Bloggiversary 2

I wrote my first post for this blog on June 8, 2006, which means I'm approaching my cotton anniversary (although I'll accept cashmere as a substitute). Here are some highlights of the last year, organized by category for your browsing convenience.

Names and Brands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing

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

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

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

Slang, Idioms, and Oddities of Speech

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

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

Read last year's Bloggiversary post.

Comments

[Nick Tata]

Happy Bloggiversary !!
I discovered your blog a short three months ago but feel that my day is not complete unless I take a peek. I feel robbed if I don't have the time to check out all the juicy links. And glory of glories a few hours later I may get enough ideas together to post a comment. I keep the online dictionary window open now and my apostrophes are starting to march into place . It's your bloggiversary , but I'm getting the present! Thank you so much, Nancy, and I hope you are having a great party filled with word art!

[Jon Carroll]

Happy cotton! Your blog is a joy!

[julia7]

Two candles on the cake! Thanks for this wonderful work.

[evvance]

Happy Bloggiversary!! I can't imagine life without *your* way with words. Congratulations!

[mike]

Congratulations! Two years of non-stop goodness--may there be many more!