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.

 

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:

 

November Linkfest

Is it time to rename the beleaguered Euro? The IPKat blog, which covers intellectual-property issues in Europe and the UK, wants your opinion. At this writing, voting is almost evenly divided among Neuro, BizMark, and Tenax (“Latin for frugal, grasping, obstinate and stingy”), but some of the runners-up are pretty clever, too: the Meou (“Memberstate European Operating Unit”), the Markel (a blend of the German mark and “Merkel”), the Ohno (no explanation required). You have till midnight (GMT) Sunday to vote. Via @igornaming.

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“Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean ‘gets rid of dirt.’ (Characters are important: the same sound written differently could mean ‘too purple.’)” – “Picking a Brand Name in China Is a Business Itself,” New York Times, November 12. Pinyin News begs to differ: “Nope. The Mandarin name for Tide detergent is Tàizì. On the other hand, ‘too purple’ would be ‘tài zǐ,’ which is close but not the same.” (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)

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I’m loving Word Soup, the new Wordnik series that covers “strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words” heard on television. A few from the October 28 post: Apparition American (a euphemism for “ghost”), turfucken (“sex with ducks”), and volumptuous (a Snooki-ism that blends “voluptuous” and “lump”). And from November 9: Moneyed American (a euphemism for “rich person”) and jägerbar (a were-bear that hunts). Say, Wordnik, how about turning Word Soup into a book?

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Speaking of TV, here in the US we’re impatiently awaiting Season 2 of Downton Abbey, coming to PBS January 8, 2012. In the meantime, Oxford Dictionaries gives us a guide to the language of the series, which is set in England just before and during World War I. No spoilers, thankfully, but plenty of interesting word histories—and some anachronisms, like “when push comes to shove,” which was primarily used in the US until 1958.

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A hat tip to the Wordnik Twitter feed for the link to “10 Words You Might Think Came from Science (But Are Really from Science Fiction).” On the list: robotics, zero gravity, blast off.

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Speaking of science fiction (not really), the Spaceage Portal of Sentence Discovery is a database of “interesting language patterns and elements,” including figures of speech, grammatical-syntactic structures, and “rhetorical maneuvers.” Search under the “clincher sentences” tag, for example, and read examples by Adam Gopnik, Todd Purdum, and Bill Bryson. Or: “Be of service to the universe by submitting examples that you yourself have discovered.” Fun and very, very useful. Via Sentence First.

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Do you believe it’s a cardinal sin to begin a sentence with a conjunction or end a sentence with a preposition? You are, in a word, wrong. Paul Brians, keeper of the indispensable Common Errors in English Usage website, has compiled a list of non-errors: “those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.” Included: “over” vs. “more than,” “raise” vs. “rear,” “between vs. among,” and—of course—”hopefully” and “momentarily.” (The late William Safire called these non-errors “incorrections,” a label Language Log has adopted.)

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I rarely post links to advice about writing because so much of it is tedious, dumb, or both. J. Maureen Henderson’s “How to Improve Your Writing,” which was published in Forbes last month, is different: it’s smart, practical, and funny. (First tip: “Do more of it. Maybe.” Second tip: “Read more. Possibly.”) The best piece of advice in the column: Edit other people’s work.

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“[S]lang is always doubting. It’s always questioning, it’s always cynical, it’s always undermining and it’s always been negative.” Lexicographer Jonathon Green, author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang (which retails for a decidedly upmarket $625), talks about his favorite subject with The Browser.

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Baby Name Wizard went shopping and discovered a nursery’s worth of shoes named Bella, Madison, Chloe, and Olivia. Surprisingly, “there’s almost no relationship between the style of name and the style of shoe.”

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Downtown Los Angeles once had streets named Faith, Hope, and Charity. “This last one, Charity Street, was a nonstarter. No one wanted to ‘live on Charity,’ so it was renamed with the grand title of Grand Avenue.” More on L.A. street names in L.A. Downtown News.

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Following up on my Tech Jargon of Yore post, here are more than 30 tech ads from that paleolithic era, the 1990s. Despite the weird kerning, this Radio Shack ad made me smile.

Word of the Week: Semmelweis Reflex

Semmelweis reflex: The tendency to reject new evidence because it contradicts established norms or practices. Named for the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), now considered a pioneer of antiseptic procedures. His observation that hand-washing greatly reduced childbirth mortality was dismissed by most of his fellow physicians, who took offense at being told to wash their hands.

In a paradoxical twist, the Semmelweis reflex has been invoked in recent years by people who oppose a medical advance—namely, childhood vaccination. “Today’s vaccine injury denialism is a modern-day Semmelweis reflex,” wrote Ginger Taylor in “The Role of Government and Media,” a chapter in the anti-vaccine book Vaccine Epidemic (2011). (Taylor is not a physician.) The Semmelweis Society International, whose stated mission is “to expose the ‘sham peer review’ of medical professionals, nurses, and physicians when they are wrongfully accused of acts that can result in the loss of their clinical privileges,” has defended Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist whose study connecting childhood vaccines with a variety of ailments, including autism, has been definitively debunked. (For a thorough recap of the Wakefield story, read the Skeptic’s Dictionary entry.)

In The Panic Virus: A True Story of Science, Medicine, and Fear (2011), his excellent account of the history of vaccination and anti-vaccination, science reporter Seth Mnookin writes:

Semmelweis is frequently invoked by anti-vaccinationists. While explaining to me why the “mainstream” ignored Andrew Wakefield, one of his supporters and financial backers said, “We know there’s never been a time in history when people, in a short period of time, have looked at the data and thought, ‘Oh, we have a problem here,’ or even, ‘We might have a problem here—maybe you should wash your hands after you dissect bodies and before you go deliver babies.’ God forbid you should wash your hands!”

The Semmelweis reflex, Mnookin writes, is “a variation on the Galileo Gambit, whereby someone whose work is debunked argues that the fact that Galileo’s work was also debunked proves he is actually correct.”

In a Republican presidential-primary debate held in early September, candidate Rick Perry strode (or swaggered) into the Galileo controversy when he asserted that the issue of climate change remains “unsettled.” “Galileo got outvoted for a spell,” Perry said.

The Texas governor got it exactly wrong, explains The Atlantic Wire:

[W]hat Perry fails to realize is the fact that the scientific community actually agreed with Galileo. It was the clergy who outvoted him, accusing him of being a heretic. “By the time Galileo was publishing on heliocentrism, the idea was already circulating and widely accepted in scientific circles, including Jesuits,” explains Joshua Rosneau from the National Center for Science Education. “He wasn’t outvoted by scientists, he was outvoted by the political and religious leadership of his country.” [Emphasis in original.]

Above: Portrait of Ignaz Semmelweis at age 42, from Wikipedia.

Word of the Week: Murmuration

Murmuration: The collective noun for a flock of starlings. Attributed since about 1450, “one of many alleged group terms found in late Middle English glossarial sources, but not otherwise substantiated” (OED). Revived and popularized in the 20th century.

European starlings are regarded as pests in the US, but it’s hard not to be awestruck by their flocking behavior, which is no less magnificent for its being a survival function. In this video, which went viral last week, British artists Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith capture a murmuration during their canoe trip on the River Shannon in Ireland. Watch:

 

(Via multiple sources, including Kottke and Andrew Sullivan.)

Read about the mathematics of murmurations (Telegraph, UK) and the physics of murmurations (Wired Science).

A list of collective nouns for birds, from the Palomar Audubon Society in Escondido, California.

UPDATE: Read a post about murmuration at Sesquiotica, a fine blog about “words, words words.”

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?

August Linkfest

My new favorite online dictionary:

Samosapedia is based in New York, but its turf is South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, from Bangladesh to the Bay Area. The lexicon is essential for deciphering passages such as this one, from the biography of one Samosapedia founder:

Vik B.was once a total buddhu from Bangalore. During SUPW periods at St Joseph’s he created so much galata and tamasha that he was subjected to routine thapads from admonishing teachers and priests.

Sign up to receive a “daily dose of chutney” via email from “General Samosa.” See also this blog post about Samosapedia at Johnson, written by a native speaker of Indian-English. (Hat tip: @MacDictionary.)

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My new favorite parody site: The Proper English Foundation (motto: “Proper English is a subjective concept which we have taken to extremes”). All rules are enforced by the Académie von anglais, whose name is “a blend of French and German, the two languages that begat English more than 1,000 years ago.” (Via Bradshaw of the Future. And yes, it’s a spoof of the ridiculous Queen’s English Society.) UPDATE: On his blog, Sentence First, Stan Carey takes a skeptical look (or sceptical, as he'd put it) at the Queen's English Society and its spoofers. 

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How does the sound of a flavor name influence the way we experience ice cream? “The fact that consumers think of brand names with back vowels as heavy, thick, richer products suggests that they might prefer to name ice cream with back vowels, since ice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be heavy and rich,” writes Dan Jurafsky in a fascinating (long) essay at The Language of Food. Jurafsky also connects ice cream with gunpowder.

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A list of English words that can be spelled using elements in the periodic table. One of the longest: thermophosphorescence. Via Wordnik.

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How 50 big companies got their names. Many are eponyms in disguise: Taco Bell is named for founder Dave Bell; Hasbro is a truncated blend of Hassenfeld Brothers. Via Name Inspector.

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FAIL: Why most brand names suck. An excellent 20-minute video presentation by Minneapolis branding consultancy Pollywog.

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Fauxgo, a collection of the fake logos used in movies and TV shows. (Via Swiss Miss.)

Oceanic Airlines, Lost.

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Last week’s theme at A Word a Day was the origins and meanings of five car names: Paseo, Accord, Prius, Impresa, and Corolla. (I wish AWAD had included my favorite bad example: the Toyota Cressida. In the Iliad—and in Chaucer and Shakespeare—Cressida was the vixen who fell in love with Troilus and then betrayed him with Diomedes. Homer always called her “faithless Cressida.”)

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Did you know that the Twitter bird has a name? Via +Rich Levin.

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And because it’s that time of year, here’s a golden oldie from Literal Minded: The nouning of back to school.

Poster from here.

Word of the Week: Butler Lie

Butler lie: A lie that allows for polite initiation or termination of a conversation, particularly in electronic communications such as instant messaging. The term was coined by a team of Cornell University researchers for a paper (“Butler Lies: Awareness, Deception,and Design”) presented at the 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

From the abstract:

Instant messaging (IM) is a common and popular way for co-workers, friends, and family to stay in touch, but its “always-on” properties can sometimes lead people to feel overexposed or too readily available to others for conversation. This, in turn, may lead people to deceive others about their actual status or availability. ... We present results from a field study of 50 IM users, in which participants rated each of their messages at the time of sending to indicate whether or not it was deceptive. About one tenth of all IM messages were rated as lies and, of these, about one fifth were butler lies. These results suggest that butler lies are an important social practice in IM, and that existing approaches to interpersonal awareness, which focus on accurate assessment of availability, may need to take deception and other social practices into account.

“Like butlers, [butler lies] act as social buffers, telling others that we are at lunch when we are just avoiding them,” writes Austin Considine in a July 10, 2011, article in the New York Times (“New Technology, but the Same Old Lies”):

Being constantly reachable makes butler lies necessary to many people, and the Cornell researchers concluded in a subsequent study that ambiguities inherent in traditional texting also made them easier. Texters typically do not know when outgoing messages are read, where their recipients are or what they are doing.

However, writes Considine:

[T]echnology is already laying siege to the butler lie. Services like BlackBerry Messenger enable mutual users to track when their texts are read, effectively torpedoing the “sorry, phone died last night” excuse. “Friend tracking” applications like Google Latitude allow people to geographically pinpoint their friends’ mobile phones. So much for “stuck in traffic” when you really overslept.

Word of the Week: Neurodiversity

Neurodiversity: “The whole of human mental or psychological neurological structures or behaviors, seen as not necessarily problematic, but as alternate, acceptable forms of human biology.” – Double-Tongued Dictionary

Neurodiversity was coined in the late 1990s by journalist Harvey Blume and autism advocate Judy Singer, possibly independently. In a short article published in the September 1998 issue of The Atlantic, Blume wrote: “Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment?” Singer, an Australian who is the self-described parent of an “aspie” (person with Aspberger’s syndrome), contributed a chapter (“Why Can’t You Be Normal for Once in Your Life?”) to a 1999 book, Disability Discourse, in which she wrote:

For me, the key significance of the “Autistic Spectrum” lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of Neurological Diversity, or what I want to call “Neurodiversity.” The “Neurologically Different” represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class/gender/race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability.

Growing interest in the autism spectrum has given rise to a spate of articles, blogs, and books about neurodiversity. In his 20101 book Neurodiversity, educational consultant Thomas Armstrong argues that:

[P]eople with mental health labels (including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other brain differences), are “differently wired” than so-called normal (or “neurotypical”) individuals, and that their differences should be accommodated by society rather than being regarded as a “disease” that must be cured. 

Armstrong also calls neurodiversity “a civil rights movement proposing that individuals with mental health labels be protected against discrimination and prejudice in the same way that people of color, women, and other minorities are protected.”

A new documentary, Loving Lamposts, looks at the ways in which the autism spectrum is being redefined. In a review and Q&A with filmmaker Todd Drezner, science journalist Steve Silberman writes:

One widespread misconception about the neurodiversity movement is that it is universally opposed to all treatments for medical problems associated with these conditions, such as the development of drugs for disabling anxiety or gastrointestinal issues. But the neurodiversity community is itself diverse. Most of the advocates I know are on the spectrum themselves, and emphasize the importance of taking a variety of approaches — including making changes to public policy and the accelerated development of assistive technology such as apps for the iPad — to improve the lives of people who think differently.

May Linkfest

Ever wonder how serial killers get their nicknames? Christopher Beam writes in Slate that most nicknames originate in the tabloid media. But there are exceptions, like the Unabomber (from an FBI code name) and the Zodiac killer (self-named). Related: Jag Bhalla pointed me to this Seinfeld script from 1998 in which Kramer invents some names for a serial killer. Denogginizer?

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Speaking of nicknames, derby girls—that’s how roller-derby competitors prefer to be known—have some colorful ones: Ovary Reaction, Hell O’Kittie, Val Catraz. But although some derby names are trademarked, “the vast majority of the thousands of U.S.-based derby girls have not” pursued legal protection for their names, write Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman in the Freakonomics blog. Instead, they’ve developed a surprisingly effective system of private regulation backed by the threat of social disapproval. And if dirty looks don’t do the trick, “there’s always violence.” (I wrote about the derby girls’ Master List of names here.)

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Mafia guys have colorful nicknames, too; one defendant in the Family Secrets trial, Joseph Lombardo, had three: “the Clown,” “Lumbo,” and “Lumpy.” But, writes Andy Grimm in the Chicago Tribune, “modern mobsters are so paranoid about wiretaps and FBI surveillance that they seldom even risk using a nickname.” (Hat tip: MJF.)

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Putrescine, moronic acid, dickite, and other unusual names of molecules.

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What are the Boylston, the Cambridge, the Ainsley, and the Hamilton? They’re all names of collar styles, as defined in an essential guide for the well-dressed gentleman, “Comprehending Copious Collars.” Please note: button-down describes a collar, not any old shirt with buttons down the front. (A longtime peeve of mine.)

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Here’s a gleeful discussion of pejorative nicknames for US locales, with –tucky blends (Springtucky, Pennsyltucky, etc.) leading the list. Most creative, and new to me: San Diego is “The Dirty Waffle” (Sandy Eggo). A few I didn’t see on the list: Lost Wages, Nevada; Slo Town (San Luis Obispo); Contraceptive (Contra Costa) County, California; and San Remote (Ramon), California. (Via @Wayword.)

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For decades, ad agencies were named for their founders. Now they’re named for … other things. Read the stories behind Zaaz, Odopod, Sra. Rushmore, and a dozen other agencies in the US and elsewhere.

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In March, Indianapolis copy editor Andy Hollandbeck (@4ndyman on Twitter) began compiling a sure-to-be-massive A to Z of Editorial Peeves, beginning with “alright.” He published the “I” list this week (i.e. vs. e.g., impact, incentivize), but you’ll certainly want to read all the entries.

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Speaking of copy editors and peeves, John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun makes the case for maintaining distinctions that matter: imply/infer, pallet/palate/pallet, discrete/discreet, reign/rein. He admits, however, that his confidence “has been shaken” on the compose/comprise issue.

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Modernist Cuisine is the six-volume, lavishly illustrated, 2,438-page set—list price $625—“that is destined to reinvent cooking,” according to its own publicity. Apparently all that lavish illustration left no room in the budget for proofreading, as this epic list of corrections and clarifications reveals. (Via Erin Brenner.)