Most naming advice in the popular media makes me clutch my head in despair, but this Inc. article by Minda Zetlin is different. Zetlin interviewed experienced name developers Anthony Shore and David Placek—both of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with—and their real-world examples are smart and helpful. “Avoid names that describe your product” and “Don’t fall in love with one name” are the first tips, and yes, you’ve heard them from me, too. (h/t trademark lawyer Ed Timberlake)
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Steer clear of negative words in your business name? Not necessarily. Read about how Calamityware got its name. (And read my own post on negative names with positive impact.)
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I will probably go to my grave insisting on the distinction between lay and lie, so I got a satisfied chortle out of this table of cat tenses, from a Duolingo chat page. (Via Language Log)
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James I. Bowie writes for Fast Company about why Colonial Pipeline’s outdated branding should have been a warning sign: “This month’s cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline’s operations made many Americans aware of their dependence on a company they had never heard of. And not only was Colonial Pipeline’s obscurity at odds with its importance, but its branding, its public face, seemed strangely archaic, as if it had been encased in amber since the days of the Kennedy administration.”
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“SOS is a really versatile distress call. You can shout it; you can tap it out in Morse code; you can honk it on a horn; you can signal it with flashes of light; you can spell it out on the beach with debris from your wrecked ship.” What’s more, says The Allusionist host Helen Zaltzman, it’s that rare acronym with an actual nautical origin, unlike, say, “posh” and “shit.” If The Allusionist isn’t on your podcast playlist, it should be.
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From the Namerology blog, new boy names from Abaddon to Zeref and new girl names from Adalet to Zepplyn. These are names that grownups are actually inflicting on infants. (I wrote about “Abbadon” almost 10 years ago.)
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Via Kottke: the Pantone pee chart.
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Martin Vargic’s map of the internet circa 2021 sure is gorgeous. Available as a poster!
Map detail
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In my family of origin we called Kleenex “winkies”; the buttocks was a “tooky.” Intra-family lingo like this is called a familect. Kathryn Himes interviewed several of her friends as well as linguist Cynthia Gordon and Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty about familects like ours: “our home slang, if you will, where we can be our nonpublic selves in all their weird glory.”
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Famous and successful writers: They’re just like us! By which I mean: They too complain that “writing is a nightmarish hellscape,” as famous and successful writer Susan Orlean puts it.
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An extensive yet still somehow not exhaustive list of company-name etymologies. Bally, the games company, was shortened from “ballyhoo”; but Bally, the shoe company (not included in the list), is an eponym. (h/t Karen Wise)
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Speaking of etymology, have you ever eaten a singing wolf? Of course you have. Read all about it in this lovely etymology blog from Drew Mackie.
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The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which archives and makes available at no cost much of the public web, is a powerful research tool (and lots of fun, too). Here are some tips for using it in investigative journalism, by Mark Graham of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.
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Need even more language-y links? Check out Stan Carey’s latest Link Love roundup.
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