Fritinancy

May Linkfest

Ready for an antidote to Bad Brand Names Week? This month's Linkfest stays on the sunny side of the street.

Wolfram Alpha may be the new kid on the search-engine block, but don't count Google out just yet. A nifty new search option, Wonder Wheel, presents results as a constellation (or mind map); each term in the constellation is clickable, yielding a new constellation. Check out the Wonder Wheel for "wisdom." (Via Joho the Blog.)

Bay Area journalist and blogger Tracey Taylor (of Home Girl and On the Block) forwarded two articles about names, brands, and trademarks. The first is Phil Patton's eulogy for animal-themed car names (Mustang and Impala are the last remnants of the herd). It's full of lore: Did you know that the Ford Taurus was named for the astrological sign of a Ford executive's wife? Or that before World War II, the Jaguar was known as the Swallow Sidecar?

The second article, "Naming a Company: Many Difficulties in Selecting a Name That Can Be Used in the Various States" (PDF), is nearly century-old proof that name development has long been a challenge. Published in 1912, it takes fastidious pains to explain to readers what must have once been a novel predicament. "When the number of States is considered," the reporter cautions, "it is at once apparent that much searching of records is necessary before a name can be adopted. It would have been unfortunate, for instance, if the organizers of the Tobacco Products Corporation had incorporated under that name without preliminary investigation, and had found that there were corporations of the same name in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Massachusetts..." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I was delighted to discover (via Twitter) the Unshelved blog, which features the only daily comic strip set in a public library. That's good news right there; even better, the May 17 strip is about my pal Charlie Haas's wonderful new novel, The Enthusiast.

Tributes to and indictments of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style have abounded in this, the book's 50th-anniversary year. Geoffrey Nunberg wrote two of the best pieces: a defense of the passive voice (originally read on NPR's "Fresh Air") and, in Language Log, a virtuoso verse (in perfectly scanning heroic couplets!) that summons the shade of Alexander Pope.

I'm glad to see someone else shares my fascination with brand names beginning with "Mister." Here's Nama Sutra with a new-to-me crop that includes Mister Tapioca, Mr. Zipper, and the gender-bending Mister Lady.

Copyeditor extraordinaire John McIntyre recommends 10 blogs to improve your mastery of language and editing, including a few that were new to me. And Mighty Red Pen suggests 10 blogs word nerds will love, including (ahem) the one you're reading now.

Finally, just for the heck of it: How many folksingers does it take to change a light bulb? (Hat tip: Walter Olson.)

Fashion Week, One Tweet at a Time

Just hours after I published my complaint about the New York Times's  Fashion Week coverage, I discovered the perfect corrective to all that divorced-from-reality blather: Renata Espinosa.

Ms. Espinosa is the fashion correspondent for The Daily Beast; earlier today she posted "The Fashion Twitterati," about covering Fashion Week on Twitter. (You can follow her yourself, here.) Because she's writing for a publication that doesn't (yet) see much need to suck up to designers and retailers, she can write what she pleases. Better still, she writes really well.

Here's what she says about tweeting the shows:

Besides vicarious pleasures, another bonus to following fashion week experts on Twitter is that it doesn’t get bogged down on interpretation (we can always psychoanalyze later—that’s what reviews and trend reports are for, right?). Instead, Twitter works as is an ongoing narration as though fashion reporters are truckers on the highway staying connected via CB radio or hobos leaving warnings through cryptic roadside graffiti. “All news that’s fit to print,” is reduced to an insta-headline or a visceral first impression. When you’re dealing with fashion, and not the finer details of an economic stimulus package bill, a snap judgment is all you really need. Fashion blogging feels downright logorrheic in comparison, and of course, a newspaper is too slow. The new fashion journalism is a Zagat’s guide to style courtesy of Twitter.

And here's an example of the difference between Ms. Espinosa and the mainstream fashion media:

At Donna Karan, I broadcasted to my followers the news that “Spanx will be doing brisk business if women with booty want to wear Donna Karan's draped jersey skirts or dresses. Which is, uh, most women” while The Moment, the New York Times T Magazine’s blog, relayed this description: “Draped cashmere with a strong, emphasized shoulder—wearable Donna Karan!”

(The trouble with writing a non-fashion blog is that I can't assume you know about things like Spanx. Oh, all right then.)

I only just discovered her, but Ms. Espinosa has been hiding in plain sight. She's the New York editor of Fashion Wire Daily, and she's the co-founder of a fashion and art blog with a name so breathtakingly good I want to send her roses: The NuNu.

Go read it all.

Hat tip: Rowland Hobbs, via a Twitter link.

Making Some Changes

A couple of bloggish announcements:

1. I'm decreasing the frequency of my posts, effective immediately. I will continue to post the Word of the Week and will publish occasional posts (twice a week? once a week? can't say for sure) on naming and branding topics. I hope you'll continue to check in and contribute to the conversation. And speaking of conversation...

2. I've reluctantly reinstituted comment moderation. If you have something interesting to say about naming, branding, or writing, your comment will be published. If you have questions about spelling or usage, please look them up (GrammarGirl is a good resource; so are the many online dictionaries) or send me an e-mail. If you have a political axe to grind, please go elsewhere.

P.S. You can still follow me on Twitter, where I'm as chatty as ever.

Electile Dysfunction

Is there a 12-step program for campaignoholics? If there is, don't tell me about it. I'm having too much fun with stuff like this:

Schnaufblog parses the Bristol Palin pregnancy announcement, in particular this sentence: "We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us."

The relative clause after children contains a coordination structure. What causes the ungrammaticality (at least I think the sentence is ungrammatical, not just odd) is that who is an object pronoun in the first part of the sentence, i.e. one could also say whom ("...five wonderful children whom we love"), and a subject pronoun in the second part of the sentence, i.e. one could not say "...and whom mean everything to us".

Conjugate Visits points out that although Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, works in "blue-collar" fields, he ain't "working class":

He's an oil production manager and a commercial fisherman. But class-wise, his income helps put the family well outside the group that's often called "working class" and that struggles to get by in today's economy.

Over at Slate, Paul Collins examines why John McCain can't stop saying "my friends":

Is this a doctrine of pre-emptive friendship—immediately declaring crowds won over with an oratorical "mission accomplished"? Perhaps, but McCain's friending is a strategy that hearkens back to classical rhetoric.

Or maybe just to mid-20th-century musical theater.

OMG, Sarah Palin has a blog! Well, "Sarah Palin" does. And she has so much to share:

I just have to say that I love the comments! :)  Outside of my rock (hi- todd!) there is no one else offering me this kind of support as I set out on this journey to become the second most powerful person in the world.  Keep it coming, it is great!  In alot of ways, I feel like Tom Joad in that movie East of Eden.  I am out there for you.  When there is stuff that is bad, I will be there to help. 

Something tells me she isn't talking about this comment from someone named Hillary: "Get over yourself, chiquita, and don't give up your day job." (Via Very Short List.)

There's a link from "Sarah"'s blog to "Bristol and Levi's wedding registry" at JCPenney.com. I totally have dibs on that awesome Bowler Camo Diaper Bag.

Previously on the Palin Channel.

August Linkfest

Some blogs I've been enjoying lately (and haven't mentioned previously):

I discovered Lexiophiles when, to my flattered surprise, it included Fritinancy among its "Top 100 Language Blogs." (I'm at #26. I'm in some very impressive company, but I seem to be the only "language" blogger who focuses on branding, naming, and other commercial applications of words.) Lists like this one often are shameless link bait, but the Lexiophiles blog is of real value to anyone with an interest in language. Each post appears in English plus one other language, and as far as I can tell the translations are done by actual humans. (Not that there aren't errors...) Here, for example, is a post on Spanish tongue-twisters (trabalenguas) in English and in Spanish. 

Bill Brohaugh has dropped by and left comments here, which is how I know about his excellent blog, Everything You Know About English Is Wrong (which is also the title of one of his books). He's funny, he's smart, and he asks the right questions. For example, we don't conversate, so why do we deliberate?

Conjugate Visits is June Casagrande's blog on "you know, like grammar and stuff." June has a refreshingly light style and a disdain for grammar snobs, although she admits to a meanie streak.

Brian White, a copyeditor at the Louisville Courier-Journal, writes Talk Wordy to Me, in which he muses on words and language. Such as: what does it mean when a newspaper movie review provides a ratings warning for "brief language"? (Words of four letters?)

And some end-of-summer diversions:

Nothing to do with language at all, but I just can't stop telling people about WalkScore. Enter your address and ZIP code (U.S. only; sorry) and find out how walkable your neighborhood is on a scale from 0 to 100. Mine is 80--"very walkable"--although a neighbor just three blocks away scored 97, "walker's paradise," which seems more accurate. Most days I do fine without a car. Even more interesting, the Los Angeles neighborhood I grew up in (Miracle Mile) scores an 85! Yep, Los Angeles. And WalkScore apparently doesn't even know about my old elementary school, a block and a half from our house; it doesn't show up in the results. Back in the day, my brothers and I walked or biked everywhere (or took the bus), partly because our mother didn't drive. That's right: in Los Angeles.

By now, just about everybody has blogged about Wordle, but see if that stops me from chiming in. Wordle creates beautiful tag clouds out of your blog post, web page, or other text. I'd show you an example, as Beancounters did, but whew--too much work to save and reproduce. Just go over there and play with it.

Why does German sound--well ... funny to English speakers? Toronto grad student (possibly a professor by now) Daniel Bader explains in this post from 2005. Synopsis: it's because English "developed something rather unique in a language, two virtually completely distinct registers," with neologisms being coined from ancient Greek and Latin and everyday vocabulary coming from Anglo-Saxon and French. Not so in German, where neologisms are cobbled together from German. Which sounds funny.

And speaking of, or in, German, if schadenfreude's your game, you'll love Typos in Print, which ferrets out misspellings, usage errors, and proofreading slips in popular fiction, nonfiction, and even--gasp!--Strunk and White. You can play along at home, according to blog author Tim Stewart:

Go to amazon.com, select the "Books" section , enter a commonly misspelled word (such as embarassed, occurence, or even inteligence) as your search query, and then hit "Go." Then sort the results by "Bestselling" and chuckle at the book titles and snippets that come up. People, those are real, live published typos. Copyeditors of the world, untie!

Profile THIS

I hate filling out those chirpy "My Interests" profiles for social-networking sites. What am I, Playmate of the Month? Usually I just ignore them. Would that I had the wit of The Assimilated Negro, who subverts the whole exercise and turns it into a poem of protest.

I admire that blog title, too. The author ("a moneylancing writer," according to his more straightforward profile) frequently refers to himself by its initials, TAN, which works perfectly. In fact, it's one of very few acronyms this anti-acronymista feels good about endorsing.

And the blog itself? Very nice indeed. Good stuff on "the negro hipster," Claire Huxtable, the mysterious whitening of Beyonce Knowles, and the music of Nas and Common. And do not miss An Open Letter from a Black Guy to His Average-Sized Penis. I started to quote from it here, but then I couldn't figure out when to stop quoting. Or laughing. Just go over there and read it yourself. (Okey-dokey pokey! Had to get that in.)

Discovered in Orange Tangerine's blogroll.

Food, Dubious Food

Does the fabulous LP Cover Lover blog have anything to do with names, brands, and writing? I honestly don't care. Maybe "quirks of the English language" can apply to  this: 

Yes, this is a record album. About food. Lots of food, apparently! And please note that "gay" was once (mid-1970s?) a family-friendly adjective that meant "festive" or "happy." There's your language quirk right there.

Does Marie narrate the recipes? I have no idea. Nor do I know much about her; she seems to be (have been?) a British cookbook writer who cornered the market on the whole gay culinary agenda.

In the absence of more Merrington info, allow me to point you to something in a similar vein: The Gallery of Regrettable Food, by James Lileks. (Yes, a book! A plausible blog connection after all.) According to the jacket copy, Lileks, a columnist for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, "has made it his life's work to unearth the worst recipes and food photography" from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s "and assemble them with hilarious, acerbic commentary." Believe me, the photos are Kodachrome-awful, the artifacts are boggling (there was once an actual cookbook titled "So You're Going to Serve a ... Salad"), and Lileks's writing had me choking with laughter:

So you're going to serve a salad! So you're going to try the most basic element of the dinnertime table! So you're a newlywed who hasn't a clue! So you're actually consulting a pamphlet to learn how to make a goddamn salad! So you're still wondering if married life is supposed to be like this, what with the endless boredom during the day, the bleak expanse of a Levittown yard out the kitchen window, the bitter wives down the street who meet for coffee in the morning but don't invite you over! So your husband already seems tired and distracted when he comes home late! So you think a salad is just the trick! So you're right where we want you! So you'll do what we say and buy what we sell!

So let's get started!

Lileks has a jolly website, too--The Institute of Official Cheer, "humiliating the defenseless past since 1996." And he's published a sequel to Regrettable Food: Gastroanomalies: Questionable Culinary Creations from the Golden Age of American Cookery.

Lots more amazing album covers at LP Cover Lover. Go there.

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.)