Fritinancy

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.

 

June Linkfest

Each week, the New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog posts a Twitter contest with the hashtag #tnyquestion. The June 1 contest asked readers to contribute a new word to the English language; the results have been compiled in a handsome PDF dictionary. The June 8 contest—invent a corporate-literary mashup—resulted in more than a thousand responses, including “Of Mice and Mennen,” “A Tale of Two Citis,” and (from yours truly) “50 Shades of Grey Poupon.” Winners revealed here. (Note: I cannot claim credit for “Pninterest”; I only retweeted it.)

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It’s Silicon Valley’s next hot IPO. It’s called Ponzify. What could possibly go wrong? (Satire alert.)

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The ass-fication of American branding continues apace: “Six print ads that use ass imagery (not actual asses, sorry) to sell stuff.” Safe for work, but may provoke loud groans.

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Steve Jobs really, really liked the name “MacMan.” He lost the battle; Apple won the war.

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Go ahead and say “the Internets,” you irony-overloaded hipster, but never, ever say “vinyls.”

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You don’t need a designer when the copy’s this good: a Flickr set of copywriter Joe D’Allegro’s signs for Synergy Fitness in Jersey City. (Via AdFreak.)

 

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Glossed Over saves you the annoyance of reading the July issue of Glamour. “Less than zero: Likelihood that I will ever use Glamour’s Word of the Month, ‘frizzle’.” 

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What not to name your spaceship. (By the way, did you know that Greece’s Olympic Airlines was originally called Icarus? What were they thinking?)

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Derek Lowe, who blogs about science and the pharmaceutical industry for In the Pipeline, asks: “What’s the biotech/pharma company out there with the worst name” (other than Abbott Labs’ new AbbVie)? His commenters gleefully ante up.

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David Crystal’s long list of words first used by Charles Dickens includes kibosh, unyielding, dustbin, devil-may-care, flummox, and sawbones.

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More from Crystal: “Dickens worked at his names: he tried out Martin Sweezleden, Sweezleback, Sweezlewag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, and Chuzzlewig, before ending up with Martin Chuzzlewit.”

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The Obama 2012 campaign slogan is “Forward,” but Americans would rather go in the opposite direction, argues advertising creative director Judith Grey.

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“My great-grandfather started this business with one simple mission that we abandoned decades ago.”

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A defense of undictionaried (aka madeupical) words by lexicographer and Wordnik founder Erin McKean.

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Why is it the United States and the Netherlands … but just plain Ukraine? Etymologist Anatoly Liberman explains to the BBC.

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“Logic is the enemy of a successful brand name,” writes veteran marketing strategist Al Ries. Example: “Search.com is shorter (one syllable instead of two), more memorable and a lot more credible than Google.com. Should Google.com change its name to Search.com?” (Hat tip: @IgorNaming.)

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An evil spelling test, courtesy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

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Naming your company is just the first step. Catchword Branding lists five factors to consider when launching a company name.

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Grexit, Geuro, neuro, and other words spawned by the Greek debt crisis. (And yes, that is the 84,573rd sighting of a “What’s in a Name?” headline.) (Via @WordLo.)

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Prosign, rag-chewing, umpty, and other telegraph lingo. (And check out the link to more telegraph and radio slang.)

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Twitter’s Fail Whale has spawned a menagerie of social-media fail pets. Mike Pope provides a taxonomy.

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And as long as we’re on the subject, I’m loving these social media propaganda posters by Etsy vendor Aaron Wood. Available individually or as a compilation. Via @mightyredpen.

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.

March Linkfest

It’s been a good month for numbered lists about names and naming. Starting with the longest list: Paola Norambuena, senior director of verbal identity at the global branding agency Interbrand, identifies 10 of the most common naming mistakes, including one that tops my own list: “Forgetting that naming is as strategic as it is creative.”

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In a guest column for Fast Company, Matt Gordon and Nick Foley of Landor’s Chicago office enumerate eight principles of product naming, from “Make it memorable” to “Expect its story to involve.” The title’s a bit misleading, because they cover corporate names, too—including one of Landor’s own, Accenture. Sneaky devils. (Via @operativewords.)

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Catchword’s Beth Gerber, a brand strategist and creative director, points out five ways in which product naming differs from company naming. “A company name is an umbrella,” Beth writes. “A product name, a hat.”

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Trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy just received her first Birchbox delivery of cosmetic samples. Gather ’round as she opens the lid and reveals the branding hits and misses within. Like Jessica, I snickered over “For hair on days of unwash,” the legend on Lulu Organics Hair Powder.

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I’ve been sending Ben Yagoda’s “Rules for Quotes” to a lot of people who probably wish I’d just shut up already. But a) it’s excellent advice from a language expert and b) for some reason, writing quotes is trickier than you’d think. Even if you’re in the business (*cough* *publicists*) of writing quotes.

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You may have noticed that slut has been in the news a lot lately, thanks to a certain bloviator whose name rhymes with Flush Flimflah. (Not to brag or anything, but I was totally ahead of the slut curve.) Language mavens and cultural critics have been quick to offer analysis and opinion. I especially liked linguist Geoff Nunberg’s recent commentary on “Fresh Air”: “Maybe someday ‘slut’ will be as comically dated as ‘bounder’ or ‘cad,’” Nunberg observed. “But in recent times, it has actually become stronger and more offensive”—to the point that it’s sometimes spelled with an asterisk replacing the U.

Not here, though.

I’m predicting that “slut” will be on the short list for Word of the Year.

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My new favorite Tumblr, ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS, also got on the slut bandwagon: “HELLO, AND WELCOME TO PLANNED PARENTHOOD, YOU SLUTTY SLUT. WHAT’S THE PROBLEM TODAY? YOU WANT A SLUTTY MAMMOGRAM TO DETERMINE WHETHER OR NOT YOU’VE GOT SLUTTY BREAST CANCER?” Go see the whole thing. (Hat tip: Nancy Nall.)

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Would you buy a condo in a building named Vertigo? The very thought makes The Name Inspector a little queasy.

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And speaking of queasy, not to mention crappy:

 

 

Yes, that’s Crapi Apartments, and no, it isn’t PhotoShopped. A dyslexic version of “Capri”? No budget for a proofreader? You tell me. The building is on Overland Avenue in West Los Angeles, and you can look it up. (Thanks, Judith!)

February Linkfest

The “Downton Abbey” anachronisms story certainly has legs. I wrote about one out-of-place usage, “to contact [someone],” in January; this week Ben Zimmer compiled a video of several ahead-of-their-time usages and wrote about them for the Visual Thesaurus. Graduate student Ben Schmidt goes further and deeper in a post on his Sapping Attention blog that summarizes the results of feeding “every single two-word phrase through the Google Ngram database to see how characteristic of the English [l]anguage, c. 1917, Downton Abbey really is.” (Via Language Hat.) “Black market,” “shortages,” “mitral valve prolapse,” and even “wartime” and “peacetime”? All rare or unheard-of in England in the nineteen-teens. (“To have legs” = to show potential for a long run. First documented in 1930, “orig. and chiefly U.S.,” according to the OED. Keep that in mind when you write your Civil War novel.)

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Meanwhile, the Wordnik blog looks on the bright side, identifying some fusty (or simply odd-to-American-ears) words and phrases that “Downton Abbey” got right, like penny dreadful, dropsy, and sprat to catch a mackerel.

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What’s a “cryppie”? A “day lady”? A “Korling”? A guide to the just-declassified lingo of the National Security Agency.

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From another subculture, a dictionary of Western slang, lingo, and phrases, wherein I learned that a “banjo” is a miner’s term for a short-handled shovel and “goat meat” is venison killed out of season. As far as I could ascertain, the lexicon is free of Deadwood-esque naughty words.

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A whole bunch of US newsroom lingo, slang, and catchphrases, from the universal (nut graf, gutter, downstyle) to the hyperlocal. My favorite in the latter category: “Arnie Pye,” used by the New Jersey Jewish News to refer to a jokey lede or headline that isn’t all that funny. Arnie Pye (in the sky) is the helicopter traffic reporter on “The Simpsons.”

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Besides our sun, how many stars can you name? (Via TYWKIWDBI.) One that didn’t make the list: Gomez’s Hamburger.

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Here’s a quiz for you: Westminster Dog Show champion dog name or line from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”? Exactly as tough as you’d think. (Via @BeautyMarks.)

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I’ve written previously about how Twitter got its name. Now read how the company bought Twitter.com from a bird enthusiast for the bargain price of $7,500.

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How to pronounce things hilariously. (Via Kottke.)

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Henry Hitchings, author of The Language Wars, talks to The Browser about “stupid myths” about the English language, e.g., “that Americans are ruining English or that American English is worse.” That, says Hitchings, “is just an absurd thing to say.”

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Speaking of stupid myths, did your fourth-grade teacher tell you there was a “rule” about never ending a sentence with a preposition? Then I implore you to listen to Slate’s new Lexicon Valley podcast, “Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From?” And worry no more about what you end your sentences with.

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And speaking of sentences and endings, here’s an appropriate cartoon by Wiley, via Mighty Red Pen:

 

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.

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?

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.