Nail-omics

This week has brought sightings of Ryanomics and Zombie Reaganomics. It also brought this:

 

Stylenomics, a new nail color from Essie, is “a wealthy, rich and opulent dark green.” It’s featured in a full-page ad in the mammoth September issue of Vogue.

I last wrote about Essie’s fanciful color names in May 2011. The current season’s palette includes Recessionista, No Place Like Chrome, and Don’t Sweater It.

I wrote about the very productive (and brandable) -omics suffix—Freakonomics, Geckonomics, Vespanomics, et al.—in April 2011. Since then, I’ve learned about someone even more obsessed with omics than I am: Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist who teaches at UC Davis. The omics suffix is “a language parasite,” Eisen told the Wall Street Journal last week. (A chart accompanying the article is titled “Increasingomics.”) In his blog, The Tree of Life, Eisen documents the “bad omics word of the day”; past honorees have included culturomics, museomics, circomics, and circadiomics. Eisen’s Twitter handle, by the way, is @phylogenomics.

UPDATE: Read Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column about the distinction between omics and nomics.

Comments

[Jonathan Eisen]

Good to find another person obsessed with the omics suffix. Though I note - I am only obsessed with those ones that are trying to connect to genomics in some way - and these usually are just ...omics although there is some confusion / diversity. I generally avoid terms that are related to economics (i.e., the nomics terms) and also try to avoid those terms that use "ome" to refer to a complex of molecules (e.g., ribosome). I am driven batty by the ones derived from genomics because they relate to another obsession of mine - the overselling of genomics.

And if you really want to know more .. see my recent paper on the topic here: http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/1/1/6

[Diana Landau]

My favorite Opi red used to be Hey Vin, Is My Car Ready? [punctuation sic]. This summer, I forget. I'd love to find a good discussion of women over 30 wearing green and blue nail colors; anyone seen one? Sorry to digress into frivolonmics, Nancy!