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.

March Linkfest

When did the Central Intelligence Agency start being called “the Company”? If you have evidence of a published example from before 1966, the OED wants to hear from you. Don’t worry, you won’t lose your security clearance.

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The iPhone could have been called the TriPod, the Mobi, or the TelePod, none of which would have been bad. The ePad Femme, on the other hand – “the world’s first tablet just for women” – suffers from more than a bad name. (Hat tip for both: Catchword.)

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Related: an honest iPad commercial.

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OK, just one more iThing link: the CTA Digital Pedestal Stand for iPad 2/3/4 with Roll Holder. (Via Virginia Postrel.)

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Three common mistakes in company naming, as told by three sadder-but-wiser business owners. (Related: my own post, Seven Ways to Go Wrong with Naming. )

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Another sadder-but-wiser tale: How not to name your restaurant. Author David Lizerbram, a trademark lawyer, leads off the story by observing: “It’s always astonishing to me that businesses will invest countless dollars in every aspect of their operations while relying on a name that will only bring legal issues.” Hear, hear!

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Speaking of trademark strength, this 1950 infographic is a thing of beauty.

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If you’re launching a fashion brand, should you follow the traditional route and name it after yourself (which worked fine for Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Betsey Johnson)? Or should you follow the lead of some younger designers and choose a quirky name like Creatures of the Wind? Mark Prus, guest-blogging for Duets Blog, weighs the costs and benefits of “strange” as a naming strategy.

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Glad to see I’m not the only one who’s wondering about the proliferation of gratuitous umlauts in brand names. (Via @TimberlakeLaw.)

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Viewy, yellow-ammer, cooshy, and other words from Parade’s End – not the recent BBC/HBO series but the Ford Madox Ford tetralogy on which Tom Stoppard based his script.

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The Atlas of True Names “reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States. For instance, where you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you ‘The Tawny One’, derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured, desert’.”

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From a glossary of American mountain-man lingo: “Arkansas toothpick” (a large, pointed dagger), “possibles” (a mountain man’s personal property), “terrapin” (dog meat).

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Blinkies, peelies, catalinas, and other words from the world of extreme couponing.

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Another one of those wonderful Wikipedia entries: a list of English-language idioms derived from baseball. (Via The Editor’s Desk.)

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Two takes on the evolution of “LOL” from “laughing out loud” to “just kidding”: from Anne Curzan at Lingua Franca and from Stan Carey at Sentence First. Stan includes a video clip of linguist John McWhorter (“Texting is not the death of writing. Texting is fingered speech”). 

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Finally: what if Seinfeld were still on the air?

 

Here a Here, There a Here, Everywhere a Here Here

Have you heard? Nokia has rebranded all of its navigation products with a single name: HERE.

The official story, in flawless brandbabble:

“HERE is a name that I think signifies what I call an ethos in cartography. HERE is about a sense of location,” said Michael Halbherr, the Nokia executive who oversees the company’s location and commerce unit, in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. (Via TechCrunch, March 2)

I can’t explain why the name is in spelled in ALL CAPS everywhere on the website except in the logo.

 

And here’s more news: PayPal has introduced a new credit-card reader for mobile devices. It, too, is called Here.

 

Eunice Park of the branding agency Catchword gives the PayPal Here name an A-:

“Here” focuses on the target audience and freshly, yet familiarly conveys its benefit: the ability to do business here and now, here and again, here there and everywhere.

However, if you happen to forget, as I did, which company makes the mapping Here and which one makes the payment Here, and you attempt to do a web search simply for “here” … well, you’ll learn some moderately interesting things about here documents and deixis and the Here Lounge in West Hollywood. 

But you won’t get Here, or HERE, from there.

Image via Medium Italic.

Year-End Roundup: The Names, Logos, Words, and Maps of 2012

Lots of late-breaking X-of-the-year news:

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Laura Wattenberg, astute observer of baby-naming trends, selected Blue Ivy as the Baby Name Wizard name of the year. The story of the name, she writes, is “all about the essence of intellectual property rules: invention, identity, exclusivity and control.”

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In a commentary for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” linguist Geoffrey Nunberg defended “Big Data,” his choice for the 2012 word of the year: “It’s responsible for a lot of our anxieties about intrusions on our privacy, whether from the government's anti-terrorist data sweeps or the ads that track us as we wander around the Web. It has even turned statistics into a sexy major.” Nunberg also talked about the political buzzwords of 2012 – right to work, entitlement, evil, and more – in a Bill Moyers Q&A.

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The Australian National Dictionary Centre’s word of the year is green-on-blue: “(used in a military context) an attack made on one’s own side by a force regarded as neutral.” It beat out qubit, fourth age, brotox, and fossil farming – none of which, I’m fairly confident, are on any US WotY lists.

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Collins Dictionary (UK) didn’t pick a single word of the year: it picked 12, from broga (yoga for men) to fiscal cliff.

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From the Wordnik blog: the best TV words of 2012, from anaphor to unwindulax, and the best language stories of 2012, from Rick Santorum’s “blah people” to the New York Times’s “offensive adjective inappropriate for family newspaper” – which wasn’t an adjective at all.

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In the New York Times, Grant Barrett’s annual roundup of the year’s notable words and expressions includes some by-now-familiar contenders – Eastwooding, 47 percent, Gangnam style – as well as some surprises, including doga (yoga with a dog), nomophobia (a Fritinancy word of the week in February), and pet shaming.

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Lynne Murphy of Separated by a Common Language picked the best American-to-British import (“wonk”) and the best UK-to-US counterpart (“bollocks”). Influencing her choice of “bollocks” was Newcastle Brown Ale’s “No Bollocks” ad campaign – used in the US but not in the UK.

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The Brand New blog identified the year’s best visual identities (logos) and the worst.

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The year in maps, from The Atlantic Cities, includes, at #5, the delightful Metrophors map of geographic X-is-the-Y-of-Z metaphors (“THE Ukraine is THE Ohio State University of European countries”). (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Coming next week: the American Dialect Society’s word-of-the-year vote. If you’re in Boston on Friday, January 5, get yourself over to the Marriott Copley Place to support your favorite words. Everyone’s welcome, and it’s a total hoot. I attended the January 2009 vote in San Francisco and wrote about it here.

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And in case you missed my earlier posts, here are my words of the year, brand names of the year, (other) names of the year, and (possibly) the name of the year.

December Linkfest

A new language quarterly, aptly called Babel, brings linguistics to a general audience without dumbing down the subject. Published at the University of Huddersfield (UK), the magazine covers “issues relating to many different human languages” – and some non-human ones, including, in the first issue, Venusian. I’m already looking forward to the second issue, which will include an article about “the secret linguistic history of brand names.”

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At Word Routes, Ben Zimmer recaps the year in words and picks his word of the year. (Surprise – it isn’t fiscal cliff.) I published my own list earlier this week.

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Do not ask science-fiction author John Scalzi to write for free. No, really – don’t even think about it.

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In the 1920s, when TV was still in its infancy, retailers used fake television broadcasts to trick customers into entering stores. Smithsonian magazine’s Paleofuture blog explains how it was done. 

Faked TV demonstration from 1926, via Smithsonian.

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From caucus to urbane: the words that spiked each week this year in look-ups at Merriam-Webster online.

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Catalog love: Your L.L. Bean Boyfriend. He’ll “build you a table and then have sex with you on it.” (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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From Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire, the best (worst) typos, mistakes, and correrctions [sic] of 2012.

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Holly Buchanan of Marketing to Women Online picks the  commercials that did the best job of marketing women in 2012. She has strict criteria:

In order to pass The Buchanan Test a commercial must do three things. It must feature women who:

1. Are outside of the home
2. Are in a role other than that of "mother"
3. Are NOT doing yoga

(For comparison, see Bechdel Test.)

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“So it looks like the New Orleans Hornets are going to change their name to become the Pelicans.” A defense of the new team name by Barry Petchesky at Deadspin. (Naughty language advisory.)

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From my favorite info-viz site, Muckety (“Mapping the paths of power and influence”): The Trump Fund for the Gutting of Red Herrings and other think tanks we’d like to see in 2013.

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I grew up in Los Angeles and always wondered why the Ralphs supermarket chain didn’t have an apostrophe in its name. Now, thanks to Los Angeles magazine, I know: the business was founded (in 1873, at Fifth and Hill streets) by George Ralphs.

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“Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention”: Matt Haughey on why he loves Twitter and hates Facebook.

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Something to play with while you’re waiting in line to see The Hobbit, which opens in theaters today: the hobbit name generator and the Elvish name generator. (Via @Wordnik.)

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Like it or not, the “fiscal cliff” metaphor is here to stay. Linguist George Lakoff explains why.

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“I sculpt baby names from love, from hatred, from the reality of this hellhole of a world that you’re forcing an innocent life to endure.” Bob Powers, artisanal baby namer, at McSweeney’s. Yes, he jests. Mostly. (Via Karen Wise.)

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Over at The Atlantic, sociology professor Philip Cohen asks: Why don’t parents name their daughters Mary anymore? (Also via Karen Wise.)

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From Copyranter: The best men’s underwear commercial ever.

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According to Helen Sword, author of a column for the New York Times and creator of something called the Writer’sDiet test, a “zombie noun” is any noun (proliferation, formation, indication) that “cannibalizes” a verb. Now linguistics grad student Josef Fruehwald, blogging at Val Systems, delivers an incisive counterpoint. “Ain’t nothing like exploiting the collective dysmorphia of a nation to push your quarter-baked usage decrees,” says he.

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Via the brilliant Maria Popova at Brain Pickings: Alice in Wonderland as a subway map.

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And to all a good night.

Electable Collectibles

The first presidential debate will be held tonight, in Denver; the general election is less than five weeks away. So it’s time to ask a serious question: How are the campaigns shaping up tchotchke-wise?

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At 7-Eleven stores in 34 states, you can let the caffeine do the talking – and the predicting. And you get to keep your cup as a souvenir. Last Friday, you didn’t even have to pay for the coffee.

 

 

According to 7-Eleven’s 7-Election website, President Obama cups have a substantial lead over Mitt Romney cups everywhere except Idaho and West Virginia.

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Berkeley’s family-owned Virginia Bakery is holding its own consumption contest. To cast your vote, buy a photo-decorated sugar cookie.

Guess who’s winning?

According to a report on the Berkeleyside news site, the bakery has sold presidential cookies in previous elections, but this is the first time it’s tracking the results. As one commenter observed, “Finally … a chance to eat the rich.”

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From tasty to tasteless:

 

 

This “Obama reusable cloth pantyliner pad,” sold by Mimi’s Dreams on Etsy, is “the perfect size for teenagers and petite women.” Ladies, don’t you want a muumuu made of that fabric? (Via Buzzfeed.)

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Speaking of the curse, here’s SNL’s ad for g.o.b. tampons—made for women by the men of the GOP. (“Now with wings!”)

The brand name is a parody of o.b. tampons, which were developed in the early 1960s by a German gynecologist, Judith Esser. “o.b.” name is an abbreviation of “ohne binde,” German for “without napkins.”

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And staying in the nether regions, Say It With a Condom is back with the 2012 edition of candidate condoms.

 

Obama condoms: “Intended to get the general public laid, not laid off.”

Romney condoms: “For the elitist penis.” Four years ago, according to my notes, it was the Obama condoms that made that “elitist” claim.

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A concept only, but what a great concept: Barack Obama, the Blue Note years, from the British pop-culture blog Voices of East Anglia.

Lots more album covers at the link. (Via Girls of a Certain Age.)

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The Sassy Gator, another Etsy seller, is offering this embroidered T-shirt in babies’ and children’s sizes for $20.

 

“Mitt Romney Is My Homeboy”

“Homeboy”? Really? A tip for Sassy Gator: Mitt Romney ain’t your homeboy unless your home has a car elevator.

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This Obama Birther Certificate Tray from Fishs Eddy* proved so popular that it’s now backordered until December. 

Perfect for serving pupu to your Democratic friends … or crow to the Republicans.

Fishs Eddy is also selling this 10-ounce Barack Obama mug  and a companion Michelle Obama mug. Nothing for the competition except a Republican elephant puzzle.

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Wish it would all just stop already? I feel your pain. And I have just the remedy: this political ice pack, available at Uncommon Goods.

Freeze, use,  repeat until Election Day.

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* The story behind the Fishs Eddy name: “It was 1986 and we were driving around the back roads upstate New York (code for lost). We stumbled upon a small hamlet called Fishs Eddy. It was a perfectly odd name so we borrowed it for our just-opened shop near Gramercy Park.”

Names in the News: Recce

Recce is a new iOS app that provides a 3D, animated, aerial view of a city (just London for now; San Francisco and New York soon). The name mystified me at first: When I read the TechCrunch headline—“A Rich, Interactive Map That’s Also a Gaming Platform”—I took in “rich,” applied it to Recce, and concluded it was an Italian word, pronounced, like “bocce,” with a /ch/ in the middle. Retchie? Hmm.

Then I read reporter Ingrid Lunden’s lede, which explains for stoopid Yanks like me that recce is “pronounced ‘wreckie’, British slang for ‘reconnaissance’ (only English people would make slang out of a word like that).”

News flash! Americans also make slang out of “a word like that”: our version is “recon,” pronounced REE-con. Both abbreviations were originally military slang, but American “recon” is older by one whole war: It was first documented in 1918; “recce” surfaced (as “reccy”) in 1941.

One other item in the story caught my attention: Lunden writes that Recce was originally called Mapply “until a French company called Mappy called to say ‘Non!’” That’s one less faux-adverbial -ly name, one more sign that the British are coming, the British are coming.

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.

Names on the Map

Ken Jennings, best known for his record-setting 2004 appearance on Jeopardy!—74 consecutive wins—has  published a new book, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks. Jennings ranges over treasure maps, Google Maps, map collecting, highway numbering, and geocaching, and devotes a section of one chapter to toponyms—the names of places. Here’s an excerpt: 

Names aren’t neutral; they come with agendas. In 1614, John Smith coined the name “New England” for the North American coast he was exploring; his map of the area pointedly left off any Native American settlements or place-names. Instead, every place got a cozy—and completely arbitrary—British name: Ipswich, Southampton, Cape Elizabeth. Most of Smith’s names never caught on, but one of his choices was adopted by the Mayflower pilgrims when they founded their colony there six years later: Plymouth, a spot that the Wampanoag Indians, then as now, actually called “Patuxet.” As late as 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay and returned to Washington bearing a map of Edo, with all the parts of the harbor given suspiciously un-Japanese names like “Mississippi Bay” and “Susquehanna Bay.” On the map, some islets in the Uraga Channel have even been labeled “Plymouth Rocks.” “Look!” the maps say, all wide-eyed and innocent-like. “These places must be ours! Why else would they have our names on them?”

Jennings’s own love of names and word play is evident in Maphead’s chapter titles, each of which carries multiple meanings: Eccentricity, Bearing, Fault, Benchmarks, Elevation, Legend, Reckoning, Meander, Transit, Overedge, Frontier, and Relief.

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Crumpled Paris city map, in polyethylene, from Uncommon Goods. Also available in San Francisco, Berlin, Tokyo, London, New York, Amsterdam, Chicago, and Barcelona.

April Linkfest

I’ve added Ruth Wajnryb’s blog, Words Woman, to my blogroll, and I recommend that you bookmark it, too. Ms. Wajnryb is an Australian linguist who writes in an approachable and open-minded manner about new words, new meanings for old words, word play, and, yes, the addition of heart (v., tr.) to the OED. I first cited Ms. Wajnryb several years ago in a post about the migrating meaning of “erstwhile.”

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Speaking of migrating meanings, Ben Yagoda, writing for Slate, considers the “nonplussed” problem, along with “momentarily,” “disinterested,” and “presently.”

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More multiple meanings: Take the Language Log polysemy quiz. And read the rest of the post, in which author Geoffrey K. Pullum asserts, using boldface for emphasis: “Languages love multiple meanings. They lust after them. They roll around in them like a dog in fresh grass.”

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What are blancmange, fish slice, pong, and skivers—all words from the British English lexicon—doing in So Much for That, a novel written by the American Lionel Shriver and set in the US? Jan Freeman explains. (P.S. So Much for That is one of the best novels I’ve read in the last five years.)

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“[W]hichever speechwriter came up with ‘win the future’ should be sent to count yurts in Outer Mongolia.” – Paul Krugman on President Obama’s budget speech.

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OK, we know that “Eskimos have a hundred words for snow” is a fallacy. But it turns out that English speakers have dozens of words for rain, from “ablaqueate” to “whisp.” Read them all in Ben Schott’s pluviovocabulary.

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Got 10 minutes? Watch an episode of “The Beauty of Maps,” a BBC documentary that originally aired last year. The series is a guided tour through the British Library’s collection of 4 million (!) maps. (Via Swiss Miss.)

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Speaking of maps, Muckety uses fascinating interactive maps to chart “the relationships of muckety-mucks”—i.e., people with power and influence, including Martha Stewart, LeBron James, and former Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. Register at the site to create your own Muckety. Vocabulary bonus: “muckety” derives from “high-muck-a-muck,” a corruption of Chinook jargon “hayo makamak” (literally “plenty to eat”—by extension an important person). Chinook jargon was a Pacific Northwest trade language that was used well into the twentieth century.

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“Can I legally get myself tattooed with a sports team’s logo?” Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope tackles the intellectual-property implications and concludes: it depends.

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How would a linguist translate “Dumber than a box of rocks” from the original Texan? Easy: “Dumber than a department of Sapir-Whorfians.” There’s a whole mess of useful conversions in “Texan for Linguists,” a possibly non-peer-reviewed article in Speculative Grammarian, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.”

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And speaking of flavorful Texas expressions, I’m partial to “Don’t just sit there looking like a tree full of owls,” from Maud Newton’s “Like We Say Back Home.” (Via Stan Carey.)

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Battle is for boys, love is for girls: the unsurprising-yet-still-discouraging sex-stereotyped vocabulary of toy ads, depicted in word clouds. (Via Arnold Zwicky.)