Stuart Elliott, who used to be the New York Times’s advertising columnist, now writes about ads for Media Village. Here’s his take on the commercials that aired during Super Bowl 50. (“Though it's the biggest feel-good day of the year, Madison Avenue tried hard to bring viewers down – not only with those commercials, but also with spots with strange, off-putting and downright weird characters and premises.”
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Speaking of the Super Bowl: Twenty years ago, Seinfeld introduced “spongeworthy” to the lexicon of dating. Now the Red Lobster restaurant chain has coined “lobsterworthy,” a reference to a raunchy line in “Formation.” A family-friendly (yet still controversial) version of the song was performed by Beyoncé during the Super Bowl halftime show.
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Why brainstorming – at least what passes for “brainstorming” in most businesses – doesn’t work, and what to do instead. (Hat tip: The Name Inspector.)
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All over the United States, there are streets named No Name.
A No Name Road in Mississippi. (Via Atlas Obscura.)
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“Comfortable names are the least effective,” and other wisdom about naming from Dan Cohen, senior namer at branding agency Siegel + Gale.
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What would the person who named the walkie-talkie have named other products?
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How the misguided avoidance of a sentence-ending preposition led to a truly awful slogan for the new movie Deadpool.
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“Easy as a poet’s dream” and 14,999 other terrible similes.
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Ben Zimmer on the etymology of the British epithet wazzock …
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… and Ben Yagoda on wazzock, pillock, and trump (v., to fart). (More on wazzock in this post of mine from 2012.)
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“They are simple words, common words, but words whose origins are a mystery: he, she, girl, pimp, ever, gawk, yet. We use these words every day, but Liberman has been working for thirty years to unearth their roots.” A profile of Anatoly Liberman, who at 79 is working on “one of the greatest achievements in the annals of lexicography: a history, as complete as possible, of some the last words in the English language whose origins remain unknown.
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Why do we “endorse” candidates?
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Donks, rat-holing, bird droppings, and other secret jargon of casinos.
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The whimsical and historical world of knitting terms.
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The marketing language of organic food.
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The New York Times crossword puzzle “uses one-third fewer non-English clues and answers than it did at its peak in 1966, and makes two-thirds fewer international references than its peak in 1943.”
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The movement to kill the phrase sharing economy. (More on “sharing” from me in the Visual Thesaurus.)
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