October Linkfest

I haven’t written about Kindle Fire, the name of Amazon’s new tablet device (although I have written about how the Kindle got its name). But that’s mostly because a couple of my colleagues covered the territory so well on their own blogs. The Name Inspector called the Kindle Fire name “redundant” and “metaphorically incoherent.” But Catchword gave the name an A and said it was “short, catchy, evocative, and stands out in the marketplace.” Me? I agree with the Name Inspector’s logic, but I don’t think customers will approach the name logically. Kindle Fire is a good-enough name. 

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Not many national retailers dare to name their wares as esoterically as Anthropologie does. If you’ve wondered where names like Varvara Maxi Dress and Hypsometric Tint Cardi (from the current season) come from, the style blog In Pursuit of Pretty Things is here to help with a helpful Anthropologie primer. (I took a stab at decoding Anthropologie product names myself in a 2009 post.)

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Need more Anthro? A new blog, Anthroparodie, does a nice job of spoofing the genre. I liked the Bucolic Spider Crusher: “Constructed of pure, river-washed stone from an Appalachian rivulet, this invention—ancient, yet ever-effective in its simplicity—allows you to leisurely macerate arachnids and insects of all varieties into a silky pulp.”

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How did we go from the disparaging X of Brand X to the “entertainment-focused, tech-forward” X of X Games and X Prize? Lexicon Branding’s director of linguistics, Will Leben, analyzes the evolution of X in brand naming and makes a few predictions.

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At first blush, the story sounds like David v. Goliath: Suburban mom starts a skin-care brand for girls, names it for her daughter (awwww), and gets sued for trademark infringement (oh noooo) by big, similarly named cosmetics company. But there’s more to Willa v. Wella than meets the sentimental eye. Trademark lawyer Lara Pearson sorts out the issues on her Brand Geek blog: “It’s nice to want to name your product line after your daughter, but that doesn’t mean you can. If my kid were named Nikey, do you really think I could name my clothing store that too?” (UPDATE, Oct. 14: Willa company founder Christy Prunier settled the trademark dispute with Procter & Gamble, which owns Wella, and won the right to use the Willa name. According to an earlier article, Prunier’s legal fees amounted to an estimated $750,000—substantially more than the average small business could have afforded.)

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Laurel Black thought she’d come up with a really clever name for her design business: Anaglyph. I think you can tell where this story is headed; read the sadder-but-wiser conclusion on Laurel’s blog.

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The new operating system for the Windows Phone boasts that it’s “a smarter way to app.” On his Evolving English II blog, Mike Pope notes that this verbification may represent a first for the very versatile app,which was voted 2010 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

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Are you ready for alphalux, blingamalism, freesumerism, and menaissance? They’re all real coinages found on a UK style sheet that covers future trends. There are many more, and I had to look every damn one up. See the whole list on Rantings of a Sub-Editor.

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A new book, The Wage Slave's Glossary, is a compilation of words we use to describe work in 21st-century America: from Blackberry prayer to Xerox subsidy, giganomics to microboredom. Here’s a sampling in The Atlantic. (Hat tip: aem76us.)

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NASA’s two robotic spacecraft, code-named GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B (for Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory), need real names “that capture the spirit and excitement of lunar exploration.” So the agency is holding a contest, open to U.S. students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Names must be accompanied by a short essay explaining your choices. Deadline: November 11. The winner(s) and their teacher(s) will be invited to participate in a teleconference with GRAIL mission team members. (Via A Hundred Monkeys.)

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Robert Lane Greene, author of You Are What You Speak and contributor to The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, dispels 10 myths about language, including “You can’t end a sentence with a preposition” and “English has spread because it is flexible and open to new words.” I wrote about Greene and You Are What You Speak in an April 2011 post.

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Here’s a sweet idea: Turn your first name into a candy brand, courtesy of the NameCandy candy-name generator. I’m Nanchoco-Rocks (“hunks-o-chocolate with real Nancy!”). And you?

Comments

[Rolig]

It's nice of Nasa to hold a contest for schoolchildren, but I think they have a winner already: Grail seems like a great name for a spacecraft on a quest.

[Scott Schulz]

Link to 10 myths about language is missing (duplicates prior link to NASA contest).

[Nancy Friedman]

Scott: Thanks--fixed now!

[Jonathon]

I'm not seeing how Kindle Fire is redundant. What do you kindle if not a fire? According to Mark Davies' COHA, "fire" is by far the most common object that follows "kindle": http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/?c=coha&q=12341198

[Q. Pheevr]

TeeniQpheenies: Itty Bitty Fruity Qpheevrs!

http://184.73.159.247:8080/CandyServices/images/Qphe1318621735566.gif