It’s been a year since the SciFi channel renamed itself Syfy. Amazingly, the universe did not implode. The Catchword blog, which initially thought the name change was “a disastrous move,” reviews, recants, and draws some thoughtful conclusions.
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Are you quick to condemn orientate, loginned, or impactful as “not words”? Not so fast, writes Stan Carey in “Not a Word Is Not an Argument”:
If you see or hear someone reject a word by saying it’s “not a word”, you can reasonably assume that they mean it’s not a word they like, not a word they would use, not a word in standard usage, not a word in a certain dictionary, not a suitable word for the context, and so on. There’s a difference, and it matters.
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Brainstorming isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, says the Killian Branding blog. “What’s genuinely valuable here, pure gold, is the rare, skilled, strategic editor with the vision to flush 199 ‘ideas’ down the toilet, and find the one worth pursuing.”
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Whatever happened to the kids of Spellbound, the Oscar-nominated documentary that followed eight finalists in the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee? Schnaufblog reports on their post-Bee lives. One of the contestants, Angela Arenivar, writes a blog, Okay, So It’s Heleoplankton. Bee Happy. Heleoplankton was the word she missed at the Bee.
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Medical linguist Janet Byron Anderson, whom I follow on Twitter, tracks language change that affects medical English usage. She compiles her “medling” tweets on her website, where you’ll learn the difference between noxious and toxic and between dose and dosage, among other useful information.
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Copycat alert! The Name Inspector examines a prolific tangle of “vine” names, including CrowdVine, Loudvine, RiotVine, and Widevine .
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Thanks to A Walk in the WoRds, I now know about an excellent new means of wasting time sharpening my mental faculties: the language games at Sporcle. New games are posted almost daily; a relatively tough quiz, “Word Patterns,” allows 12 minutes for completion.
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