The last linkfest of 2017! Let’s exorcise this miserable year with some amusing and edumacational links. And have yourselves a merry little Festivus.
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Drew Magary is back with the 2017 edition of his Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma catalog: “More than any reindeer parable or silly children’s rhyme, it is THIS catalog and its splendidly useless items wherein you and I can discover the TRUE meaning of Christmas, which is that it delays the pain and horrors of this shit world at least until after New Year’s.”
“You listen to me, Williams-Sonoma: There will NEVER be a fondueassaince. Ever.”
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Everything wrong with marketing-speak in one chart, by Ryan Wallman (aka Dr. Draper; follow him on Twitter for more like this.) Via Joe Lazauskas.
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Language writer Robert Macfarlane’s new book, The Lost Words, “retrieves 20 of the words sliced out of the Oxford Junior English Dictionary — many of which are also endangered species — and bestows upon them a kind of mythic treatment,” writes reviewer Meara Sharma.
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“Untranslatable” words aren’t really untranslatable; they just “lack one-for-one equivalents.” Lapham’s Quarterly gathers 22 of these complicated words – from Russian, Lakota, Quechua, Bantu, and 18 other languages – that “reveal something difficult to articulate in any language: what’s on one’s mind.”
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I can finally forget a rule I was forced to learn as a copyeditor: Walmart has dropped the hyphen in its formal legal name.
As if you weren't feeling unwell enough, having reached a state of screaming + vomiting, the #portmantNO 'scromiting' would certainly get you there. https://t.co/uuEwoB0QHc via @beardheat
— The Allusionist (@AllusionistShow) December 7, 2017
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Linguist Lynne Murphy, aka Lynneguist, has made her annual selections of UK-to-US and US-to-UK words of the year. Read her reasons for picking (respectively) shitgibbon and (television) season. And for more on shitgibbon, see this post by Ben Yagoda and this one by Ben Zimmer.
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“The Trump Administration has banned the 2017 Word of the Year,” writes Dennis Baron, aka Dr. Grammar.
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Boy, bad, big, curse, and other etymological mysteries, by Arika Okrent for Mental Floss.
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The surprising etymology of job, by Anatoly Liberman for OUPblog.
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Also on OUPblog: John Kelly reveals the secret histories of secret Santa, gift, white elephant, and other seasonal words.
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A small jewelry store in Orleans, Massachusetts, is in a trademark tussle with the U.S. Navy over a shared tagline, “Forged by the Sea.”
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“For brand names in 2017, the single-English-word-used-in-a-suggestive-but-unexpected-way trend continued robustly, particularly in B2C tech,” writes Erin Milnes on the Catchword blog. See the list of Catchword’s favorite company and product names of the year.
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TMI Taglines presents: pic.twitter.com/M6QiP1HIjJ
— Slededitor (@Mededitor) December 6, 2017
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“Barring trademarks that include immoral or scandalous language is an unconstitutional restriction of free speech, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Friday [December 15]” – Hollywood Reporter. (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)
FUCT clothing: no longer legally fucked.
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Today in #Naming
— Trademarks Are Magic (@TimberlakeLaw) December 21, 2017
(Featuring both a trendy term
and a gratuitous umlaut,
as a trademark for lamps)https://t.co/hsbZ6x5NGU#trademarks attn: @Fritinancy pic.twitter.com/fdspKXnvMh
(“I see an elephant,” replied fellow trademark lawyer Matthew Hintz. More gratuitous umlauts here.)
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And finally: A year-end roundup of sweary gifts, by yours truly for Strong Language.
Under non-sweary gifts, how about this new censorial software for writers and editors:
GET THE "FUCK" OUTTA HERE!
Posted by: Dan Freiberg | December 24, 2017 at 12:18 PM