Balloting has begun in the Name of the Year contest, now in its 29th year of providing merriment at others’ expense. The ground rules, in case you’ve forgotten: all names are real, many are from the world of sports, all comments are welcome, reporting of results may take a while. In the first round, I’m quite smitten with Courvoisier Winetavius Richardson, “armed robbery suspect.”
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From A Walk in the Words, links to four very interesting articles about language and sports, including a 2006 American Speech paper about Homeric and hypocoristic nicknames in professional baseball and hockey. Seriously. You’ll love it.
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People “get very worked up about” the naming of neighborhoods, observes University of Chicago sociologist Gordon Douglas. The Atlantic surveys the neighborhood namescapes of several cities, including Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. (Via Dustbury.) Related: check out this wonderfully detailed neighborhood map of my own city, Oakland. Be sure to embiggen it for the full effect. (Via Our Oakland.)
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Eavesdrop as some New York City building developers brainstorm names for their new properties. Some of the coinages, writes the New York Times’s Joanne Kaufman, “are as whimsical as those of movie stars’ children.”
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Why wait and worry about whether your thesis will be published? Submit it to The Journal of Universal Rejection and know for sure!
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Your own surname is usually a safe choice for your company or product name, but not when, for example, your name is Mustee and you make shower stalls. Susan Perera talks eponyms and perceptions on the trademark-and-marketing blog Duets Blog.
They’re not real pros, just “pros.”
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How potato-chip brands use language to position their products: a scholarly yet appetizing essay by linguist Dan Jurafsky in his blog, The Language of Food.
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Wrong pronoun choice, lack of the subjunctive, lay/lie errors: Erin McKean bravely reveals the horror of ungrammatical song lyrics.
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Speaking of errors, did you screw up and write “sneak peak” instead of “sneak peek” in a tweet? There’s a bot for that, the excellently named Stealth Mountain. (Yes, a sneaky peak.) Misspell the phrase and Stealth Mountain will tweet back a mild-mannered correction: “I think you mean sneak peek.” Check out the favorites page, which reveals that people do not always appreciate being led onto the path of knowledge. Shocking, I know. (Via Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic.)
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A staggeringly comprehensive lexicon of slang terms and acronyms used by doctors and veterinarians. Or: why a HOPEFUL does not inspire hope. (Via Language Hat.)
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At last, the beauty product we’ve all been waiting for: Fotoshop by Adobé (a-doe-BAY). With pro-pixel intensifying hydro-jargon microbead extract!
By Jesse Rosten.
I'm surprising that McKean doesn't acknowledge that "ungrammatical" song lyrics reflect common usage, i.e., vernacular speech, even while acknowledging that "the right kind of wrong" is ok with more obviously ethnic speech. This is especially true for lie/lay "confusion" and the use of "was" to mark the conditional.
All this the more surprising given McKean's background in that most democratic of linguistic vocations, namely lexicography, where you are obliged to listen to how people _actually_ talk.
Posted by: mike | January 18, 2012 at 10:40 PM