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.

Weekend Link Pack

Longtime readers may recall my 2008 post about the British energy-drink brand Pussy (“Bad Brand Names: The New Champion!”). Now the UK’s advertising regulator has ruled on complaints about Pussy ads. The deadpan ruling is worth your time for passages like this one:

We noted that the slogan in ad (a) stated “The drink’s pure, it's your mind that's the problem” and considered that strongly suggested that the term “pussy” had a secondary meaning which was not “pure” and was a “problem”, and considered that slogan reinforced the colloquial meaning of “pussy” to those older children or implied that that secondary, colloquial meaning was in some way impolite or even offensive or sexually explicit.

Hat tip: S. Quinn on the American Name Society listserv.

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On DuetsBlog (where I am an occasional contributor), Mark Prus of NameFlash considers the names of minor-league baseball teams. I learned a thing or three: for example, the Las Vegas 51s are not so called because they’re one card short of a deck.

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You’d think a new debit card with “Visa Paywave” would involve some sort of waving activity, right? Gotcha! “Sometimes a product name can sound really good, but it can send the wrong signals,” sighs Australian linguablogger Superlinguo.

Language-ier!

Thanks to reader Steve Hall for bringing to my attention another advertiser playing the faux-comparative/superlative game: the golf-club maker TaylorMade. A new spot, Steve writes, has been in heavy rotation during ESPN’s coverage of the 2013 Masters Golf Tournament.

 

 

I admit I don’t understand why a golf club would be called RocketBallz. (The name of another TaylorMade club, RocketBladez, makes more sense.) But that’s just one of the many, many things about golf I shall never understand. For example, who are the guys in the ad? Advertising logic tells us they are famous golfers who are instantly recognizable to fans; to this viewer, however, they’re just a bunch of bad actors in dorky outfits.

I am somewhat more clueful about the ad’s language, which riffs on the comparative suffix “-ier.” In the space of 30 seconds we’re treated to huge-ier, smash-ier, long-ier, so-sweet-ier, money-ier (that’s “money” as in “so money,” as in Swingers), nothing-on-that-ier, way-better-ier, quieter-ier, good-to-be-you-ier, and, of course, RocketBallz-ier, a play on “ballsy.”

It gets suffix-ier: TaylorMade is using the #ier hashtag to identify and, um, “socialize” the campaign. From the TaylorMade Tour blog:

To help celebrate the official Tour launch of the RBZ [RocketBallz] Stage 2 fairway woods and Rescues, every TaylorMade pro competing in this week’s WGC Cadillac Championship will be using a new special edition staff bag featuring an “IER” panel – their names, plus IER – as well as wearing hats and visors with the hashtag #IER on the front of the hats.

I’m aware of at least two other brands that have created ad campaigns built around the “-ier” suffix: Perrier and Napier. In both of those cases, the connection between the brand names and the ad copy – which used real adjectives like “riskier” and “snakier,” not invented ones – felt authentic and boosted the brands’ memorability. It’s harder to make a connection between “good-to-be-you-ier” and RocketBallz. (Commenter Steve Hall remembered the advertiser as Callaway, a TaylorMade competitor!)

Other observations:

• TaylorMade uses a clumsy “X Just Got Y” sloganclone toward the end of the spot: “Our longest just got longest-ier.” (More “X Just Got Y” examples here, here, and here.)
• The hip-hop-inspired Z-plural of RocketBallz and RocketBladez was already old news when I first wrote about it in 2006. Which means it probably still sounds edgy and “urban” to the golf crowd.

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Read my previous golf posts: “The Smaller the Ball” and “How to Name a Golf Course.”

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?

 

Word of the Week: Pre-Drinking

Pre-drinking: “Chugging cheap alcoholic drinks before heading out to a bar, club, or sporting event.” – “ ‘Pre-drinking’ or ‘Pre-funking’ Common Among Young Alcohol Users,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2012. Also called pre-gaming, pre-partying, pre-loading, or frontloading.

Young drinkers’ reasons for pre-drinking include saving money, “getting in the mood,” and “facilitating contacts with potential sexual partners,” according to a new Swiss study to be published in the February 2013 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. It’s risky business, the L.A. Times reports:

Researchers found that when students drank prior to going to a bar or club, they drank more than they would otherwise. On average, pre-drinking students consumed seven drinks, and students who drank only at a bar or event consumed just over four drinks.

The researchers surveyed 183 Swiss adults, with a median age of 23, over five consecutive weeks. They used a recently developed cellphone assessment technique to collect reports. The legal drinking age in Switzerland is 16.

Florian Labhart, one of the study’s authors, was quoted by Science Daily as saying that “pre-drinking has been found in about one third of all on-premise drinking, which is a very high rate.” Pre-drinking rates in the United States may be even higher than that, according to Shannon R. Kenney, a sociology professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles who did not participate in the study. Kenney told Science Daily:

“In fact, due to U.S. legal drinking age requirements, pre-drinking may be most prevalent among underage drinkers in the U.S. … Research shows that underage drinkers may be motivated to pre-drink to achieve a ‘buzz’ or become intoxicated before going to a licensed premise where they cannot legally consume alcohol, such as a bar, club, concert, or sporting event.”

Happy new year! And if you pre-drink, please don’t pre-drive.

Names of the Year 2012

The American Name Society is accepting nominations for Names of the Year, with the winners to be announced at the society’s annual meeting in Boston on January 4, 2013. Anyone can play; submit your nominations no later than January 1.

Here are my own picks in the categories established by the ANS.

 

Personal Name

Blue Ivy. The daughter of Jay-Z and Beyoncé, born January 8, was destined to make headlines because of her celebrity parents. But her unusual name – “Blue” because it’s Jay-Z’s favorite color, “Ivy” for the Roman numeral IV (maybe) – also guaranteed the spotlight. In October, Jay-Z and Beyoncé failed to get trademark protection for “Blue Ivy”: a Boston events planner had beaten them to it, in 2009.

Higgs. Scientists at CERN announced in July that they’d discovered a particle that behaves like the Higgs boson, aka the “God particle.” The particle is named for Peter Higgs, professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh.

Jeremy Lin. The New York Knicks point guard had a sensational season, and his surname was turned into a string of puns, from Linsanity to Linspirational to Linderella. Ben Zimmer wrote in February about the Lin-guistics of Lin-sanity.

Kony. Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan guerrilla group, was the subject of a documentary film, Kony 2012, released in March. The film, produced by Invisible Children, Inc., went viral; it was seen by more than 100 million viewers within a week of its release. It also inspired a critical backlash. (Jen Doll includes Kony in her “2012’s Worst Words” roundup at The Atlantic Wire.)

Malala. First name of the teenage Pakistani activist who in October was shot by the Taliban for refusing to abandon her campaign for girls’ education. She is still recovering in a hospital in Britain.

Mitt. It’s possible that only the mother of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney ever called him by his legal first name. Romney was named for family friend J. Willard Marriott, founder of the hotel chain, and Milton “Mitt” Romney, a cousin of his father’s.

Trayvon. The fatal shooting of unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin on February 26 inspired national protests and more than 2 million signatures on an online petition.

 

Trade Name

FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver’s polling-aggregation blog takes its name from the number of electors in the U.S. electoral college. I gave my reasons for choosing this name (and nine other notable brand names of 2012) in my recent column for the Visual Thesaurus.

 

Place Name

Gangnam. Did anyone not see the “Gangnam Style” music video this year? The monster hit by Korean pop star PSY takes its name from Seoul’s Gangnam District. On Language Log, Ben Zimmer wrote about a “Gangnam Style” spoof that featured linguist/political critic Noam Chomsky.

Gaza. Site of eight turbulent days of fighting in November between the Israeli and Palestinian forces.

Literary Name

Grey. The eponymous protagonist of the publishing phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels. “Young entrepreneur Christian Grey” is “brilliant, beautiful, and intimidating,” with “singular erotic tastes.”  

Amy. There’s been a spate of “Amy” characters in recent novels, movies, and TV shows: The protagonist of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl. Laura Dern’s character on the HBO series “Enlightened.” The baby on NBC’s “Up All Night.” Anna Chlumsky’s character on HBO’s “Veep.” The American teenager in ABC Family’s “Secret Life of American Teenager.” Mayim Bialik’s character in CBS’s  “Big Bang Theory.” Rebel Wilson’s character (actually called Fat Amy) in the 2012 movie Pitch Perfect. “Amy” hasn’t been a top-ten baby name since the 1970s, when it was ranked #2 in the United States; I’m guessing the creators of all those Amy characters were also born in the 1970s – and grew up in a sea of Amys.

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.

Word of the Week: Curlbro

Curlbro: “A pejorative slang term referring to gym-goers [who] focus on training their arms when weight lifting.” (Source: Know Your Meme.)

Despite being closely associated with the Jersey Shore aesthetic, “curlbro” first appeared in a UK fitness forum, The Student Room, on November 11, 2010. An Urban Dictionary definition was posted on December 10, 2010: “The word curlbro consists of the two words curl (for biceps-curl, a popular isolation exercise in hypertrophy training) and bro (brother, but here: fake tan, borderline-retarded, gel-in-hair, unintelligent person).”

“Curlbro” gained traction after Time magazine released a set of photos of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan working out. Something about the pose, the facial expression, the backward baseball cap, and the earbuds proved irresistible to amateur caption writers.

 

(Source.)

“Paul Ryan is a total curlbro,” wrote Caitlin in “Dissecting the Cult of the Curlbro,” an October 16 post on her Fit and Feminist blog:

You know who they are. They are the men who line up in front of mirrors in gyms all across the United States, who pass hours curling their way into oblivion, who look at a squat rack and see not a squat rack but a really fancy contraption in which they can do curls. Every day is arms day for these guys.

The female counterpart of a curlbro, I learned from Caitlin, is a “cardio queen”:

The sadly ironic thing is that the curlbro has more in common with the cardio queen than just about anyone else in the gym. In fact, I’d say the two are photo negatives of each other. Each one is so focused on making their body look a specific way – a way that is defined strictly according to their gender – that they completely ignore all of the things that actually make for a strong, healthy body. I mean, who cares if you have twenty inch biceps if you can’t run a mile or you can’t bend over at the waist. And big deal if you can fit into a size 0 but you can’t even open your own damn jar of pickles.

October Linkfest

Forget everything you know about Banana Republic as it is today, and try to imagine the company in its crazily unconventional youth, when the stores had animal-call soundtracks and Jeeps in their windows and the mail-order catalogs—this was pre-Web, kiddies—featured sly, literate copy, interviews with famous-ish and once-famous people (James Fallows; the American-born former crown princess of Sikkim), and illustrations instead of photographs. I don’t have to imagine any of this, because I worked for Banana Republic back then*, after it was sold to the Gap but before Gap-ization eliminated every last whiff of creativity from the endeavor. Now, though, we can all return to that khaki-hued era, because BR’s founders, Mel and Patricia Ziegler (who, by the way, hired me), have written a history of their time with the company. In alternating first-person voices, Wild Company: The Untold Story of Banana Republic tells how an unemployed newspaper reporter (Mel) and artist (Patricia) used their powers of storytelling to spin heaps of military surplus from the far corners of the earth (but mostly the British Commonwealth) into gold. For a preview, listen to an interview with the Zieglers on the public-radio show Marketplace. (“I wish they’d changed the name,” Mel says of BR’s current incarnation.) And to get a sense of the hold the original Banana Republic still has on loyalists—including a few who are too young to have shopped in the 1980s—see Scott C. Adams’s blog, Abandoned Republic, which lovingly reproduces and annotates every one of the old catalogs.

And before we move on, please allow me to correct a common misconception: Banana Republic, founded in 1978, came first; J. Peterman, which appropriated the copy and illustration style and was parodied during several seasons of “Seinfeld,” was founded in 1987.

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If the comic site xkcd baffles you, help is on the way: Explain xkcd is the “For Dummies” of xkcd-dom, providing an earnest exegesis of every panel of almost every strip.  

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Speaking of humor and not getting it, let’s see how stories from The Onion (satirical!) would look on Facebook (credulous!). Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Literally Unbelievable. (Via Karen.)

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The book-recommendation site Goodreads polled its users about their presidential-candidate preferences and then analyzed reading habits across party lines. The result is the fascinating infographic “You Are What You Read.” There’s some crossover between the two camps, but I bet it doesn’t surprise you that Romney supporters think much more highly of Atlas Shrugged than Obama supporters do.

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Did you miss the recent kerfuffle over Britishisms (a k a Briticisms) in American speech? Catch up right here! The first salvo was fired by the fabulously named Cordelia Hebblethwaite of BBC News (“Bit by bit British English is invading America”), which prompted two responses from Geoff Nunberg on the linguistics blog Language Log and one from Mark Liberman. Then came “Americans Are Barmy Over Britishisms” in the New York Times (the print edition had a better hed: “And Bob’s Your Uncle”), and a Times blog post that rounded up tweets with Americans’ favorite Britishisms. The Atlantic Wire and The Economist’s Johnson blog eagerly piled on, while Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language attempted to bring some academic rigor to the discussion.

Meanwhile, Ben Yagoda continues to add entries to his Not One-Off Britishisms blog. Lately, “toff,” “twee,” and “snarky” have been hotly debated in the comments section.

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Calling all peevologists: Ragan.com has published a list of “9 completely pointless corporate words” that will rally your blood pressure. (Decisioning! Solutionize! Planful! And, as suggested by multiple commenters, the ever-unpopular reach out!) For lots more—in dictionary form, no less—see Learnings.org, “where corporate speak goes to die.” (Via Deborah Schneider.)

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Mazel tov to Lena (“Girls”) Dunham on selling her essay collection for $3.5 million. For that kind of dough, Ms. Dunham can afford a less generic title than Not That Kind of Girl, which is not that distinctive. (Via Jessica Testa.)

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Why are men’s nicknames on the decline? Possibly because there’s more diversity in first names nowadays—and thus less need to distinguish one Jim or Joe from another.

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Today is National Dictionary Day in the US. Let’s celebrate with a “30 Rock” dictionary that goes from Avian Bone Syndrome to zing. And who could forget EGOT, fun cooker, and KDate?

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The titanic taxonomy of wrestler names. Suitable for framing! (Via @Catchword.)

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Got 15 minutes? Check out Milking “Got Milk?”: “A photo essay of the ad campaign that won’t go away.”

 

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“I hate beverages with names that tell me how to drink them.” – Impulsive Buy.

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Finally: Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies.

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* In fact, I interviewed Mr. Fallows—I woke him up in his Kuala Lumpur home, to my chagrin—and Ms. Hope Cooke, the former crown princess who had divorced the prince and was leading walking tours of Manhattan.

September Linkfest

New York City gangs take their names very, very seriously, according to “Gang ‘Slang’ers,” in the New York Post. “It took us about a month to come up with our name,” said Piff Montana, a member of the Get Touched Boyz of Jamaica, Queens. … We wanted a name that would make an impact.” The full list of 300 or so gang names reveals a preoccupation with numbers and precinctspercentages: there are gangs called 5 Precinct Percent, 10 Precinct Percent, 40 Precinct Percent, and so on up to 122 Precinct Percent. (Hat tip: NameFlash. And thanks to Dave for correcting me on "precinct.")

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New additions to World Wide Words: eastwooding, mirror fasting, underbragging, and gramping. No, gramping is not a misspelling of glamping.

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Looking for a title for your book? You can’t go wrong with “The Elements of ___,” says Poynter.org’s Roy Peter Clark, who lists more than 25 knockoffs of the Strunk and White original. Here’s the one that inspired his post:

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Before she founded the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean worked on the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, a reference that isn’t just for writers but is also by writers—i.e., various writers were invited to contribute notes on words that interested them. One of the writers assigned to McKean was the late David Foster Wallace, who, she writes, approached the copyediting phase as if “someone invited him to an all-day grammar seminar (with celebrity photo signings and vendor's expo hall), combined with a debating society picnic, where the topic was ‘RESOLVED: This Comma Should Be Removed.’ (You're not surprised, are you?)” Read the whole delightful account at “It was wonderful, marvelous, magnificent, superb, glorious, sublime, lovely, delightful ...”

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The Chamomile Tea Party was formed in 2010 as an alternative to “the rancor between the political left and right” in the US. It’s using modified World War II posters to get the point across, and you can view and download the posters on Flickr.

 

By outtacontext.

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In brand naming, many clients panic if a name is more than five letters long. According to Baby Name Wizard, there’s a contrary trend in baby-boy naming, at least in the US: fear of short names. Finn becomes Finnegan, Quinn becomes Quinlan, and—most boggling of all—Levi becomes Leviathan (“the twisted serpent to be killed at the end of time”) or Leviticus (the third book of the Old Testament, notable mostly for its litany of laws about skin diseases, sacrifices, and genital discharges).

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Fellow name developer Chris Johnson (aka The Name Inspector) has created my new favorite Pinterest board: the Wall of Namifying, “logos of companies whose names end with -ify (or, in one case, -efy).” As you probably know, I share his obsession. (And speaking of Pinterest, I’m trying my hand at a similar project: cataloguing the many, many -ly names and logos.)

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Linguist Arnold Zwicky collected some wonderful names of minor-league baseball teams, including the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, the Fort Wayne Tincaps, and the Lansing Lugnuts. Then he followed up with an imaginary list of his own. I’m rooting for the Baton Rouge Compacts.

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From the Autoextremist blog, a slightly jaundiced guide to the latest auto-industry terms. An “accidental tourist” describes “executives devoid of the qualifications necessary to properly perform the duties assigned to them”; “greenage” is a program’s environmental potential. (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Speaking of jaundiced, there’s nothing like a Condescending Corporate Brand Page to say “We're a big corporate brand using Facebook. So look out for us asking you to like and share our stuff in a faintly embarrassing and awkward way.” Read more about the CCBP in Fast Company. (Note: the CCBP is British in origin—its URL contains “corporate bollocks”—but the themes are, alas, universal.)

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He is the very model of an amateur grammarian.

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I attended the Brand New Conference last year, when it was held in San Francisco, but couldn’t make it to New York for this year’s conference. Thankfully, organizer Armin Vit has compiled the best quotes and tweets from the event. Here’s a provocative opinion from UK designer Miles Newlin: “Stories have an end, and unless you want to think of your brand as having an end, then forget the storytelling idea, and forget people who talk about brand storytelling.”

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See what happened when New York Magazine sent a reporter to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to ask startup founders about their “chronically misspelled” company names. It’s, uh, Osom. (Thanks, Jessica!)