistic power structure are racist, classist, or élitist, or whether they’re based on the whims of dead white males. This is how the system works right now, today, and in order to best get the attention of those in power, to begin to effect change, we must be able to use their dialect. We must know their rules.

I’m neither a linguist nor a lexicographer, so I’m not qualified to talk about descriptivism and prescriptivism with any authority.** But I am qualified to tell Ryan Bloom that if he thinks “prescriptive English” is “the way the people in power communicate,” he and I are living on different planets. Maybe “prescriptive English” is how the powerful people at the New Yorker speak and write. But as far as I can tell from my sorties into other corridors of power, it sure ain’t how “the system works right now.”

You want to know how “people in power”—company presidents, board chairmen, politicians, and other members of the .01 percent—communicate? I’ll tell you. They say and write things like “between you and I” and “please circle back to Fred and myself.” They write “alot” and “alright.” They “hearken back.” They use comma splices. They confuse your and you’re, rein and reign. They’ve never met a Business Concept that didn’t merit Promotion through Capitalization. They smiled benignly upon the 43rd president of the United States—a former person of power—when he publicly said misunderestimate and Grecians. They didn’t see what the fuss was all about.

Need more evidence? Listen to Ursula M. Burns, the CEO and chairman of Xerox, in a recent interview with NPR:

What I found there was an organization that accepted me for whom I was.

Xerox ranks #127 in the Fortune 500. Ms. Burns has a master’s degree in engineering from Columbia. I’d say she is one of those “people in power” Ryan Bloom is talking about. And yet she used whom incorrectly (and quite emphatically) in the interview. I don’t know why. Maybe she once learned a “rule” about whom following prepositions (as it does in “for whom the bell tolls”). Maybe, like many people in and out of power, she thinks whom just sounds ritzier than plain old who. She’s doing it wrong, but who’s going to tell her?

I say all this not to shame, blame, or point with alarm. (OK, just a little.) I’m just saying that Ryan Bloom has been misinformed. To all appearances, knowledge of proper “prescriptivist” grammar is not a prerequisite for survival at Xerox. Or, like it or not, at most other companies. Other things matter more: enthusiasm, connections, the right degree from the right university, the willingness to work nights and weekends. “Correct” language? That’s for pedants and peevers, not for American go-getters and success-seekers.

I do maintain that there are good reasons—clarity and consistency foremost among them—for mastering some rules of language usage. But the notion that we plebes need to speak and write “correctly” so as to impress the higher-ups is simply nonsensical. The rich and powerful may have more money and political clout, but when it comes to “correct” speech and writing they’re as clueless and error-prone as everyone else.

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*Someone else wrote a completely bonkers letter that bemoaned usage “horrors” such as “Did you finish your homework yet?” and claimed that “a locution like ‘exact same’” is “indicative of the depth to which American English has sunk.” I kid you not. (One Language Log commenter suggested that the letter was an example of Poe’s Law, which states that without signals like emoticons, it’s difficult to tell whether extremism on the Internet is sincere or satirical.)

**The linguists at Language Log have done their usual excellent job analyzing the current brouhaha: see Mark Liberman (here and here) on the Acocella story and Ben Zimmer on Bloom’s blog post. See also Jessica Love’s essay on “what the New Yorker got wrong” in The American Scholar. (Update: Read Steven Pinker’s response to Acocella, “False Fronts in the Language Wars: Why New Yorker Writers and Others Keep Pushing Bogus Controversies,”  published May 31 in Slate.)

Are We Having Funner-er Yet?

Something about this Hipmunk ad seemed familiar to me.

San Francisco Muni bus, May 20, 2012.

Then I remembered: Back in 2008 Google introduced its first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1. The ad for the phone was, as Ben Zimmer wrote for Language Log, “packed with jocular comparative adjectives: smarterer, connecteder, funnerer.” Ben went on:

This isn’t just an homage to Dumb and Dumberer, the even more dim-witted sequel to Dumb and Dumber. Rather, it’s being recognized by many in the techie community as a pointed jab at Apple honcho Steve Jobs, who recently enthused about “the funnest iPod ever.”

Jobs died last year, the iPod Touch website no longer includes a reference to “funnest” (it now says “It has fun written all over it”), and the G1 has evolved into the G2X. But “funner-er” lives on at Hipmunk, the San Francisco startup founded in 2010—a generation removed, in tech years, from that 2008 Android campaign.

You may be wondering about the Hipmunk name. Here’s a story about it from TechCrunch, reproduced verbatim with the usual caveat about TechCrunch’s slack writing and editing:

Like many startups in today’s Silicon Valley*, [co-founder Adam] Goldstein was struggling to find an apropo domain that was topical and more importantly, available. After dangerously flirting with (and even purchasing) domains like BouncePounce.com and Trot.me, Goldstein’s girlfriend** told him to identify a cute mammal that he could build a brand around. Hipmunk fit the bill.

You’ll notice something missing from this origin story: an explanation of how Chipmunk (I presume) became Hipmunk. I gather that Chipmunk.com wasn’t available and (“more importantly”) no one was willing to part with cash for (a) domain negotiations or (b) professional naming services. Or maybe the founders just wanted to emphasize their hipness. A follow-up question from the reporter would have been helpful.

I wrote about another super-superlative coinage—“Maker’s-er,” from Maker’s Mark—in a September 2011 post.

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* Hipmunk is in San Francisco, not Silicon Valley. Different area code, more fog, etc., etc.

** I’m sorry to keep sticking it to TechCrunch, but who was doing the dangerous flirting and purchasing—Goldstein or his girlfriend? Dangling modifiers: use at your own (and your readers’) peril.

May Linkfest

The new-to-me verb “to knoll” comes from Knoll, the furniture brand named for founders Florence and Hans Knoll. Mike Pope writes in his Evolving English II blog that knolling refers to “aligning or squaring things (as on a desk), or more broadly, in what might be thought of as arranging things in an uber-anal-retentive way.” Mike’s post includes an “Always Be Knolling” video clip. I am a non-knoller—an anti-knoller, even—but I do like knowing the word and its origin.

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Pinterest is a dream medium for visual thinkers, but lately I’ve been seeing it used in some distinctly verbal ways. See, for example, Dipika Kohli’s board about naming that includes links to posts about taglines, the naming process, and common naming mistakes. I was especially pleased to discover “How to Name Things,” a thoughtful post on the ribbonfarm blog about naming and numbering. And I love the story about how ribbonfarm got its name.

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Worry more about creating a strong brand than about concocting a “pure” URL, advises Jay Jurisich of naming agency Zinzin. (Hear, hear!)

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Monday was “Name Day” in the U.S.: the day the Social Security Administration released its 2011 baby-name data. Read Nancy’s Baby Names and Baby Name Wizard for comprehensive coverage. (Each link goes to the first of several posts about the name data.) Some high/low points: Sophia is the number-one girl’s name for the first time; Tyler, Jayden, Isabella, and Miley are finally falling out of favor; and the girl’s name Harper rose in rank from 118th in 2010 to 54th in 2011. Also from Baby Name Wizard, the best sibling name set ever.

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The misuse of “whom” only seems like a recent problem. Language Log reminds us that the humorist James Thurber, tongue planted firmly in cheek, addressed the problem in 1929: “Take the common expression, ‘Whom are you, anyways?’ That is of course, strictly speaking, correct – and yet how formal, how stilted!”

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The University of Minnesota’s James M. Pilcher, who has been studying the origin of the taco for 20 years, tells the Smithsonian magazine that the name for the food item may have originated in the 18th century, in the silver mines of Mexico, where “taco” referred to little charges used to excavate the ore. “Taco” first appeared in print in the U.S. in 1905. Lots more fascinating history in that article, including the story of Taco Bell, named for its founder, Glen Bell. For more taco history, read the recent New York Times article about Gustavo Arellano, author of a new book, Taco USA.

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The Millions on books with one-word titles: “At their best, one-word titles distill content to its purest essence, which is what all titles strive to do, and then they stick in the mind. Sometimes, of course, they fall flat, and much of the time they’re just lukewarm and vague or, worse, falsely grand.”  (Hat tip: Diana Landau.)

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On the other hand: One hundred books whose titles start with “The Man Who…”

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Need to name a beverage? Just add zero.

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“A company needs a new name and it decides to engage its employees to come up with a new name,” writes guest blogger Mark Prus at DuetsBlog. “What could go wrong?” Plenty.

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Quick: How many fictitious brands from “The Simpsons” can you name?

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Bill Gardner of Logo Lounge identifies the most significant logo trends of 2012, and the names he gives the trends are as interesting as the designs. A sampling: Potato Chip, Anaglyphs, Sphere Carving, Peel.

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Why does the sentence adverb “hopefully” carry a stigma in some quarters while “obviously,” “seriously,” and “honestly” don’t? Linguist Geoff Pullum casts a gimlet eye on “five decades of foolishness,” hopefully put to rest now that the AP Stylebook permits “the modern usage of hopefully”—i.e., “it is hoped that.”

April Linkfest

If you’re interested in English-language slang from the early 19th century—and who wouldn’t be?—you’ll want to follow @Vulgar_Tongue, which tweets citations from Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue. A few examples: scandal broth (tea), sir reverence (a turd), and sea lawyer (a shark). The entire book is available online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

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“Eight-point type? I’m sure that’s legible” and other encouragement copywriters can give to art directors: Go Art Director Go. (Hat tip: Lori Burwash.)

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Cartoonist Brian McFadden totally nails the naming style of social-media startups in his Sunday New York Times strip. “Slackify”? Perfect.

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Past naming trends—remember all those “tronics”?—hold clues to the future of naming. Alan Brew, a principal at brand strategy firm RiechesBaird, makes the case.

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“Stop talking about names, start talking about characteristics of names”: good advice from Nancy’s Baby Names that works for the company- or product-naming process too.

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Episode 6 of Lexicon Valley, the linguistics podcast on Slate.com, is about how Scrabble, “a math game disguised as a word game,” reveals “the essential beauty of English.” The podcast features an interview with Word Freak author Stefan Fatsis. (All of the Lexicon Valley podcasts are well worth your time. Each one is about 30 minutes long.)

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What makes a movie quote memorable? A team of Cornell University computer scientists compared short, memorable lines from about 1,000 movies and compared them to other lines spoken by the same characters in the same films. Read about their findings at Technology Review (I love the title of their paper: “You Had Me at Hello: How Phrasing Affects Memorability”), then take the test yourself.

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To atone for her absence from blogging, trademark lawyer Lara Pearson of Brand Geek researched SORRY trademarks. She found 22 registered marks and 19 pending marks with SORRY in their names, including the famous board game, an apparel brand, and SORRY FOR PARTYING, “a lifestyle brand connecting those who need an elegant way to apologize for doing everything wrong, yet so right.”

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What’s the connection between hood, hoodlum, and hoodie? Jan Freeman of Throw Grammar from the Train investigates.

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Twitter’s “Who to Follow” feature is grammatically OK, writes Stan Carey. “Not only that: it sounds natural and normal, whereas whom in the same context runs the risk of sounding fussy, affected, and pretentious.”

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The hidden messages in 28 famous and not-so-famous logos.

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“The name of these cookies was changed from Blueberry Craze to the more prosaic Blueberry Cookie, so the sweets were less appealing to children.” A naming lesson from a marijuana bakery, via The Hairpin.

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Mike Pope is conflicted about typos. Or spelling errors. Or whatever you want to call them.

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URGENT REQUEST FROM MOOR OF VENICE and other Shakespearean spam from comedy writer Megan Amram, who(m) you should follow on Twitter, too. She had me at Bravest Avatar Ever.

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“When copywriter Robert Pirosh landed in Hollywood in 1934, eager to become a screenwriter, he wrote and sent the following letter to all the directors, producers, and studio executives he could think of.” It begins “I like words,” and it’s delicious. From Lists of Note. P.S.: Pirosh went on to win a screenwriting Oscar in 1949. 

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Fifteen minutes of literary bliss: former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins talks about the collaboration that turned some of his poems into short animated films. One of the best TED Talks I’ve seen.

Names in the Wild: 9th Avenue, San Francisco

Magic and mystery in the Inner Sunset, near Golden Gate Park:

 

 

Misdirections is a splendid name for a magic shop: Misdirection is what gives magic tricks their magic. This particular shop not only sells cards, books, DVDs, and other paraphernalia, it also sponsors shows and lectures. I’d hoped the website would display a touch of magic—disappearing text? disembodied hands executing feats of prestidigitation?—but alas, it’s merely workmanlike. (When it works at all: the About page is missing. Maybe magic was afoot after all.)

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Right next door to Misdirections is this mysterious sign:

 

 

The symbol is a pilcrow, which is a clue to the store’s name:

 

I’m not sure what the name Paragraph has to do with clothing—elements of style, perhaps? One clever Yelp reviewer said the store “is punctuated just right,” so maybe that has something to do with it. I did recognize “Paragraph” as belonging to the Writer’s Workshop school of retail and fashion naming, a trend I’ve been noticing in various quarters. For example, Nordstrom has a department called Narrative (“polished, casual styles and brands”), and Sears sells clothing with the Apostrophe private label (not sure whether it’s the punctuation symbol or the figure of speech). In the UK there’s an Eileen Fisher-style brand called Poetry*; I suppose when you wear the clothes it’s Poetry in motion.

There’s even a brand, exclusive to the Anthropologie chain, called Pilcro, a variant spelling of Pilcrow. (Its original name was Pilcro and the Letterpress.) Pilcro makes a halfhearted effort to follow through on the theme: there are denim styles called Edit and Stet (editing jargon for “leave it as is,” which may refer to the adjustable cuff), and an ankle-length linen-and cotton trouser called Hyphen. I’ve written previously about Anthropologie’s naming conventions here and here.

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* Thanks to Passage des Perles for informing me of this brand.