Hotels.com registered the longest URL in internet history “to prove it has more than hotels.” (Adweek)
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“One very recent scandal in immigration politics in Britain was, improbably, named after a ship that sank decades ago.” (Lingua Franca) .
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Kim Kardashian’s decision to name her new lingerie line “Kimono Intimates” has provoked charges of cultural appropriation. But all Jezebel – and I – could think of was a 30-year-old condom brand.
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“Air Force Once,” “state of the uniom,” and other typos – serious and ridiculous – made by the current White House. (BBC)
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“How Brands Are Built,” a new podcast from San Francisco brand strategist Rob Myerson, is a “practical and tactical” resource for brand-builders. The first guests are name developers Anthony Shore and Shannon DeJong.
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Lexicographers Kory Stamper and Steve Kleinedler – she wrote Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries; he wrote Is English Changing? – have launched “Fiat Lex,” a podcast about dictionaries and words. Episode 1: “Getting a Word into the Dictionary.”
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Laurel or yanny? In case you missed the ambiguity illusion of the year, the New York Times has a recap of the controversy, Wired has “the true history,” and Language Log – of course – has the scientific nitty-gritty.
What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I
— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) May 15, 2018
Meanwhile, Vocabulary.com, the source of the original recording, has added yanny to its lexicon. Be sure to click on the “play pronunciation” icon.
Whether you're team #Laurel or #Yanny we unearthed the original audio file to help you decide:
— Vocabulary.com (@VocabularyCom) May 16, 2018
https://t.co/gBlfuNYwYn
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I’ve written frequently about part-of-speech-scrambling ad slogans like “Extraordinary Commits Entirely.” (So has Ben Yagoda.) Now Christopher Beanland, writing for The Guardian, confirms our suspicions: “Baffling slogans have become the new norm in adland.” (Hat tip: Lane Greene.)
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Why everyone stopped asking Jeeves. (Mental Floss)
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Chinese nicknames for NBA players: a Twitter thread.
Steph Curry - 库昊 "fucks the sky"
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) May 7, 2018
This is an extremely elaborate pun. One of Curry's phonetic names is 库里 (ku li) and the second character is a combination of the characters 日 ("sun") and 土 ("ground"). But 日 is also slang for "fuck." 1/3
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Thomas Markle III, nephew of the soon-to-be Mrs. Henry Mountbatten-Windsor, is a cannabis grower in Grants Pass, Oregon. He’s developed a new strain he calls Markle Sparkle, which he says was his nickname in school; it will be introduced at the High Times Cannabis Cup NorCal, in Santa Rosa, in early June. (Oregon Live)
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If you are considering a name for a future child and are thinking "You know, I could replace one or maybe even two of those vowels with a y," then you should understand that you're going to hell.
— Quinn Cummings (@quinncy) May 14, 2018
(More on Y-for-an-I replacement here.)
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In nine languages studied by a pair of linguistics researchers. “the speech immediately preceding a noun is three-and-a-half-per-cent slower than the speech preceding a verb. And in eight of nine languages, the speaker was about twice as likely to introduce a pause before a noun than before a verb.” (New Yorker)
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SCANDINAVIA was originally called ‘Scadinavia’. The extra N was added in error by Pliny the Elder, and has remained in place ever since.
— Haggard Hawks (@HaggardHawks) April 5, 2018
➡️ https://t.co/Ll96AYaqXP pic.twitter.com/2olL5PzHI5
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HODL, bitshaming, the Flippening, and other bitcoin slang. (Business Insider)
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Swedish art director Daniel Carlmatz turns familiar words (like lucky) into visual puns. (My Modern Met)
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