Fritinancy

May Linkfest

Newt Gingrich—remember when he ran for president and talked about building bases on the moon?—now appears to be campaigning for Andy Rooney’s old slot on “60 Minutes.” “We’re really puzzled,” he tells his YouTube audience, a look of grave concern furrowing his brow, a familiar-looking device in his hand. “We spent weeks [!] trying to figure out whaddya call this.” This is what you and I call a cell phone or a mobile phone or a smartphone, but that doesn’t satisfy Gingrich. He’s soliciting new, more precise names for the gizmo he used to call “a handheld computer.” Commenters have been gleefully obliging; my favorite nominations are Talkie-Viewie (maybe “TV” for short?), roundcorner-camera-communicati­ons-email-apps-thingy, iMoon, and horseless telephone. (Via TechCrunch.)

Meanwhile, linguist Geoffrey Pullum, posting at Language Log, has “an inkling of what moved Gingrich to embark on his piece of burbling.” It’s all about the naïve lexical global Whorfianism, obviously.

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I caught this a few days too late for Underwear Week but can’t resist sharing it anyway. Triumph, the Swiss bra company, last week introduced its concept bra of the year at a Tokyo press conference. The theme: “branomics,” “a playful take on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ‘three-arrow’ economic revival plan,” according to Reuters. “We hope that as the Japanese economy grows, we can also help bust sizes to get bigger,” said a Triumph spokeswoman. (Via The 3% Conference.)

Image via AdFreak. Note arrows.

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Merriam-Webster, the dictionary company, is having a photography contest for word lovers that looks like a lot of fun. Deadline for submissions: May 26. (Via Emily Brewster.)

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Speaking of photography, here’s a pop song dedicated to stock photo clichés: “groom on phone with angry wife,” “bearded man is looking grave,” “black and white handshake,” and many more. (Via Igor blog.)

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And speaking of photography and contests, GeoGuessr combines street-view photos with a test of your geographical knowledge. Challenging and addictive. (Via PopeHat.)

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Maps! I love ’em. And I especially love maps that combine geography, history, biography, and name lore, like this interactive map of San Francisco place names, developed by Noah Veltman.

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This advice from Baby Name Wizard about overcoming naming remorse works for company and product naming, too.

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Andris Pone of Coin Branding, in Toronto, applauds Frogbox, a “green” moving company in more than one sense. It’s a great brand story, Andris writes: “The Frogbox positioning statement, From one pad to another, exemplifies the message of ease by creating a promise (completely delivered on) that one can move from their old home to their new one with all the difficulty of a hop.”

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Here’s a nifty infographic on how corporate logos evolve.

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Corporate buzzword-wise, “delight” is shaping up to be the new “passion.” (Via MJF.)

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You’ll need to subscribe to Visual Thesaurus to read Mike Pope’s excellent column, “What’s in a -Nym?”, which goes beyond antonyms and synonyms to more obscure and fascinating terms like contranym, retronym, and backronym. But of course you’re already a subscriber.

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From Idibon, a language-data company: how to name a racehorse.

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Finally, in honor of the return of the cicadas to the eastern U.S., here’s a reprise of my plug for Cicada-licious: Cooking and Enjoying Periodical Cicadas, the cicada cookbook produced by the University of Maryland cicadamaniacs (their term). Yes, I have a well-documented fondness for -licious names.

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I also can’t resist an opportunity to combine entomology, etymology, and a plug for Fritinancy. As language maven Ben Zimmer—my editor at Visual Thesaurus—observed in an email to me:

I noticed that the first OED cite for “fritin(i)ancy” is from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, talking about cicadas. (In this edition, it’s actually “fritinnitus.”) Johnson defined “fritinancy” as “the scream of an insect, as the cricket or cicada” (citing Browne) and subsequent dictionaries used similar definitions. (Johnson didn’t define “cicada,” oddly enough.)

My original post about Fritinancy cited Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), which mentioned crickets but not cicadas. The post was written before I had access to the OED online, a weak defense but the one I’m sticking with.

In other cicada news, linguist Arnold Zwicky has written about “swarmageddon” and “cicadapocalypse,” and science writer Carl Zimmer, brother of Ben, examined the remarkable life cycle of this long-lived insect. Carl Z’s editors at the Times consulted with Ben Z to come up with a pronunciation guide: “cicadas (usually pronounced sih-KAY-duhz).”

But, Ben told me, “there are plenty of people who pronounce it KAH, and many dictionaries give it as an acceptable alternate. I don’t have a good sense of the regional distribution of the two pronunciations, though.”

Perhaps Fritinancy’s readers can help.

Veggieducken

Attention, thoughtful Thanksgiving cooks! This year, don’t make your vegetarian guests endure a wan simulacrum of the big bird (yes, I’m looking at you, Tofurky®). Instead, serve them a true pièce de résistance: the veggieducken, a k a “vegetarian turducken.”

Photo via NPR Weekend Edition.

Turducken, you will recall, is chicken stuffed in duck stuffed in turkey. Veggieducken does not, paradoxically, contain ducken, or even tofu ducken. (Tofucken®?) Rather, it consists of a two-foot-long banana squash artistically stuffed with onions, leeks, sweet potatoes, red bell pepper, breadcrumbs, and herbs. Its alternate name – equally portmanteau-y, somewhat harder to pronounce, but more technically accurate – is squashleekotato roast. The dish was developed by Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful blog and podcast. (Motto: “It’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters.”)

I’m of the “life’s too short to stuff a mushroom” school, so I’m not going to be making veggieducken this year, or any other year. (But if you want to make it, I’ll happily eat it.) I’m interested in veggieducken because of how the word was constructed. The fact that it references “turducken” is evidence of how far the latter word has come since it first appeared in print in 1982, courtesy of chef Paul Prudhomme. (Prudhomme’s Magic Seasoning Blends company registered the Turducken trademark in 1986. Yes, we should be capitalizing the word.) Not only is turducken well accepted, if only as an aspiration or a joke*, but with the advent of veggieducken we see -ducken evolving into a bound morpheme. Linguists sometimes call bound morphemes cran-morphs, from the cran- in cranberry that now attaches itself to brand names like Cran-Apple. Other familiar cran-morphs include burger and -licious.

In short: The -ducken in veggieducken has nothing to do with duck + chicken; it now communicates the more general idea of “elaborately stuffed/nested food.”

From @lynneguist.

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Related Thanksgiving word lore:

Turbaconducken.

Cherpumple.

Cranpagne.

Edward Gelsthorpe, father of the cran-morph.

How Butterball got its name.

Fooburkey, crankeywich, self-gravification, and other winners of Wordnik’s turducken-word contest.

And for readers far more motivated than I, a veggieducken video tutorial.

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* There’s that problematic “turd” syllable, for starters.

How Livemocha Got Its Name

I’ve been researching the rise of online education for a project I’m working on. One of the companies in this growing field has a name that fits nicely into this week’s Life-or-Death theme: Livemocha.

 

 

Livemocha was founded in 2007 to bring language learning to a global audience. It currently offers courses in 38 languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Indonesian, Hebrew, and Turkish. Fees start at about $10 per course; students come from “every country in the world.” The website is elegantly designed, informative, and welcoming.

I originally encountered the Livemocha name out of context, and nothing about it suggested “education” or “language learning” to me. I was uncertain about the pronunciation: did “live” have a short vowel (suggesting an imperative verb) or a long one (suggesting “alive”)? Was “mocha” pronounced with a /k/ in the middle, like the color/coffee drink/city in Yemen; or phonetically, as in “cha-cha-cha”?

So I emailed the company to get the name story. The gracious reply came from Kira Fickensher, Livemocha’s community manager:

Livemocha is 2 parts: Live and Mocha. Live is pronounced lahyv as in “live broadcast” (the adverb/adjective form of the word). It represents live learning, live conversation, live practice - everything language learning should be. Self-study and online learning are such an essential evolution for language learning, because they are far more accessible and practical than traditional methods. But these need not exclude human interaction and immersion. Our approach of using social networking to reduce the barriers of distance actually bring [sic] live practice and immediate feedback into the act of self-study.

The second part of Livemocha is mocha, pronounced like the coffee drink. This is both a nod to our hometown of Seattle, which is known for its coffee culture, and a way of incorporating the ambience and sentiment of a coffee shop, where you can both study by yourself with a laptop or chat with a friend.

I’m glad the company gave this much thought to the name story; too many businesses with puzzling names default to “It’s just a name” or “It’s something our PR agency dreamed up.” And I’m happy to see those positive associations: “live learning” plus “sociable setting.”

But I’m a native English speaker. I wonder how well those meanings translate to a native speaker of, say, Mandarin Chinese (one of the top 10 languages spoken by Livemocha members). The pronunciation isn’t transparent, either: The short I, the ambiguous CH, and the V—pronounced B or W in various languages—could be confounding. Would a native Spanish speaker with no knowledge of English pronunciation be tempted to pronounce the name Lee-bay-MO-tcha?

Then there’s the leap required to get from “Livemocha” to “language learning.” The tagline—“Creating a World without Barriers”—is of only limited help: It could apply to a concert (think Live Aid or LiveNation), an international philanthropy (think Doctors without Borders), or a campaign for wheelchair access. I’m not saying the name and tagline need to be descriptive or pedestrian, but they should provide a clue about what’s being offered here.

My grade for the Livemocha name: B-minus. It’s distinctive and evocative if you speak English, and easy enough to pronounce once you see the word split. (The cursive treatment of the logo makes it a little clearer; an intercap M or a space between the words would be even better.) But it’s an oddly challenging choice for a global brand that focuses on cross-border fluency. It makes me wonder about the thoroughness of the pre-launch linguistic screening.

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

 

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.)

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.

The Versatile Blogger Award

Aw, shucks. The Wordnik blog has nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award, which is like Stephen Hawking giving a trophy to the local Science Fair winner.

Thank you!

These are not the resting-on sort of laurels: I’m supposed to nominate 15 other blogs and tell you seven interesting (or, according to some versions of the rules, “completely random”) things about myself.

Here are the interesting/random things about myself. As Grammar Girl put it, “This will be easier if we all pretend you care.”

1. I made my television debut at age four on the Los Angeles version of “Romper Room.”
   
   
2. I’m very good at American-style crosswords and word spirals, but hopeless at acrostics and cryptic crosswords.
   
   
3. A story I wrote for New West magazine about tampons and toxic shock syndrome was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In her bestseller The Coming Plague, science writer Laurie Garrett cited my article as an “outstanding piece of investigative journalism.” That was better than winning the award.
   
   
4. I named a condom for Mayer Laboratories. (It’s not on their website, but you can read about it here, at least until I overhaul my website.)
   
   
5. I once wrote a sonnet in Spanish in the style of the Siglo de Oro poets.
   
   
6. I once wrote five original nursery rhymes for a company that made fancy furniture for children’s bedrooms.
   
   
7. I have swum from Alcatraz to San Francisco on two New Year’s Days—water temperature 50° F—and on many slightly warmer days as well. I don’t wear a wetsuit.

As for the 15 blogs, here are my choices. I also endorse the selections made by my predecessors in this chain (Wordnik, Grammar Monkeys, and Grammar Girl).

 

Baby Name Wizard Blog. Intelligent, BS-free analysis of baby names and naming trends. While you’re there, check out the highly addictive NameVoyager tool, too.

Beauty Marks. Commentary on trademarks and brands by the smart, funny Jessica Stone Levy, a trademark lawyer who really knows her stuff.

Brand New. Before-and-after analysis of visual-identity makeovers by the team at Under Consideration LLC.

Catch This. The naming blog of Catchword Branding, my esteemed colleagues here in Oakland.

Copyranter. Frequently angry, often profane, usually hilarious takes on advertising copy.

Figaro Speech. Figures of speech and rhetorical tropes in daily life, brought to you by Jay Heinrich, author of Thank You for Arguing.

Johnson. The Economist’s language blog, covering English on both sides of the Atlantic.

Language Log. Group-written linguistics blog. Sometimes academic, occasionally arcane, often very funny, always worthwhile.

Literal Minded. Linguist Neal Whitman takes on the big subjects, like ass/fucking intensification and why you can say “where to go” and “how to go” but not “why to go.”

Name Inspector. Christopher Johnson’s nom de noms; his blog is “a close look at names and what makes them tick – or tank.”

Not One-Off Britishisms. Ben Yagoda’s heroic pursuit of U.K. expressions that have seeped (or barged) into American English.

Sentence First. Stan Carey writes from Galway, Ireland, about crashblossoms, glottal stops, totes amazebags abbrevs, and much more.

Separated by a Common Language. American linguist Lynne Murphy, aka Lynneguist, writes about American and British English from her expatriate perch in the UK.

Throw Grammar from the Train. By Jan Freeman, former language columnist for the Boston Globe.

Word Routes. Ben Zimmer’s column for the Visual Thesaurus, “exploring the pathways of our lexicon.” Unlike my own VT columns, Word Routes doesn’t require a subscription (but you should subscribe anyway).

And because I’ve never met a rule I didn’t want to break, here’s a 16th nomination: Dustbury isn’t a language or branding blog, but it more than fits the “versatile” description. In a typical week, the sole author, C.G. Hill, might cover social media, automobile tires, basketball, My Little Pony, print magazines, transportation in Oklahoma, women’s shoes, and Zooey Deschanel—all with enviable literary skill and brio.

If the abovementioned nominees feel moved to play the game, here are the rules:

1. In a post on your blog, nominate 15 fellow bloggers for The Versatile Blogger Award.
2. In the same post, add the Versatile Blogger Award.
3. In the same post, thank the blogger who nominated you in a post with a link back to their blog.
4. In the same post, share 7 completely random pieces of information about yourself.
5. In the same post, include this set of rules.
6. Inform each nominated blogger of their nomination by posting a comment on each of their blogs. (Or tweeting.)

January Linkfest

Balloting has begun in the Name of the Year contest, now in its 29th year of providing merriment at others’ expense. The ground rules, in case you’ve forgotten: all names are real, many are from the world of sports, all comments are welcome, reporting of results may take a while. In the first round, I’m quite smitten with Courvoisier Winetavius Richardson, “armed robbery suspect.”

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From A Walk in the Words, links to four very interesting articles about language and sports, including a 2006 American Speech paper about Homeric and hypocoristic nicknames in professional baseball and hockey. Seriously. You’ll love it.

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People “get very worked up about” the naming of neighborhoods, observes University of Chicago sociologist Gordon Douglas. The Atlantic surveys the neighborhood namescapes of several cities, including Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. (Via Dustbury.) Related: check out this wonderfully detailed neighborhood map of my own city, Oakland. Be sure to embiggen it for the full effect. (Via Our Oakland.)

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Eavesdrop as some New York City building developers brainstorm names for their new properties. Some of the coinages, writes the New York Times’s Joanne Kaufman, “are as whimsical as those of movie stars’ children.”

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Why wait and worry about whether your thesis will be published? Submit it to The Journal of Universal Rejection and know for sure!

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Your own surname is usually a safe choice for your company or product name, but not when, for example, your name is Mustee and you make shower stalls. Susan Perera talks eponyms and perceptions on the trademark-and-marketing blog Duets Blog.

 

They’re not real pros, just “pros.”

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How potato-chip brands use language to position their products: a scholarly yet appetizing essay by linguist Dan Jurafsky in his blog, The Language of Food.

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Wrong pronoun choice, lack of the subjunctive, lay/lie errors: Erin McKean bravely reveals the horror of ungrammatical song lyrics.

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Speaking of errors, did you screw up and write “sneak peak” instead of “sneak peek” in a tweet? There’s a bot for that, the excellently named Stealth Mountain. (Yes, a sneaky peak.) Misspell the phrase and Stealth Mountain will tweet back a mild-mannered correction: “I think you mean sneak peek.” Check out the favorites page, which reveals that people do not always appreciate being led onto the path of knowledge. Shocking, I know. (Via Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic.)

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A staggeringly comprehensive lexicon of slang terms and acronyms used by doctors and veterinarians. Or: why a HOPEFUL does not inspire hope. (Via Language Hat.)

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At last, the beauty product we’ve all been waiting for: Fotoshop by Adobé (a-doe-BAY). With pro-pixel intensifying hydro-jargon microbead extract!

 

By Jesse Rosten.

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.

Into a Bar

There’s a fun little language meme over at alt.usage.english Google Group: bar jokes that hinge on fine points of grammar, punctuation, and linguistics. Peter Moylan of Newcastle, NSW, Australia, got the ball rolling on November 22*:

1. A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

2. A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave.

3. A question mark walks into a bar?

4. Two quotation marks “walk into” a bar.

5. A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, planning to drink.

6. The bar was walked into by the passive voice.

7. Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They drink. They leave.

Last time I checked, there were 126 posts, many with multiple entries. Some of my favorites:

• A spoonerism balks into a war.
• A colon walks into a bar and evacuates.
• A snowclone walks into the mother of all bars.
• omg a TnAjrrr wks n2 a bar
• Davy Crockett walks into a b'ar.
• A superlative goes into a bar none.
• A musician segues into a bar.
• A telegrapher walks into a -... .- .-. .

And there’s this, from Jerry Friedman (no relation):

A poet walks into a bar.
“A metaphor, friends, is a star.
   It always sounds neater
   In anapest meter,
And the rhyme shouldn’t mar it or jar.”

My own (unposted) contribution: A clumsy ballerina walks into a barre.

Completely independently (I think), Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten posted this bit of brilliance on Twitter last week:

 

* UPDATE: Commenter Allison Callan points out that Peter Moylan's original post wasn't original: it quoted a November 8 article by Erik K. Auld on McSweeney's. 

October Linkfest

I haven’t written about Kindle Fire, the name of Amazon’s new tablet device (although I have written about how the Kindle got its name). But that’s mostly because a couple of my colleagues covered the territory so well on their own blogs. The Name Inspector called the Kindle Fire name “redundant” and “metaphorically incoherent.” But Catchword gave the name an A and said it was “short, catchy, evocative, and stands out in the marketplace.” Me? I agree with the Name Inspector’s logic, but I don’t think customers will approach the name logically. Kindle Fire is a good-enough name. 

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Not many national retailers dare to name their wares as esoterically as Anthropologie does. If you’ve wondered where names like Varvara Maxi Dress and Hypsometric Tint Cardi (from the current season) come from, the style blog In Pursuit of Pretty Things is here to help with a helpful Anthropologie primer. (I took a stab at decoding Anthropologie product names myself in a 2009 post.)

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Need more Anthro? A new blog, Anthroparodie, does a nice job of spoofing the genre. I liked the Bucolic Spider Crusher: “Constructed of pure, river-washed stone from an Appalachian rivulet, this invention—ancient, yet ever-effective in its simplicity—allows you to leisurely macerate arachnids and insects of all varieties into a silky pulp.”

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How did we go from the disparaging X of Brand X to the “entertainment-focused, tech-forward” X of X Games and X Prize? Lexicon Branding’s director of linguistics, Will Leben, analyzes the evolution of X in brand naming and makes a few predictions.

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At first blush, the story sounds like David v. Goliath: Suburban mom starts a skin-care brand for girls, names it for her daughter (awwww), and gets sued for trademark infringement (oh noooo) by big, similarly named cosmetics company. But there’s more to Willa v. Wella than meets the sentimental eye. Trademark lawyer Lara Pearson sorts out the issues on her Brand Geek blog: “It’s nice to want to name your product line after your daughter, but that doesn’t mean you can. If my kid were named Nikey, do you really think I could name my clothing store that too?” (UPDATE, Oct. 14: Willa company founder Christy Prunier settled the trademark dispute with Procter & Gamble, which owns Wella, and won the right to use the Willa name. According to an earlier article, Prunier’s legal fees amounted to an estimated $750,000—substantially more than the average small business could have afforded.)

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Laurel Black thought she’d come up with a really clever name for her design business: Anaglyph. I think you can tell where this story is headed; read the sadder-but-wiser conclusion on Laurel’s blog.

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The new operating system for the Windows Phone boasts that it’s “a smarter way to app.” On his Evolving English II blog, Mike Pope notes that this verbification may represent a first for the very versatile app,which was voted 2010 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

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Are you ready for alphalux, blingamalism, freesumerism, and menaissance? They’re all real coinages found on a UK style sheet that covers future trends. There are many more, and I had to look every damn one up. See the whole list on Rantings of a Sub-Editor.

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A new book, The Wage Slave's Glossary, is a compilation of words we use to describe work in 21st-century America: from Blackberry prayer to Xerox subsidy, giganomics to microboredom. Here’s a sampling in The Atlantic. (Hat tip: aem76us.)

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NASA’s two robotic spacecraft, code-named GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B (for Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory), need real names “that capture the spirit and excitement of lunar exploration.” So the agency is holding a contest, open to U.S. students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Names must be accompanied by a short essay explaining your choices. Deadline: November 11. The winner(s) and their teacher(s) will be invited to participate in a teleconference with GRAIL mission team members. (Via A Hundred Monkeys.)

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Robert Lane Greene, author of You Are What You Speak and contributor to The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, dispels 10 myths about language, including “You can’t end a sentence with a preposition” and “English has spread because it is flexible and open to new words.” I wrote about Greene and You Are What You Speak in an April 2011 post.

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Here’s a sweet idea: Turn your first name into a candy brand, courtesy of the NameCandy candy-name generator. I’m Nanchoco-Rocks (“hunks-o-chocolate with real Nancy!”). And you?