Don’t read “How to Name a Baby” to learn how to name a baby. Read it for insights into historical baby-naming trends and to confirm your hunches (e.g., “the popular girl name Reagan is for Republicans”). Also: charts!
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Given names are “one of the last social acceptable frontiers of class war.”Also: nominative determination, implicit egotism, and how the Internet has made baby naming more difficult. Part 1 of a four-part podcast series about names from Australian radio network ABC. The presenter, Tiger Webb, has an interesting name story himself. (Hat tip: Superlinguo.)
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The not-so-secret jargon of doctors is full of acronyms: a flea—fucking little esoteric asshole—is an intern, an FLK is a “funny-looking kid,” and an “SFU 50 dose” is the amount of sedative it takes for 50 percent of patients to shut the fuck up.
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Ever wonder what value-creating winners do all day? Here’s Business Town to enlighten you. It’s “an ongoing project attempting to explain our highly intangible, deeply disruptive, data-driven, venture-backed, gluten-free economic meritocracy to the uninitiated. With apologies to Richard Scarry.”
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Stop your whinging, Brits: a lot of those so-called Americanisms you profess to detest—like “gotten” and “fall”—were originally English.
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The spectacular neon art of the Walker Collection of American Signs, a swath of advertising history auctioned earlier this month in Proctor, Arkansas.
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Attention, domain shoppers and everyone who believes the best defense is an offensive offense: the .sucks domain went on sale in early April. There was an immediate buying frenzy; consumer advocate Ralph Nader promoted it in a commercial as “a protest word.” Now ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has asked U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies to determine whether the the domain’s high price—$2,499 during the “sunrise” period—is illegal. (For more about the unusual relationship between Vox Populi—which secured the rights to sell the .sucks domain—and ICANN, see John R. Levine’s blog.)
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“The decision is made. The name won’t be changed.” – Tim Mahoney, head of marketing for Chevy, speaking to the Detroit Free Press about the Bolt electric vehicle, whose name is strikingly similar to that of the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. In fact, a Spanish speaker would pronounce the two names identically. (Hat tip: Jonathon Owen.)
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I’ve been saying this for ages, but now I can quote the Harvard Business Review: Group brainstorming is a waste of time.
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“A brand of snack bars is made ‘in small batches at our own makery’. Makery? I am guessing that ‘makery’ is a portmanteau for ‘made-up bakery’.” Steven Poole on why the language of food packaging makes him sick. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy.)
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Remember wack slacks, lamestain, and swingin’ on the flippity-flop? Of course you don’t. Why grungespeak was the greatest language hoax of the 1990s.
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Chart: How to say “It’s all Greek to me” in 30 languages. (For Greeks, it’s all Chinese.)
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Negative polarity item, critique drift, and other terms—many of them linguistic—that have caught the eye of tech writer/editor Mike Pope.
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Lindström, Minnesota, is getting its umlaut back.
English is the language where diacritics go to die. Except in Minnesota. #missionumlaut. h/t @SPNoir @JKealing pic.twitter.com/8q80R4n6nR
— Patrick Cox (@patricox) April 15, 2015
And don’t forget all those gratuitously umlautted brand names!
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