NASA has renamed a facility in West Virginia after Katherine Johnson, the mathematician whose story was told in the book and and subsequent film Hidden Figures. Johnson, who was born in West Virginia, will turn 101 in August.
Katherine Johnson. Source
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You can help name some newly discovered moons of Jupiter, but only you follow some restrictive rules. The name “must be 16 characters or fewer, preferably one word. It can’t be offensive, too commercial, or closely tied to any political, military or religious activities of the past 100 years.” And that’s just the beginning. (Hat tip: Chris Labarthe.)
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Laura Wattenberg, founder of the brilliant Baby Name Wizard family of resources, has launched a new website, Namerology. Check out the atlas of the most popular baby names around the world, and read a timely post about the alter-names of superheroes—Carol (Captain Marvel), Bruce (Batman), Barry (Flash)—all of them influenced by mid-20th-century naming trends.
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The orthography of vegan food is absolutely wild pic.twitter.com/edceNTdKfb
— Joshua Raclaw (@joshraclaw) March 8, 2019
I wrote about apostrophe’d synth-food names like chik’n and bac’n back in 2011.
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A short list of quirky job titles—customer success engineer, anyone?—by Hugo VK for Wordnik.
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Farro, maltipoo, cannabusiness, misgendering, and other words newly added to the online OED. Read about one of the additions, frequency illusion, in Ben Zimmer’s post for Language Log.
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“Misles,” writes Stan Carey, “are a subset of mispronunciations. They’re not like expresso for espresso, where the variant pronunciation corresponds to a different spelling that’s produced or assumed. Misles are more like an early stage in rebracketing, where affixes and compounds create ambiguous morphology: coworker, deicer, mishit, redrawing, sundried, titleist, unshed.” Or misled, the source of “misle.”
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All shrift is short, all dudgeon is high, all Guignol is grand, only idiots can be blithering, and other fused pairs that belong to a category called, for obvious reason, Stormy Petrels. (“A question mark next to an item indicates doubt as to its petrelosity.”) (Hat tip: Mike Pope.)
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The Catchword Branding blog gives high marks to BONVOY, the new name of Marriott’s loyalty program: “Bonvoy is what we in the biz call a suggestive coined word — it isn’t real, but it is clearly derived from real words — in this case, ‘bon voyage’ and to some extent ‘envoy’.” Armin Vit, of the design-critique blog Brand New, finds the name “unorthodox” but “interesting,” he’s perplexed about that underlined O (a design trend I’ve been noticing a lot lately—my guess is it’s arbitrary). My Twitter pals Amy and Braulio, on the other hand, have their reservations.
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Googlers, Amazonians, Tweeps: The folks at A Hundred Monkeys, a naming agency, have had it up to here with cutesy work-o-nyms.
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Molecule Water Cellular Health pic.twitter.com/WsQUpNS68O
— Howard Mittelmark (@HMittelmark) March 19, 2019
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Pyt, “which sort of sounds like ‘pid’,” was recently voted the most popular word in Denmark, reports PRI’s “The Conversation.” “Pyt is usually expressed as an interjection in reaction to a daily hassle, frustration or mistake. It most closely translates to the English sayings, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ ‘stuff happens’ or ‘oh, well’.” A Danish website sells a PYT button for 89 Danish krone (about US$13.61). Here’s a Google translation of the copy: “Fun little button that can help the family or office not to take things so heavily. If you have lost something, things do not go as planned, press the button and move on :)”
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Shameless self-promotional link: I wrote about tits and ass and A Chorus Line and Lenny Bruce for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing.
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