Fritinancy

Color Me Perplexed

TypePad, which hosts this blog and many others, gave some of us a not-altogether-welcome surprise present earlier this week: a brand-new editor for composing posts. I hadn't asked for it, I'm not wild about it, and I'm particularly annoyed that I had to discover it by accident and then stumble around trying to decipher it. (I tend to glaze over when presented with a clutter of icons. I'm a word person through and through.) It took me an irritatingly long time to find where they'd hidden three basic blogging functions--categories, posting status, and trackbacks. Yes, it's easier to include a hypertext link, but the rest of the interface is slow and kludgey, and for all the "upgrading," it's still not possible to import text from MSWord.

On the other hand: many, many new colors in the palette! One hundred forty-four! Why? No clue. I mean, we're not Leonardo here. Wouldn't Crayola's classic 64 colors have sufficed? Personally, I'd be satisfied with four (black, red, green, blue)--in exchange for faster keyboard response. 

But then I noticed that--unlike in the old Compose editor--each color had a name that revealed itself when I moused over it. Now you've got my attention.

I moused over all 144 colors and arrived at this conclusion: TypePad created the palette and then realized--uh-oh!--that the colors needed names. So they assigned a few colors at random to a few interns who'd been idling around the water cooler, and then uploaded the color names without cross-checking, consulting a dictionary, or indeed applying common sense.

Apparently some of the interns were not only unpaid, they were also color-blind.

Let's take a look, shall we? I boldfaced the color names for emphasis until I got weary of all the interface problems and just gave up.

April Linkfest: Bonus Fashion Week Edition

Some of my favorite fashion bloggists, notable for their stylish way with words:

Linda Grant, who blogs from London at The Thoughtful Dresser, has been blogging for less than a year and she already has a contract for The Thoughtful Dresser, the book. Of course, she was already a highly regarded author of fiction and nonfiction when she started blogging, which explains why TTD is consistently well written and enlightening. I love TTD's motto--"Because you can't have depths without surfaces"--and I melted when I read this post from April 8:

To go into a shop and say, what lovely shoes, can I try these, and they say yes, and yes we have them in your size, and yes, look they fit, and yes, they are comfortable, and yes, I can walk in them and as Molly Bloom would say, yes yes yes yes, and so it's over to the cash register and out with the Amex and yes.

Passage des Perles is a relatively new blog that offers daily insights into style "for the elegant age." I know little about "Duchesse," its author, except that she resides in Canada and wields a tart and sophisticated pen. This is from an April 3 post titled "Body Shapers: Do They Really?"

The body shaper, the modern girdle, is one thing we 50+ women are told we absolutely need. Must. Not. Bulge. I've bought Spanx, Donna Karan, Flexees and a bunch of other brands, with hope and the fervent desire to Get It Together Under There.

Une Femme d'un Certain Age writes from Los Angeles about "living a stylish, adventurous, balanced, delicious life after 50." I love it when she waxes philosophical. From her April 3 post:

"Would I wear it in Paris?" It's clear, it's concise, and it shall become my wardrobe mantra. Managerial and motivational textbooks stress that success comes from goals that are clear and results that are measurable. And lo! the yardstick has appeared.

A Dress a Day is the sewing-and-fashion blog by Erin McKean, probably better known to my readers as Dictionary Evangelist. Not content with being a witty and celebrated lexicographer, Erin also sews her own clothes. Mainly dresses. From an April 16 post:

First off: who dreamed up the fake bolero? (Because, obviously, a real bolero is too much trouble, right? What with all the tedious being able to take it off and put it back on again.) Or is it an elaborate collar? I'm much more sympathetic to the elaborate collar, although I don't like buttonholes that will never feel the touch of a button. Buttons on their lonesome: okay. Buttons sewn over snaps ... eh, whatever floats your boat. Buttons condemned to look longingly at their buttonholes across a never-to-be-crossed divide? That's just cruel.

Reading Style Spy is like sitting at a sidewalk café with your funniest, fashion-savviest girlfriend, who offers a running commentary on what every passerby is wearing. White dresses without linings, the godawful creations of Beyoncé Knowles's mother--she covers the waterfront. She passes judgment on men's apparel, too, as in this April 10 post about "business casual":

The fine line that a well-dressed man has to walk is how to work the formula without lapsing into fashion turpitude. Throw into the mix that a guy probably has a job he goes to five days a week where he would like to not be mocked by his fellow employees, and I can see why it's so easy to slide down the slippery slope of sartorial laziness until he is trapped at the bottom of the deep, dark, Canyon of the Pleated Khakis and Polo Shirt.

If you aren't yet reading Manolo the Shoeblogger, what are you waiting for? The Manolo he has the opinions; the Manolo he has the recommendations; the Manolo he has the strangely configured prose of the visitor from another continent, or universe. Here he introduces a pump shaped like the Opel Agila car. And here he weighs in on the Sarkozy effect:

Trust the Manolo, the mythical man of business who wishes to “up his game” by wearing the stacked heel shoes, will indeed not only look taller, but also ridiculous. Few things indicate male insecurity as forcefully and as humorously as tacky elevator shoes. One might as well resort to the Ron Popeil hair-in-the-can as the cure for baldness as stacked heels as the cure for shortness.

Which fashion blogs are you reading?

X Is Like Y

From Blank is Like Blank, a blog of "analogies to live by":

Waterboarding is like freebasing:

They both sound like they should be summer-camp activities.

*

Using a semicolon is like barbecuing:

I'm never quite sure I'm doing it correctly.

From Justin Feinstein, a Brooklyn copywriter who also blogs at Guardedly Optimistic. (Check out his "If Taglines Were Honest" post from last October.)

(Hat tip: Swissmiss.)

April Linkfest

This month's menu: Fun, games, made-up names, and pie charts.

The Blog & Website Cuss-o-Meter tells me I'm pretty darned clean, but not as saintly as Mr. Verb, to whom I tip my hat.

Karen at Verbatim pointed me to GraphJam, where users post their own graphs on sundry topics. Here's one of the wordier ones:

And this one appears to have been made especially for me:

Speaking of circular objects, "volvelle" was new to me: it's a Latin word for a type of wheel chart first used in the Middle Ages and still popular today. Eclectica gives a brief review of Reinventing the Wheel, by Jessica Helfand (a contributor to the excellent Design Observer blog), a survey of wheel and slide charts and other pre-computer-age information technology. (Via All This ChittahChattah.) Here's a nice volvelle swiped from Eclectica:

Finally, in honor of Passover, the Four Questions:

Question #1: Can you name 18 made-up drugs from books, movies, and TV? A.V. Club can, from Synthehol (Star Trek) to Mimezine (Wild Palms). The comments are a long, strange trip in themselves.

Question #2, posed by Motivated Grammar: Why won't "willn't" work?

Is it just that modern people are lazy? Or some consequence of the O and I keys abutting on a QWERTY keyboard? Nope. In fact, we’re not even asking the right question.

Question #3: Nancy R. Callahan at Nancy's Baby Names asks, "Have you ever noticed that the names of many oral contraceptives sound a lot like (or really are) female names?" There's Camilla, Portia, Yasmin, and Errin, for starters. (Male contraceptives don't follow this format, unless you consider MAXX a proper name. I once attempted to name a condom Roger, but that's a tale for another day.)

Question #4: Which imaginary animals are kosher? Evil Monkey, at Ecstatic Days, asks an expert:

Mongolian Death Worm - A: “No, because you cannot eat anything that crawls on its belly.” EM: “Does that mean an injured kosher animal that is crawling along isn’t kosher any more?” A: “Yes, because you can’t eat an animal that’s been injured or is sick.” EM: “It’s a wonder you haven’t all starved to death.”

(The fourth question comes via BoingBoing, which last year regretted to inform that marijuana isn't kosher for Passover. Oy. Bummer.)

He Writes Funny

When you title your blog IWriteFunny.com, you'd damn well better deliver. Fortunately, Aaron Weiss does. This spot-on parody of the Cook's Illustrated writing style, for example, made me--a Cook's Illustrated devotee--laugh out loud:

In my first effort to produce a reliable boiled water, I began with a cylindrical steel container, or “pot” as often called for in traditional recipes. Placing the pot four inches away from the flame, the water did eventually come to a boil, but it took six hours. This might have been acceptable in our grandparents’ day, but many of us no longer have so much time to spare. I then moved the pot closer, a mere two inches from the flame. Indeed, the water boiled in just three hours – a big improvement.

(Hat tip: Karen.)

But it was the Swiftian flair of My Year of Cannibalism that had me rolling on the floor:

I know what you’re thinking. How did I get enough fiber? My cholesterol must have gone through the roof! But I developed a system.

First, it is important to eat at least five servings of vegetarian per day. If you can eat vegans, so much the better, but they can be a little bland so you need to alternate them with someone tastier, like pastry chefs. When I need a buzz I choose men with large beer guts. On special occasions I like small children. They don’t offer a lot in the way of nutritional value, but their young and tender muscles are like butter. I do not eat actual butter because it comes from cows, and that’s just wrong.

Because Weiss is a sustainable kind of guy, he has a locavorian angle:

Try to eat people who live within 50 miles of your home. They will not have to travel as far, which will reduce your carbon footprint while eliminating theirs.

And he works in "manivorous," a most excellent man-word. And you know I love me some man-words.

Fritinancy Is the New Away With Words

Announcing the new name of this blog:

Fritinancy.

I'll take questions from the audience now.

Q. Did you make that word up?

A. No, I did not. From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 edition:

Noun: A chirping or creaking, as of a cricket. (Obsolete.) Origin: Latin fritinnire, to twitter.

Q. How do you pronounce it?

A. Phonetically, more or less: FRIT-ih-nan-see.

Q. Why did you change the blog's name?

A. I'd originally chosen Away With Words to play off my business name, Wordworking. I'd wanted the blog to be an opportunity to run away with words--to take them a little less seriously than I do in the world of commerce. But it turned out there was already another blog called Away With Words, as well as an English-Japanese-Cantonese-language movie (a k a San Tiao Ren) and a book (by Australian writer Ruth Wajnrjb) by the same name. And then there's A Way with Words, the public radio show about language hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette. (It isn't carried on any of my local public radio stations, and I confess that when I started blogging in June 2006 I hadn't yet heard of it. Mea maxima culpa.) If I'd analyzed my own competitive namescape as critically as I do for my clients, I'd have told myself to go back to the drawing board.

Q. Why Fritinancy?

A. I explored other creative directions involving "words," "names," "language," and other obvious concepts. None seemed distinctive, memorable, or appealing enough.

I considered some aliases I've used around the internets: Bon Mot, Wordworker, etc. Meh.

Then I began looking at my own name. My naming colleague Mark Gunnion had enjoyed my post about the term Friedman Unit and suggested I appropriate that term as a blog title. I was tempted--FriedmanUnit.com, .net, and .org are still available as of this writing--but FU is permanently attached to New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (no relation), and I'm not eager to have my opinions confused with his.

So I turned my attention to my first name and began pushing it around. Several words, I realized, end with -nancy, and some seemed appropriate as titles for a blog about language. Consonancy (taken, alas). Dissonancy (taken). Resonancy (taken). Assonancy. (Okay, not Assonancy.) Finally, a wild-card search turned up Fritinancy. I'd never encountered the word, which tickled me: there was my own all-too-familiar name peeping out from under those Edwardian-era skirts. And I was pleased to discover no one else had claimed it--not as a business name, not as a blog name, not as anything I could find except old dictionary definitions.

And I liked those definitions. "Chirping" and "creaking"--not to mention "frittering"--seem like perfectly apt descriptions of what I do here. (And yes, I have a Twitter account, although I haven't tweeted yet.)

More positive associations: I like the way "Friti-" suggests my surname. (In high school and college, where I was one among many Nancys, I was known as Friedy.) "Fritinancy" is obscure, but not impossibly so. It's a fun word to say. In rescuing it from obsolescence, I felt I was doing a linguistic good deed. In that, I am greatly encouraged by the examples of Wishydig, A Roguish Chrestomathy, and several of the other linguistics blogs I read regularly.

I can imagine Fritinancy on a menu: pommes fritinancy, perhaps.

Finally, just look at the Scrabble words you can pull out of Fritinancy: infantry, tyrannic, nifty, crafty, frantic, inanity, infancy, ratify ... well, you get the idea.

Q. Enough about you. If I've bookmarked or subscribed to or linked to your blog, do I have to change anything?

A. If you've been kind enough to include me in your blogroll, I'd appreciate it very much if you changed the name of the link to Fritinancy. Otherwise, no need to take action--not for now, anyway. The blog's URL will remain nancyfriedman.typepad.com until I get energized to change it. (I've registered fritinancy.com, .net, and .org, just in case I suddenly, or even gradually, start getting 25,000 readers a day and decide to make a technology investment.) If your bookmark or link includes Away_With_Words in the URL, you might want to delete that appendage, but you probably don't have to.

Q. Do bloggers do this often? Change their blog names, I mean.

A. Often enough. The most prominent example is probably Guy Kawasaki, wildly famous venture capitalist and author, whose blog has had three names during its lifetime: "Bona Tempora Volvantur" (Let the Good Times Roll), "Signum Sine Tinnitu" (Signal Without Noise), and--currently--"How to Change the World."

I like to think I'm in good company and that I've made my own small step toward betterment. You, however, may disagree, in which case I invite you to leave me a politely worded comment.

Or you can start writing your own blog and call it any damn thing you like.

Photo ("Cricket passant la tête") by Guillaume T. at Flickr.

Like a Rock

The Conglomerate blog, which has been covering business, law, economics, and society since 2003, is kind enough to provide an explanation of how it arrived at its name. The blog's founding pair--both law professors--considered several name candidates: Venturpreneur ("clunky and too hard to spell"), Punctilio (a key term in an important Supreme Court ruling; rejected as "too obscure"), Peppercorn (from contract law's peppercorn theory of consideration: used in too many business names, it turns out), Random Walk, Noise Theory, and Seamless Web (a phrase first used to describe the law in 1898).

In the end they chose Conglomerate. The blogging linguist Mr. Verb is as mystified as I am:

These guys chose the name for its 'businessy' sound, among other reasons. But their sense of the term is dramatically different from my own, and probably that of many readers of this blog. For me, conglomerate has a very negative ring to it. It calls to mind the buying of companies to drive up stock prices, where people got rich off manipulating markets, not by producing goods or delivering services. I'm just making a point about word meaning here, not about what's good business practice, but a similar view of conglomerates is laid out in this wikipedia entry, and also in this post on Conglomerate Monkeyshines.

I couldn't agree more. And I'd go even further:

• Conglomerate sounds off-putting. It's that glom syllable in the middle, which derives from Latin glomus, a ball. It's an unlovely-sounding word in English, made even less attractive by the (probably unrelated) slang meaning of glom: to take or steal. There's also glom onto: to grab, attack, or grasp. Glom has visual and aural associations with glop, clomp, and glum, none of which has a positive meaning.
• It's generic. It's like calling your business Company, Inc.
• Descriptiveness is a weak benefit. Yes, conglomerate "denotes the gathering of disparate parts into a whole." And it's a kind of rock. So what? What does this tell me about the insights Conglomerate's authors will share, the experience they offer, or the ways in which they'll make me a smarter, better person? Far better to find an intriguing metaphor or a provocative phrase that suggests a point of view or an advantage.

Lawyers aren't known for world-shaking creativity in name development. Most law firms, after all, are simply named for their original partners. And lawyers are trained to scrutinize word meanings rather than word associations. But the art of naming requires a broader perspective, one that includes etymology and meaning but also reaches out to consider allusion, association, emotional resonance, and ear appeal. By those standards, Conglomerate--an earnest and well-reasoned effort--falls short.

Personally, I think they were on the right track with Peppercorn. If I'd been their naming consultant, I'd have encouraged further exploration in that direction.

Image: Inside Google.

Snowclones Blog Makes "Best of 2007" List

Congratulations to linguist Erin O'Connor: her Snowclones database has been named #6 on Fimoculous's¹ list of the 30 best blogs of 2006 that you (maybe) aren't reading. In this case, you doesn't include moi: I've been a fan since Day One. Well done, Erin!

What's a snowclone? Briefly, it's a fill-in-the-blank cliché. One of the best-known snowclones is "X is the new Y." (Seen in the New York Times Thursday Styles section today: "Blue is the new green," a quote from ad agency JWT.) Once you read Erin's blog, you'll start seeing a blizzard of snowclones.

Oh, and needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), I'm thrilled to receive an honorable mention in the category along with the estimable LanguageHat.

Now I'm going to work my way through the rest of the list, which includes a whole lot of blogs I'd never heard of, as well as one--The "Blog" of "Unneccessary" Quotation Marks--that I recommended a few months ago.

___

¹Now you want to know what "Fimoculous" means. Blog author Rex Sorgatz writes: "A fimoculous is a micro-organism that consumes its own waste for sustenance. Fimoculli are therefore a self-perpetuating ecology. A mono-parasite, a homo-symbiosis, Fimoculous.com devours the filth expunged on the mediascape."

Well, that's close, but not quite right. Fimoculous is an adjective, not a noun; it means "inhabiting or growing on dung"--fimus being one of several Latin words for dung. Which suggests a snowclone: "If the Romans had N words for dung, surely X have Y words for Z.")

(Snowman image: Fashions by Gigi.)

Linguistics Blog Names

To my regret, I took only one linguistics class in my six years of higher education. I'd expected to love that class, but the professor--who I later learned was universally known as the Department Head, as in pothead--was so unfocused and just plain weird that I lost all desire to continue my formal studies.

To compensate, I've made an effort to self-educate, mostly through written-for-laypersons books such as Anthony Burgess's A Mouthful of Air and John McWhorter's The Power of Babel. Thanks to the blogosphere, though, I've been able to expand my scope by reading linguists' blogs. Every day I learn something new--something like parataxis, circumstantial modal, or discourse marker--and never do I experience that lost-in-space sensation I'd had in the halls of academe.

As a practical practicing wordsmith, I've been curious about the names linguists give their blogs. They tend to occupy well-defined areas of the naming spectrum. On one end are the descriptive, matter-of-fact names: The Linguistics Zone, The Language Guy, Language Geek. The most widely read linguistics blog of all is called simply Language Log.

In the middle are the semi-descriptive, semi-evocative blog names with a metaphor or a subtle twist: Language Hat (whose About pages include My Languages and My Hats), HeIdeas (a nice blend of Heidi Harley's first name and "ideas"), and Canny Linguist (a Schrödinger's blog whose name just barely escapes being a dirty joke) .

And then there are the magnificently, proudly obscure blog names--names that dare the non-professional to guess their meaning. To save all of you the effort and possible embarrassment, I've asked the owners of some of these blogs to explain themselves. Which, I'm happy to say, they seemed eager to do.

In random order:

Wishydig is the blog of Purdue University graduate student Michael Covarrubias, whose areas of interest include English-language history and phonology. Michael explained in an email:

"Wishydig" is an Old English word meaning wise, thoughtful or prudent. It's a compound of wis meaning 'wise' and hygdig meaning 'careful' 'modest' (from hygd: mind, thought, consideration). Note that the 'g' dropped from hygdig to hydig. The -ig ending corresponds to the Modern English -y adjectival ending. So etymologically it's similar to something like the silly sounding 'wisemindy'--but 'wise thinking' is a common gloss.

In order to justify such a presumptuous title for the blog I had to remind myself that most readers wouldn't know what it meant. (But I must have known that some would ask.) And I figured it's a nice simple way to communicate my interest in OE and English language history.

I had been going with "In a Word" as my blog name for a while but that just doesn't pop out in a list of words or phrases. So I went for a single word that an interested person could easily hang on to. One friend thought wishydig was a made-up compound word for some sort of optimistic excavation: a wishy dig. And that's the way I expect most readers pronounce it (in the unlikely event that anyone ever mentions my blog out loud). It looks like it fits standard English spelling and pronunciation conventions with a nice simple dactyl.

Of course the OE pronunciation would not have had the "sh" sound. The 'i' would have been phonemically long in duration (somewhat like the vowel in 'bee') and the 'y' is a rounded high front vowel like the 'ü' in German 'flügelhorn'. And altho when I'm talking about the word I pronounce 'wis-hydig' according to OE rules, when I'm saying anything about my blog I do say "wishy-dig". I find a playful catchiness in the word. I like that it's easy to learn.

Unfortunately because most people have never seen the word before there's no real likelihood that they'll be searching for it and stumble across my blog. But I do like that once you seen the word it's easy enough to remember--leading to some recall and certainly recognition.

Epea Pteroenta is Greek for "winged words"; the phrase first appeared in Homer's Odyssey and now refers to words that were first used in a specific literary context and have "flown" into common usage. The blog is written (mostly) in English, thankfully.

Tenser, Said the Tensor--written by "a graduate student in linguistics" whose interests include "language, science fiction, computers and technology, comics, anime, and other geekery." The author provides an extended "word of explanation" that begins: "The title of this blog come from the novel The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, which won the first Hugo award for novel in 1953" ... and if that piques your interest, you'll certainly want to read the whole post.

Mr. Verb is both a blog name and the pseudonym of its primary author, who swore me to keep his identity a secret. I agreed. (Other contributors to the blog include Mrs. Verb and Stumblerette.) Mr. Verb emailed me this origin story:

A buddy of mine who blogged had been encouraging me to start a blog. He's not a linguist and I was always telling him (mostly off-the-beaten-path) stuff about languages and linguistics; he thought there was a niche for a blog that dealt with language the way we talked (and still talk) about it. I resisted, but posted comments a few times on blogs. Mostly anonymous, I think, and nothing big or interesting really, but enough to start thinking about what it would mean to write in the weirdly public way that is blogging. Lo and behold, the main blog I was commenting on was getting odd comments from somebody and the blogger decided to restrict comments to people with blogspot accounts. I was figuring I wouldn't comment anymore, but then there was some post I just had to comment on. I'd given some thought to actually starting a blog but finding a name just seemed impossible. But I started a blogspot account to comment and just decided to go for a silly name for the account. So, it was a brainstorming session in a sense, but hardly extensive. And for the record, verbs are pretty remote from the stuff I actually do for a living -- I know shockingly little about them in fact, in most respects.

The weird twist is, once I had the name (the account was pretty trivial of course), it seemed like it was just a matter of time before I actually created a blog. I don't know if the casual dorkiness of the typical Mr. V post is related as cause or effect to the name, but it feels pretty comfortable by now.

That's a long-winded answer to a simple question, but that's the story.

Polyglot Conspiracy is written by L.M. Squires, a (surprise!) linguistics grad student at the University of Michigan. She writes:

I have posted before about senses in which I think "Polyglot Conspiracy" is suited for a linguistics blog name, though this perhaps seemed intentionally cryptic and too open-ended.

The real story is owed to one of my best friends. Before I was about to start my MA in linguistics, I was talking one night with him about going to grad school for linguistics. He went through college with me and had seen my interest in linguistics develop. Somehow or another - maybe we were talking about grad school language requirements or something - our discussion turned to the typical linguist's complaint that the first thing anyone asks you when you tell them you're a linguist is "How many languages do you speak?" So I was saying how, for me, this question always managed to make me feel both a) annoyed/indignant, because it's a confusion of "linguist" as "polyglot," but also b) pretty guilty or underqualified, because I really speak only English and am, to be frank, not very dedicated to turning myself into a polyglot - other languages just aren't where my interests in language come from; language-learning has never come easily to me - but this makes me feel somehow uncommitted to the project of Language, about which I often feel remorseful and consequently I am envious of linguists (and non-linguists, like my friend) who ARE actually polyglots. Anyway, in response to my complaint about the "How many languages do you speak?" trend, my friend said, "Well ok, but I feel like you're getting a little too upset with the public about this. I mean, it's not like it's some vast polyglot conspiracy to make linguists who don't speak other languages feel bad." or something similar; that's a paraphrase. Anyway, the phrase "polyglot onspiracy" stuck out to me, and came back to me when I was thinking what to name the blog. After I thought a bit more about what these two words meant, and what they could mean together (an apt description of the trouble people seem to find with the linguistic state of the world, if you ask me), it just seemed right.

A Roguish Chrestomathy ("the pultaceous wisdom of a word weevil") is written by--you guessed it--a linguistics grad student (he goes by "q. pheevr" ). A sidebar offers these definitions from the OED:

Roguish – 1.a. Pertaining or appropriate to, characteristic of, rogues (or vagrants); disreputable. b. Vile, wretched. 2. Acting (or wandering) like rogues; knavish or rascally in conduct. 3. Playfully mischievous; arch, waggish. 4. Of plants: Inferior, degenerate.

Chrestomathy – A collection of choice passages from an author or authors, esp. one compiled to assist in the acquirement of a language.

Bradshaw of the Future, which specializes in etymology (with an emphasis on Proto-Indo-European), is written by "goofy," who emailed this explanation:

Bradshaw of the Future is a from Lewis Carroll's A Tangled Tale. It's the name of one of the characters who writes in with answers to Carroll's mathematical puzzles. As far as I know, it's a complete fiction and all the people writing in were created by Carroll himself. My blog wasn't about linguistics originally, and I just thought that "Bradshaw of the Future" was a really cool name.

"goofy" because I'm sometimes very goofy. But my online personality has turned out to be quite serious. :)

Many thanks to all the linguists out there for sharing your thoughts!

October Linkfest

Blogs I've been enjoying but haven't linked to previously. In alphabetical order:

Apophenia is Danah Boyd's blog about subjects that interest her, particularly in her academic field: youth culture and social media. A June 2007 post, "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace," and her subsequent response to critiques of that essay, stirred up a huge online controversy. For something a little lighter, check out "LOLCat Bible = Infinite Entertainment."

Ben and Alice--he's a computer programmer, she's a PhD candidate in English at Columbia--call themselves "two nerds" with "five opinions." Fortunately, all of those opinions are interesting and well articulated. I especially enjoyed Ben's posts on the pros and cons of circumcision and on "ten better names for NBA teams" (Phoenix Ashes? Hollywood Agents?).

Just when I was beginning to think no one besides me gets annoyed about Elizabeth hooking up (again!) with that dork Anthony in "For Better or For Worse," I discovered The Comics Curmudgeon. Not comix, not manga: comics. In the daily paper. With your cornflakes. My local daily no longer carries a lot of the oldies, so I go to CC to get my "Apartment 3G" and "Mary Worth" fix and to read sage commentary like this (about--in case you had any doubt--"Rex Morgan, M.D."). After you link, scroll down:

That final panel isn’t artsy visual narrative, or a metaphor for Rex’s dual nature, or anything like that. It’s actually offering us a look into Rex Morgan’s head, wherein lies … another, slightly smaller, Rex Morgan head. And what’s inside that Rex Morgan head? You’ve got it: yet another Rex Morgan head. It’s like those damn nesting Russian dolls, only with Rex Morgan heads.

I can't figure out who writes Descriptively Adequate--I'll go out on a limb and guess that it's a linguist--but I love the title and am wild for this analysis of the "whomever" scene in last week's episode of "The Office." (Update: Benjamin Zimmer, at Language Log, clues me in that Descriptively Adequate is written by Ed Cormany.)

Sometimes I just can't wait for the next issue of the New Yorker to read Hendrik Hertzberg. So I'm very glad he also writes a blog about all the stuff that ticks him off: Bush, the neocons, the Supreme Court, etc.

The Party of the First Part is Adam Freedman's spirited attack on legalese like "witnesseth" and "rest, residue, and remainder." Freedman also gives credit where it's due, as when a U.S. district judge rendered a decision written in the verse style of "Green Eggs and Ham."

Now that the New York Times has made all its content searchable and free, there's no reason not to read Paul Krugman every day, instead of just the two days a week he appears in the paper. He's on book tour right now, promoting Conscience of a Liberal (which is also the name of his blog), but he's still finding time to post at least a couple times a day. Good stuff on politics, economics, hell, and handbaskets.

Swiss Miss is the nom de blog of Tina Roth Eisenberg, a Swiss designer now living and working in New York, and her blog is a "visual archive of things that 'make me look.'" Like these window stickers in the shape of Boeings, Cessnas, and other aircraft; and this amazing bookshelf system.

Tenser, Said the Tensor is the blog of a nameless grad student in linguistics who's also into comics, sci-fi, "and other geekery." His (her?) language posts are quite wonderful, like this meditation on "toward" vs. "towards" and this post, "A Tale of Two Geddies," about how and why bass player Gary Lee Weinrib became Geddy Lee and the actor Gary Watanabe became Gedde Watanabe.