It's been cold and gray for weeks in the Bay Area: bad for Seasonal Affective Disorder, good for hunching over a warm computer and foraging for links. Such as these:
Remember those adverbial puns known as Tom Swifties? ("I'm losing my hair," Tom bawled.) They're (almost) all here, helpfully organized in alphabetical order.
Edmunds Daily picks the top 10 categories of stupid car names, including the oxymoronic Dodge Sprinter and the sounds-like-you're-from Boston Ford Kuga and Ford Ka. (Not on the list: my favorite Bad Car Name.)
Fork in the Road, a Village Voice food blog, lists words "that are so overused in food writing, they make our skin crawl."
Golden Gaytime ice cream bars? Yes, and 11 other Unfortunate Product Names, including Vergina beer, which I wrote about here. (Hat tip: Cooking with Amy on Twitter.) For a daily delivery of bad nomenclature, check out the Unfortunate Names Blog.
A Walk in the WoRds presents a short glossary of Simpsons neologisms, including "craptacular," "pointy kitty" (a rat), and my favorite, "knowitallism."
"It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news." Read about what happened. (Via Snarkmarket.)
I'm fascinated by this glossary of jewelry terms from Ideal Brilliance, a jewelry retailer. A torsade is "any strand of jewelry that can be worn twisted"; a YAG is an yttrium aluminum garnet, a synthetic substitute for a diamond.
One more: Just about everyone has blogged about it already, but in case you missed it, Pride and Twitterverse is a marvelous send-up of both Jane Austen and social media. Best if you've dabbled in Twitter yourself; certainly enhanced by familiarity with Austen's fiction.
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Photo swiped from CHUD, where it accompanies an interesting post about a Tom Swift movie that's in the works. Incredibly, it's the first Tom Swift movie in the character's history, which goes back to 1910, when the first Tom Swift novel was published.
Ooh! I know YAG from my medical editing. The Nd:YAG laser sends light beams through neodymium:YAG crystals or something. Sounds like a Yon Yonson slur, though. "Don't be such a yag, Ole."
Posted by: Amy Reynaldo | June 17, 2009 at 04:42 PM