Fritinancy

June linkfest

“Place names and the stories behind them define how we perceive and connect to landscape. But we live in a world populated by places named for colonizers: Libraries, streets and counties across the country bear names like Washington, Jefferson and Jackson, while ‘San’s and ‘Santa’s dot the Southwest, shadowing California’s coast in missionaries’ cloaks. Can we even see the land underneath those names, in all its complexities? And what is the impact on the mind — especially the Indigenous mind — of a lifetime spent repeating colonizers’ names, invoking their stories?” (Brian Oaster for High Country News)

Trilingual sign in southern Colorado. Photo by Orin Hargraves. See my October 2021 Visual Thesaurus column (no paywall!) for more discussion of place names.

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February Linkfest

Rebranding Cupid, just in time for Valentine’s Day. 

 

By Massive Media. See also my February 2010 post about another Valentine’s Day rebrand, this one by Under Consideration for Studio 360.

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An order of roastbeef with a side of stalefish? Yes, we’re talking snowboarding lingo. The Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Bachman interviews snowboarders; Ben Zimmer, at Slate, analyzes “I’ll just huck it,” which caused an “overanxious” BBC presenter to “freak out.”

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Leave it to the inventive and enterprising Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, to turn language peeves (“literally,” “could care less,” “very unique,” et al.) into a card game in which the object is “to annoy your opponent to death.” She’s raising money for Peeve Wars through Fund Anything; contribute now to claim your own card set or another nifty reward.

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Speaking of peeves, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg has had it up to here with verbal anachronisms in otherwise classy TV shows—like, say, Showtime’s Masters of Sex: “We live in a golden age of production design—but only for what we see, not for what we hear. Script-wise, anything goes, including the lexical equivalents of a jukebox in a frontier saloon or a zip-up toga on a Roman senator.” See also a response and amplification from the master of anachronism-spotting, Ben Schmidt. (As you may recall, this stuff annoys me, too.)

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Some people peeve about new, “unnecessary” words. But language blogger Stan Carey defends them: “Avoiding new and ‘needless’ words in formal contexts is all well and good, but what’s wrong with a grand superfluity elsewhere? Will the language look untidy if words float around not filling vital gaps? Will they gum up the works?”

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“We think first / Of vague words that are synonyms for progress / And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.” This Is a Generic Brand Video, from McSweeney’s, of course.

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Orenitram, a drug for pulmonary arterial hypertension, is an ananym: The name was created by reverse-spelling the first eight letters of the name of the drug company’s CEO, Martine Rothblatt. But that’s just the beginning of a truly remarkable name story, reported by Catchword.

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The new BuzzFeed style guide answers the really tough spelling and usage questions: Is bitchface one word or two? (One.) Is there an E in chocolaty? (No.) What’s the proper abbreviation of douchebag? (d-bag.) What’s the difference between wack and whack? (Look it up; it’s in there.) And, FYI, the word is spelled whoa. Don’t make us repeat ourselves.

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“Writing and editing are linked but distinct enterprises, and distinct temperaments are involved. Very few people can move smoothly from the one enterprise to the other.” – John McIntyre, one of the few. 

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The second lives of dead US brands: Woolworths thrives in Australia, Nextel in Latin America, Friendster in Southeast Asia, Mister Donut (“Misudo”) and Pan Am in Japan. (Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp and Shogannai.)

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Arika Okrent sorts out 11 brands with plural problems (topping the list: LEGO).

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A linguist (Gretchen McCulloch) explains doge grammar: “[B]roadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling.”

 

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Who names the color of the year? Professional namers, that’s who. The Boston Globe interviewed Bay Area name developer Anthony Shore for his insights into color naming; the article is headlined—care to guess?—“What’s in a Name?” (I tackled the subject of color names myself for a 2011 Visual Thesaurus column.)

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From the indispensable TV Tropes, the periodic table of storytelling.

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Speaking of charts and taxonomies, here’s a “marketing technology landscape supergraphic”—the logos of 947 companies in 43 categories—created by Scott Brinker.  Wow. Very names.

 

Read Brinker's follow-up post about the chart.

Nonplussed

A few observations about the new marketing campaign for the Bay Area’s Sutter Health medical group.

 

"When you're with child / We're with you." Outdoor ad, Van Ness Avenue at Filbert Street, San Francisco.

First, who says “with child” in 2013? Even on Downton Abbey, set between 1912 and 1922, characters were constantly saying that so-and-so was “pregnant.” (The casual use of the word was almost certainly anachronistic: the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us “pregnant” was a taboo word until the mid-1950s. “Expecting” and “in the family way” were far more common.)

“When you’re with child, we’re with you” is earnest but clunky: “with child” and “with you” aren’t really parallel here.

But what will puzzle most people about the ad is the slogan: “We Plus You.”

Here it is on the website:

The logo? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

It isn’t intended as a mathematical statement, with plus as a conjunction: “We plus you equals good health,” or something like that. No, plus is clearly a verb here: “It’s how you plus us, and we plus you.”

I remember some talk about to plus a couple of years ago, when Google launched its social-media service Google Plus. To give a stamp of approval to something on Google Plus, you click a “+1” icon. Users started referring to the action as “plussing.”

But it turns out Walt Disney had Google beat by almost 70 years. According to How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life, a chatty/motivational 2004 biography that refers to its subject by his first name, Walt Disney emphasized “the plus factor” to his artists and designers:

Sometime during the 1940s, Walt coined the term “plussing.” Normally, the word “plus” is a conjunction, as in “two plus two equals four.” But Walt used the word as a verb—an action word. To “plus” something is to improve it. “Plussing” means giving your customers more than they paid for, more than they expect, more than you have to give them. … He began by plussing Mickey Mouse with sound, then plussing the Silly Symphonies with color. Walt plussed the skills of his artists by sending them to art school at his own expense. Walt’s relentless quest for excellence kept him at the leading edge of his industry—and left his competitors, well, nonplussed.

Sutter Health may be using “plus” in this “improvement” sense. Or maybe it’s saying “You complete me.”

“We Plus You” isn’t the only bit of peculiar wordplay in the Sutter Health campaign. Here’s a full-page print ad in the March issue of San Francisco magazine:

 

 

“We specialize in You-ology.”

You-ology? Right down the hall from Your-ology, where you can get that prostate exam.

 

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Re the title of this post: nonplussed does not mean nonchalant, although a lot of people think it does.

January Linkfest

I’ve always wanted to name a perfume. Maybe I should just invent my own, as Sarah Marshall of The Hairpin did with her Unreleased Celebrity Fragrances: Acedia by Louis CK, Sherlocked by Benedict Cumberbatch, and a bunch of others, each with a pungent description.

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Continuing with the made-up names theme, here’s a crayon collection with grown-up color names:

 

I’m digging “Void of Existential Anguish Black.”

Via Arnold Zwicky, who adds a story about the Eagle Shirtmakers color-naming contest of 1961, which yielded submissions like Roe Cocoa, Unforeseeable Fuchsia, and Noblesso Beige.

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Also from Arnold Zwicky: How the dobro got its name. Dobro is a registered trademark of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, which means we all should be capitalizing it; it’s also an eponym, a portmanteau, and a word meaning “goodness” in most Slavic languages.

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“We gave you way too big an advance to call this book Freakonomics,” said the publisher of the book that gave rise to an entire freakin’ industry. Briefly considered as substitutes: Economics Gone Wild, Bend It Like Veblen, and Dude, Where’s My Rational Expectation?

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Earlier this month, the American Dialect Society voted phablet – the coinage that describes a smartphone-tablet hybrid – the word Least Likely to Succeed. (Phablet shared the dubious distinction with YOLO.) In a Word Routes column, Ben Zimmer traces the origins of phablet and ponders why nobody loves the word. (For the record, I’d revive an old word, tabloid, to replace phablet. Here’s my 2009 post about tabloid’s fascinating history.)

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Let’s squeeze in one more Word of the Year 2012 story. This one’s by linguist Arika Okrent, who rounds up eight countries’ words of the year, from entroikado (Portugal) to watture (France). J’aime beaucoup watture!

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“Focus more on connotations and less on definitions” – Lexicon Branding’s advice for choosing a name.

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“The next time someone tells you that they can’t accept a name with risk, consider asking them if pouring money into a brand that no one notices and no one cares about is more or less risky than investing in one that just might have a shot.” – Tate Linden, founder of the branding agency Stokefire, in a Q&A with the Wordnik blog.

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Whoever named the top 10 cannabis strains of 2012 was having way too much fun. (Via a tweet from Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.)

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What can the online dating site OKCupid teach us about naming? It’s all about standing out from the crowd, says Beth Gerber of Catchword Branding.

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Ever remember hearing that HAL, the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was meant to represent big bad IBM? (Just move the letters H-A-L forward one space in the alphabet.) A new video sets out to prove that the theory isn’t so farfetched after all.

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Ben Schmidt, who’s written about anachronisms (or prochronisms) in Mad Men and Downton Abbey, listens for anachronisms in Lincoln, the Stephen Spielberg movie written by Tony Kushner. Examples: “barrage” (of artillery) didn’t enter the lexicon until 1900, and “peace talks” wasn’t coined until the Vietnam War. Bonus for Lincoln-lingo nerds willing to pay for the privilege: Ben Zimmer’s Boston Globe interview with Kushner. There’s a related (free) article at Word Routes.

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How did Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works get its name and mascot? The Zinzin blog follows the scent and tracks down the story.

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What’s your favorite legal word? The ABA Journal’s readers testify. (Via a tweet from Beauty Marks.)

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Two from Ad Freak: The ad agency pronunciation guide…

 

 

.. and a taxonomy of ad-agency names.

 

(Click to embiggen.)

Name of the Year: Follow-Up

“My money’s on Sandy,” wrote Ben Zimmer in a comment on my Names of the Year for 2012 post, published earlier this week.

That’s probably smart money, and I’m regretting my oversight.

“Sandy” is linked to two separate 2012 disasters, both of which occurred in the last quarter of the year. The first was Hurricane Sandy (aka Superstorm Sandy, Frankenstorm Sandy, or Bride of Frankenstorm), which smashed into the East Coast in late October. “Sandy” came from a storm-name list created by the World Meteorological Organization. Since 1979, the WMO’s lists have included male and female names in alternating alphabetical order, omitting the letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z. (See the name lists for the next five years at the National Hurricane Center’s website.)

As a personal name, “Sandy” may have sounded old-fashioned to a lot of Americans. Its popularity peaked in the 1960s, when, according to the Baby Name Voyager, it ranked #167 among girls’ names. When you search “Sandra,” from which Sandy is often derived, the trend is even starker: Sandra was hugely popular in the 1940s, peaking at #6, and remained in the top 100 through the 1980s before falling steeply. The best-known “Sandy” today, other than the hurricane, may be the female lead in the Fifties-nostalgia musical Grease, played in the film version (1978) by Olivia Newton-John. Sandy can be a male nickname (Sandy Koufax, Little Orphan Annie’s dog), but it’s more often associated with a certain pert, wholesome, mid-20th-century female archetype: think of perennial Peter Pan Sandy Duncan, born in 1946.

(I found it interesting that many of the other girls’ names on the 2012 hurricane list were similarly Forties- and Fifties-ish: Betty, Patty, Debby, Joyce, Leslie. I suppose you have to reach back that far to find unambiguously girly names: today’s baby girls are likely to have androgynous or traditionally male names like Taylor, Sawyer, MacKenzie, and Maxwell. Compare anachronistically named Susie in the “lemonade-stand” Verizon Wireless commercials, played by a young actress with the trendily androgynous name Lennon.)

The other 2012 Sandy is, of course, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were massacred on December 14. This Sandy is a descriptive word modifying “hook,” a geographical term for a curved spit of land.

Two devastating Sandys in two months: That’s a lot of attention on a familiar-sounding yet out-of-the-mainstream name. It could be the deciding factor in January’s Name of the Year vote in Boston.

Word of the Week: Prochronism

Prochronism: A chronological error in which an event or usage is dated earlier than its actual occurrence.

A prochronism is a specific type of anachronism; “anachronism” (from Greek roots meaning “refer to wrong time”) can apply to any misplacement in time, while a prochronism

occurs when an item appears in a temporal context in which it could not yet be present (the object had not yet been developed, the verbal expression had not been coined, the philosophy had not been formulated, the breed of animal had not been developed, the technology had not been created). (Source: Wikipedia).

I discovered “prochronism” via Prochronisms: or Downton Crabbey, a blog dedicated to “using TV anachronisms to learn about changes in language, and trying to avoid complete curmudgeonhood in the process.” The blog’s author is Ben Schmidt, a graduate student in intellectual history at Princeton whose earlier work I mentioned in a February post. Schmidt started Prochronisms when PBS’s “Downton Abbey” was on the air; he charted every two-word phrase in the series to unearth prochronistic usages such as “just might” (much less common in 1920 than “might just”) and “black market” (unknown in Britain until World War II).

Post-Downton, Schmidt trained his focus on “Mad Men,” which was set in 1966 this season. He nailed the obvious problems with “callback” and “pay phone” in the mid-1960s. And he discovered the prochronism in an innocent-sounding phrase like “I need you to make dinner reservations”: people in the U.S. rarely said “I need you to” until about 1980. (“‘Need’ and ‘just' are words that are surprisingly modern in their usage,” notes Schmidt.)

“Mad Men”’s final episode of Season 5 aired last night. Schmidt hasn’t yet revealed where Prochronisms will travel next. I’ll make a suggestion: Season 3 of “Boardwalk Empire,” coming this fall.

The Persistence of Susie

During a recent evening of TV viewing I saw repeated airings of “Going Pink,” the latest installment in Verizon Wireless’s long-running “Susie’s Lemonade” ad campaign. The ads, created by McCann Erickson, feature a plucky, adorable girl, age 8 or 9, who over the course of the campaign turns a conventional idea—a neighborhood lemonade stand—into a mini-empire. The ads have been praised for “depicting a positive female role model” (AdWeek) and for being “memorable,” “engaging,” and “heartwarming.” 

The spots are indeed charming and expertly produced. But something bothers me about them: Susie. Not the character—her name.

Think about it: how many 8-, 9-, or 10-year-old American girls do you know named Susie? If you have a young daughter, was Susan or Susie on your short list of names for her? I’m guessing the answers to those questions are “none” and “no,” because Susan/Susie is very far out of the 21st-century baby-naming mainstream (yet not far enough out to be cycling back into popularity, like some early-20th-century names). The last time Susan was in the top 100 baby names was in the 1980s, according to the Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager tool. (It ranked #4 in the 1950s and #3 in the 1960s.) In 2010, the last year for which statistics are available, Susan barely appears on the graph: its rank was #792.

So why would Verizon and its ad agency give their protagonist such an unpopular, anachronistic name—a name that now suggests not a fourth-grader but her grandmother? Laura Wattenberg of Baby Name Wizard looked at this question in a different context in a November 2010 blog post, “The Mysterious Persistence of Little Johnny,” whose title I’ve cribbed. Wattenberg was inspired by this New Yorker cover:

 

In her post, Wattenberg observes that we still turn to names like “Tommy,” “Johnny,” and “Sue” whenever we need “generic symbols of American childhood.” They’re examples, she says, “of a distinctive faux-name species: the Mid-Century Normative Child (MCNC).” She continues:

I remember the generic use of “Little Johnny” sounding old-fashioned back in my 1970s childhood. All these years later, Johnny still rules the roost alongside the New Yorker’s Tommy and Sue, as well as Jimmy (a generic child I spotted in a recent Dear Abby column). All of those names had their heydays in the mid 1940s. The most up-to-date name on the standard MCNC list is Timmy, which peaked in the late ’50s.

It’s as if we locate the essence of childhood itself in that narrow historical period. There’s some logic to that. The early bound is set by the end of WWII, and the first generation of American kids fully protected by child labor laws. The end is the last cohort to experience childhood before the creeping cynicism of the Vietnam era. We signal “little kids” with names historically pinned to innocence and carefree prosperity.

If Verizon had wanted its young heroine to sound like she was born around 2002 or 2003, it could have given her a plausible name such as Ellie (rising fast over the last decade), Ava (in the top 25 since 2004, and #5 last year), or Emma (#2 in 2003, when “Susie” was probably born). A name like Lily (in the top 100 since 2000) would have said “21st century American girl” while also alliterating nicely with “lemonade.” “Emily’s Lemonade”—Emily was the #1 girl’s name in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007—has a nice ring and a satisfying anapestic dactylic meter, too.

And if Verizon had wanted to be trendy and realistic and alliterative, it could have used the actual first name of its young star: Lennon. (Her last name is Wynn.) You just can’t ask for a more perfect example of the early-21st-century girl’s name style than Lennon: androgynous, celebrity-influenced, and historically rare. (Lennon has never been ranked among the top 1,000 baby names for either sex.)

But contemporary realism and fashion were clearly beside the point in the Verizon ads, despite their emphasis on GPS, 4G LTE, and other whiz-bang technology. “Susie” seems to have been chosen because it’s quaint and anachronistic. The name belongs to a dimly remembered past, a golden age in which kids didn’t need adult supervision or city permits to operate lemonade stands, and parents didn’t care if their kids’ names weren’t cool and unique. Normative was the way to go. By choosing “Susie” over the more-likely candidates, Verizon may be signaling that it’s counting on consumers to accept its brand as normative, too.

More about anachronistic fictional names here.

"To Contact" in 1918?

Like millions of TV viewers in the US and the UK, I’ve been under the spell of “Downton Abbey,” the period drama originally produced for Britain’s ITV and rebroadcast in the US on PBS. We’re now three episodes into Season 2, which opens in the middle of World War I and shuttles between a grand Yorkshire estate and the trenches of war-torn France. The attention to detail in clothing, automobiles, home furnishings, and telephones is extraordinary. The dialogue, however, isn’t always quite as authentic.

One out-of-place usage caught my attention in Episode 3, which aired last Sunday: contact as a verb meaning “to communicate with.” I heard it spoken twice: once by Cousin Isobel Crawley (at 10:09*: “I’ll try to contact Captain Crawley and explain to him what happened”) and once by Lord Grantham (at 25:35: “I don’t know how to contact her”).

By coincidence, I had recently researched the history of to contact for a column in the Visual Thesaurus, so I knew its use in “Downton Abbey” wasn’t just slightly amiss but grossly anachronistic.

Contact has been documented as a verb since 1834, but for decades it had a single meaning: to place in a such a manner that surfaces are touching. (That’s the literal meaning of the Latin root words.) The metaphorical sense of to contact—“to communicate with”—wasn’t recorded until 1927, and then only as an American colloquialism. The colloquial usage was still scandalous in Britain in 1935, when Sir Alan Patrick Herbert wrote What a Word! (wonderfully subtitled “Being an account of the principles and progress of ‘the word war’ conducted in ‘Punch’, to the great improvement and delight of the people, and the lasting benefit of the king’s English, with many ingenious exercises and horrible examples”). “A charming lady in the publicity business shocked me when we parted,” wrote Sir Alan, “by saying ‘It has been such fun contacting you.’”

Brits continued tsk-tsking about to contact for years. Here’s Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage, first published in 1947:

If you feel that without this American synonym for ‘to establish contact with’ or, more idiomatically, ‘get in(to) touch with’ [a person], life would be too unutterably drear and bleak and ‘grim’, do at least say or write ‘to contact a person’, not contact with … Extremes of fashion bring their own corrective, and contact, the great word of the era of sales promotion and consolidation, shows signs of retiring to its proper place.

Fat chance, although the No Contact crowd had plenty of sympathizers on this side of the Atlantic, too. In The Careful Writer, originally published in 1965, Theodore Bernstein dismissed contact as “a fad word.” And Wilson Follett found it necessary to devote two hand-wringing columns to “contact, verb” in Modern American Usage (1966). An excerpt reveals the emotional valence of the dispute:

Persons old enough to have been repelled by the verb contact when it was still a crude neologism may as well make up their minds that there is no way to arrest or reverse the tide of its popularity. Persons young enough to have picked up the word without knowing that anyone had reservations about it may as well make up their minds that a considerable body of their elders abominate it and would despise themselves if they succumbed to the temptation to use it. …

If in doubt, contact your physician — this locution is as natural to the American of thirty as it is grotesque to the American of sixty, for whom the idea of surfaces touching is the essence of contact. The elderly can therefore see no fitness and no use for the word in its new sense, when the vocabulary already provides consult, ask, approach, get in touch with, confer with, and simply see.

“Repelled,” “crude,” “abominate,” “despise, “grotesque”—if those were the words being applied to contact in 1966, one can scarcely imagine the pearl-clutching, if not outright apoplexy, that would have resulted from its utterance in 1918.

Today, of course, we’ve made our peace with to contact and shifted our contempt to reach out. “Why not just say contact?” the peevers complain. Plus ça change.

For a discussion of other anachronistic language in “Downton Abbey,” see this article in the Daily Mail (UK), which considers the idioms “everything is rosy in the garden,” “get knotted,” and “logic pills,” all of which were unfamiliar to me. Meanwhile, in a recent Language Log post, linguist Mark Liberman took a look at “Just sayin’,” which was spoken in a DA episode set in 1916. Oh, and here’s that Visual Thesaurus column I wrote about reach out and contact.

UPDATE: Read Ben Zimmer’s columns on “Downton Abbey” anachronisms in the Visual Thesaurus and the Boston Globe.

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* The current episodes will be online through the end of the season. After that, you’ll have to rent or buy the DVD.

The Wrong Names

New York Times film critic A.O. Scott is annoyed by one of the names in the new release Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski and based on Yasmina Reza’s four-character comedy of bad manners, The God of Carnage. The film is set in a “comfortable high-rise apartment” in Brooklyn:

I know these people. Why be coy? I am these people. And while these people might well be the parents of a Zachary and an Ethan, the sister of a Zachary would much more plausibly be a Sophie or an Emma than a Courtney. (Courtney? What is this, Beverly Hills? Reality television? Come on!)

My reaction precisely. How can you presume to comment on cultural mores while demonstrating such a tin ear for naming trends?

It’s not as though the filmmakers didn’t have a say in this matter. Reza wrote the play in French, and the characters’ names were Anglicized when it was performed in the US. (I saw it in Los Angeles earlier this year.) For some reason Polanski changed the women’s names again: Veronica (originally Véronique) became Penelope, and Annette (in both French and English-language versions) became Nancy. Huh? Penelope is a very popular baby name right now, but it’s anachronistic for a character in her mid-30s. And Nancy, I regret to say, would be more appropriate, name-trend-wise, for that character’s mother.

I had similar thoughts when I read a review of Daniel Handler’s new young-adult novel, Why We Broke Up. (Handler has also published under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket.) The first-person narrator is a high school junior named Min, a name that sounds right on trend for a girl born in 1993 or 1994. But the other teenage characters are named Ed, Al, and Joan. Really? There may be a few baby Joanies in the US right now, the offspring of besotted Mad Men viewers, but trust me: in the 16- to 18-year-old demographic there are approximately zero Joans. In fact, “Joan” disappeared from baby-name lists toward the end of the 1980s; it hadn’t been really popular since the 1930s. (Don’t take my word for it: check out the Baby Name Voyager.)

Likewise, a hip high school kid in 2011 would more likely be called Alec or Alejandro than “Al”—Al would be his grandfather or great-grandfather—and a boy born in 1993 would more likely be called Eduardo or even Edison than “Ed.” (Edison, which was very popular in the 1910s, has enjoyed a couple of recent dramatic spikes.)

With so much good research about naming trends at our fingertips—once again, I refer you to Baby Name Wizard—why would a playwright, screenwriter, or novelist make such tone-deaf choices?

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Read my January 2007 post about well-chosen character names.

November Linkfest

Is it time to rename the beleaguered Euro? The IPKat blog, which covers intellectual-property issues in Europe and the UK, wants your opinion. At this writing, voting is almost evenly divided among Neuro, BizMark, and Tenax (“Latin for frugal, grasping, obstinate and stingy”), but some of the runners-up are pretty clever, too: the Meou (“Memberstate European Operating Unit”), the Markel (a blend of the German mark and “Merkel”), the Ohno (no explanation required). You have till midnight (GMT) Sunday to vote. Via @igornaming.

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“Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean ‘gets rid of dirt.’ (Characters are important: the same sound written differently could mean ‘too purple.’)” – “Picking a Brand Name in China Is a Business Itself,” New York Times, November 12. Pinyin News begs to differ: “Nope. The Mandarin name for Tide detergent is Tàizì. On the other hand, ‘too purple’ would be ‘tài zǐ,’ which is close but not the same.” (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)

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I’m loving Word Soup, the new Wordnik series that covers “strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words” heard on television. A few from the October 28 post: Apparition American (a euphemism for “ghost”), turfucken (“sex with ducks”), and volumptuous (a Snooki-ism that blends “voluptuous” and “lump”). And from November 9: Moneyed American (a euphemism for “rich person”) and jägerbar (a were-bear that hunts). Say, Wordnik, how about turning Word Soup into a book?

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Speaking of TV, here in the US we’re impatiently awaiting Season 2 of Downton Abbey, coming to PBS January 8, 2012. In the meantime, Oxford Dictionaries gives us a guide to the language of the series, which is set in England just before and during World War I. No spoilers, thankfully, but plenty of interesting word histories—and some anachronisms, like “when push comes to shove,” which was primarily used in the US until 1958.

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A hat tip to the Wordnik Twitter feed for the link to “10 Words You Might Think Came from Science (But Are Really from Science Fiction).” On the list: robotics, zero gravity, blast off.

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Speaking of science fiction (not really), the Spaceage Portal of Sentence Discovery is a database of “interesting language patterns and elements,” including figures of speech, grammatical-syntactic structures, and “rhetorical maneuvers.” Search under the “clincher sentences” tag, for example, and read examples by Adam Gopnik, Todd Purdum, and Bill Bryson. Or: “Be of service to the universe by submitting examples that you yourself have discovered.” Fun and very, very useful. Via Sentence First.

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Do you believe it’s a cardinal sin to begin a sentence with a conjunction or end a sentence with a preposition? You are, in a word, wrong. Paul Brians, keeper of the indispensable Common Errors in English Usage website, has compiled a list of non-errors: “those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.” Included: “over” vs. “more than,” “raise” vs. “rear,” “between vs. among,” and—of course—”hopefully” and “momentarily.” (The late William Safire called these non-errors “incorrections,” a label Language Log has adopted.)

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I rarely post links to advice about writing because so much of it is tedious, dumb, or both. J. Maureen Henderson’s “How to Improve Your Writing,” which was published in Forbes last month, is different: it’s smart, practical, and funny. (First tip: “Do more of it. Maybe.” Second tip: “Read more. Possibly.”) The best piece of advice in the column: Edit other people’s work.

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“[S]lang is always doubting. It’s always questioning, it’s always cynical, it’s always undermining and it’s always been negative.” Lexicographer Jonathon Green, author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang (which retails for a decidedly upmarket $625), talks about his favorite subject with The Browser.

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Baby Name Wizard went shopping and discovered a nursery’s worth of shoes named Bella, Madison, Chloe, and Olivia. Surprisingly, “there’s almost no relationship between the style of name and the style of shoe.”

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Downtown Los Angeles once had streets named Faith, Hope, and Charity. “This last one, Charity Street, was a nonstarter. No one wanted to ‘live on Charity,’ so it was renamed with the grand title of Grand Avenue.” More on L.A. street names in L.A. Downtown News.

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Following up on my Tech Jargon of Yore post, here are more than 30 tech ads from that paleolithic era, the 1990s. Despite the weird kerning, this Radio Shack ad made me smile.