Last week wine distributor Lot18 and MGM – producer of the Hulu streaming series The Handmaid’s Tale – announced one of the more harebrained merchandising collabs of recent years: three wines named after the show’s most prominent characters, Offred, Ofglen, and Serena Joy. It went about as badly as you might expect, and within 24 hours the wines had disappeared from the Lot18 website.
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Before an airline was a company that provided air travel, it was an “air line,” a type of rail service. Jonathan Morse writes about the surprising history of the word. (Hat tip: Language Hat.)
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An interview with Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief and managing editor at Penguin Random House; his usage guide, Dreyer’s English, will be published in January 2019. “If you want to observe the evolution of language,” says Benjamin, “hang out on Twitter, the agora of the twenty-first century.” I recommend hanging out with Benjamin.
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Speaking of copy chiefs, John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun introduced me to a nifty recent coinage: thinnernym, a word substituted for another to save space in a newspaper headline – ire for anger, pact for treaty, aide for subordinate official. Thinnernym was popularized (or at least publicized) in 2014 by Guardian sub-editor (= copy editor) Andy Bodle, who provided a long list of examples.
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NPR wanted to celebrate Mexico’s Year of the Woman with a tweet. Unfortunately, an all-important tilde got omitted, and the network looked like an ass. (This problem comes up in crossword puzzles a lot, too.)
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We verb as good as we tagline. pic.twitter.com/PmqypjJ9Kw
— Rob Drummond (@RobDrummond) July 17, 2018
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Trigger-happy Americans are naming their babies after guns and gun components. According to the Baby Name Wizard blog, names like Pistol, Caliber, and Shooter – all documented in Social Security data – “were unknown a generation earlier. (Related: ammosexual.)
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Why are there so many X-and-Y brand names – Lark & Ro, Terra and Sky, Ava & Viv – these days? Catchword Branding offers 10 theories. Related: my Pinterest board of X + Y names (89 and counting).
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The always excellent journalism blog Heads Up dissects a headline and deck to show how they’re framed to appeal (or pander) to the Fox News audience.
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Brilliant. Someone has actually made a cryptocurrency called Exposure: https://t.co/CR5oFtPwZY
— neville park (@neville_park) July 7, 2018
(Paging @forexposure_txt)
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From Superlinguo, a comprehensive list of linguistics and language podcasts.
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For a decade or more, one typeface – Trajan – dominated posters for movies as dissimilar as The Joy Luck Club, The Pelican Brief, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A Vox video explainer tracks Trajan’s rise and fall.
I have a grandson named Gunner. He's 11.
Posted by: CGHill | July 21, 2018 at 07:40 PM