Fritinancy

Bloggiversary 2

I wrote my first post for this blog on June 6, 2006, which makes today my cotton anniversary (although I'll accept cashmere as a substitute). Here are some highlights of the last year, organized by category for your browsing convenience.

Names and Brands

This December post on the IKEA naming system is my most-visited post ever. Someone Dugg it, someone else posted it on Reddit, and one day in February, to my amazement, I had more than 59,000 page views. (That's laughably small if you're Gawker or Jezebel, but extraordinary for Fritinancy. For comparison's sake, on an average day I have about 400 page views.) It's a little embarrassing, because I was just passing along a link I'd discovered in David Byrne's blog.

In February I changed the name of this blog. If you're just joining us, here's the whole story. (If you're not just joining us, you can read it anyway.)

I had a lot of fun analyzing some of the company names in the news at last year's TechCrunch40: Xobni, Cake Financial, 8020 Publishing, and more.

A lot of people have discovered this blog through "If Any Letter Defines Modern American Name Style, K Is It," my follow-up to New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks's riff on contemporary baby-naming trends.

Simpsons Brand-o-Rama, my attempt at a list of all the fictitious brand names in "The Simpsons," drew a record number of comments. Simpsons Brand-o-Rama 2 is in the works; look for it later this month!

I worked really hard on Every Woman a Queen, my exploration of brands with "diva" in their names, so give it a read, dammit.

People are still finding Airport Name Game through Google searches. I dunno, should I switch to a quiz-a-day format? Answers to that particular quiz, by the way, are in the following day's post.

Another post that took a long time to research and write, but was very satisfying: backward-spelled brands, also known as anonyms.

Also fun to write: a pair of Halloween-themed posts, Brands to Die For and an appeciation of Vampire wine.

And now that I've written Naming Trends of 2007, I suppose you'll expect me to do it again this year. Oh, all right.

Writing

It seemed like an innocent question: How Did You Learn Grammar? The conversation got very interesting.

I'm not sure why, but this post on the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which I titled The Hound, the Caspian Pizda, and the Pulpy Furred Wetness, brings in a lot of readers from Eastern Europe. Must be the pizda (a Russian vulgarism equivalent to "pussy").

And then there's this post from late August on the quirky prose style of Jane magazine (R.I.P.).

Slang, Idioms, and Oddities of Speech

This was big-ass fun: The Bottom Line, on all those ass-combination words in the vernacular: cheapass, badass, kickass, and so on. Not to mention the ass-tacular "ass casserole."

This post on Iraq war slang continues to get Google hits every week.

My favorite Word of the Week of the year: Bershon.

I loved my self-indulgent little foray into fashion--the week's worth of posts I wrote during the week of April 28--and especially this essay on the bikini, the monokini, the skirtini, and their kin(i). It got picked up for the Fabulous! Festival for May, which was kind of a kick.

Miscellany

My remembrance of my father, Daniel Friedman, who died in February and who hugely influenced my interest in words and names.

And what would a Fritinancy retrospective be without a post on corporate passion?

Read last year's Bloggiversary post.

Bloggiversary

I started this blog one year ago today--my personal D-Day--and 399 posts later, to my ongoing amazement, I'm still at it.

It seems appropriate to celebrate by (a) taking a semi-holiday and (b) publishing a list of favorite posts--yours, mine, and Google's. And I hope you make it all the way to the end, where I write about a movie I urge you to see.

Big Business

Our Passion Is Your Problem, on the rampant abuse of the P-word in corporate lingo.

What's in Your Genes? on "corporate DNA" and its clones.

Capital Punishment, or, Why Corporate Writing Is in Love with Big Letters.

Naming (Adult and Juvenile Divisions)

The Mysteries of Naming, or, everything I know so far, in four parts: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4.

What Not to Name the Baby, a modest proposal for bringing professional discretion to an out-of-control practice.

Naming 2.0, on Flickr, Meebo, and other Web 2.0 nuttiness.

The Naked, the Bimbo, and the Deliboy, or, the wide world of auto naming.

Jargon and Cliché

Value-Added, Outside-the-Box Sea Change--in Just Five Short Weeks! On clichés that deserve to die.

Nine Yards? Possibly my most popular post ever, on the mysterious origins of the expression "the whole nine yards."

Writing

Warren Buffett, Copywriter, or, why Berkshire-Hathaway's annual reports are so much fun to read.

Style vs. Style, on correct usage and personal expression.

Fear of Words (and Other Writer's Blocks), on visual thinkers and verbal thinkers.

What Journalism Taught Me--namely, to spell the names right.

My Favorite Word of the Week (So Far)

Hootlessness.

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And speaking of D-Day, I want to tell you about an extraordinary documentary now playing in the Bay Area (and perhaps elsewhere): The Rape of Europa. Based on the book of the same name by Lynn Nicholas, it tells the story of the Nazis' systematic plunder and destruction of centuries of art masterpieces and the lengths to which local people--including some very courageous museum curators--went to protect and rescue those masterpieces. I've long been a bit of a WW2 buff, and I certainly was aware of Hitler's campaign against "degenerate" (read: Jewish) art, but 95% of the material in the film was new to me. Among the story's unlikely heroes were a tiny group of young American GIs--no more than 200 or so--dubbed "Monuments Men," who worked doggedly at the end of the war to track down and salvage the art. One of those Monuments Men was Bernard Taper, a former journalism professor of mine at UC Berkeley. Again: a surprise. I'd known Bernard as a gifted teacher and the author of a biography of the choreographer George Balanchine, but not this. How wonderful, and moving, to see him--now 89 years old and retired from teaching--interviewed on film.

Read about the film's production. And here's a link to a story about Bernard Taper that appeared in the S.F. Chronicle last month.