Why are some companies, like publishers and fashion businesses, called “houses”? Includes a delightful explanation of how Random House got its name. (Grammar Girl)
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I’m a pushover for specialized slang dictionaries, and this is a good one: a guide to carnival lingo. Warning: many irresistible rabbit holes on that site. (Good Magic)
A razzle dazzle game (Stevens Magic Emporium)
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You’d think I’d have known this word for years and years instead of for just a few days, because cacography describes a wide swath of brand naming. Also, I like -graphy words in general (choreography, biography, typography, cinematography, lexicography, orography), all of which have some connection to writing, which is what the Greek root graphein signifies. And I’m also (immaturely) drawn to words beginning with cac- and kak-, my very favorite being kakistocracy. The front part of those cac- and kak- words comes from Greek again: kakistos means “worst,” but it’s probably related to an even older root that means “to defecate.” Thus kakistocracy is, roughly, “government by shitty people,” and cacography is, well, shitty writing.
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Lately the news on this planet has been just too depressing. So let’s slip these surly* bonds and see what’s happening on Mars.
Here’s Dr. Tanya Harrison, “professional Martian” and director of Arizona State University’s NewSpace initiative, with a weather report and a question for her Twitter followers: If fog on Earth is called @KarlTheFog, what should we call fog on Mars?
My own vote goes to Wanda’s nomination, “Marsha,” which is derived from Latin “Marcius,” meaning “of Mars” and which evokes damp marshes.** But what interests me even more comes further down in the Twitter thread, where Tanya reveals the source of the photo.
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Earlier this week, Washington-area news media reported that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, daughter and son-in-law of the president-elect, would be moving into a six-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bathroom house in the District of Columbia. The house, which sold on December 22 for $5.5 million, $400,000 under the listing price, is less than two blocks from where President and Mrs. Obama will live after they leave the White House. (It isn’t clear whether the Trump-Kushners had bought it or will be renting from the buyer).
The neighborhood is called Kalorama, which got my attention.
2449 Tracy Place NW. Built in 1923 by Waddy Wood, who championed Colonial Revival designs over the Craftsman style. Walk score: 50 (mostly car dependent).
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An aristocracy is government by the best people; the word was adopted into English in the 1560s from a French word coined from the Greek for “best” (aristos) and “rule” (kratos). A kakistocracy is the opposite: government by the worst or most unprincipled people. Given that the Greek word for “worst,” kakistos, is probably related to Proto-Indo-European kakka, “to defecate” – compare caca, known to toddlers worldwide – you could say that kakistocracy is “government by the shitty.”
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Sarcasm: A cutting remark intended to express contempt or ridicule. From late Greek sarkasmos: a sneer, jest, taunt, or mockery. Its original meaning was “tear flesh”; its root is sarco-, a Latinized form of a Greek root meaning “flesh.” Compare sarcophagus (limestone used for coffins; literally “flesh-eating”) and sarcoma (a fleshy tumor).
Sarcasm was defined and debated last week after the Republican presidential nominee – who had insisted multiple times at an August 10 rally in Florida, and in an August 11 radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, that President Obama is “the founder” of ISIS and Hillary Clinton the group’s “co-founder” or, alternately, “most valuable player” – shout-tweeted that the remarks were “sarcasm.”
Ratings challenged @CNN reports so seriously that I call President Obama (and Clinton) "the founder" of ISIS, & MVP. THEY DON'T GET SARCASM?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2016
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Apophasis: Saying something by denying that you’ll say it; the “I’m-not-saying-I’m-just saying” rhetorical device. From the Greek roots apo- (away from, off) and -phatikos (to speak): “to deny.” Entered English in a 1656 rhetoric text, when it was defined as “a kind of irony.” Pronounced (ə-pŏf′ə-sĭs). Apophasis is also known as praeteritio (“passing over”).
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Thyristor: A A four-layered semiconductor rectifier in which the flow of current between two electrodes is triggered by a signal at a third electrode. (Source: Oxford Dictionaries.) Coined in the 1950s from thyratron, a kind of thermionic tube (from Greek thura, “gate” or “door”) and transistor. Pronounced THIGH-wrist-er.
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Cinemagraph: A still photograph in which an element is animated with a small amount of video. A blend of cinema and graph.
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Don’t read “How to Name a Baby” to learn how to name a baby. Read it for insights into historical baby-naming trends and to confirm your hunches (e.g., “the popular girl name Reagan is for Republicans”). Also: charts!
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Given names are “one of the last social acceptable frontiers of class war.”Also: nominative determination, implicit egotism, and how the Internet has made baby naming more difficult. Part 1 of a four-part podcast series about names from Australian radio network ABC. The presenter, Tiger Webb, has an interesting name story himself. (Hat tip: Superlinguo.)
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The not-so-secret jargon of doctors is full of acronyms: a flea—fucking little esoteric asshole—is an intern, an FLK is a “funny-looking kid,” and an “SFU 50 dose” is the amount of sedative it takes for 50 percent of patients to shut the fuck up.
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Ever wonder what value-creating winners do all day? Here’s Business Town to enlighten you. It’s “an ongoing project attempting to explain our highly intangible, deeply disruptive, data-driven, venture-backed, gluten-free economic meritocracy to the uninitiated. With apologies to Richard Scarry.”
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Stop your whinging, Brits: a lot of those so-called Americanisms you profess to detest—like “gotten” and “fall”—were originally English.
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The spectacular neon art of the Walker Collection of American Signs, a swath of advertising history auctioned earlier this month in Proctor, Arkansas.
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Attention, domain shoppers and everyone who believes the best defense is an offensive offense: the .sucks domain went on sale in early April. There was an immediate buying frenzy; consumer advocate Ralph Nader promoted it in a commercial as “a protest word.” Now ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has asked U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies to determine whether the the domain’s high price—$2,499 during the “sunrise” period—is illegal. (For more about the unusual relationship between Vox Populi—which secured the rights to sell the .sucks domain—and ICANN, see John R. Levine’s blog.)
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“The decision is made. The name won’t be changed.” – Tim Mahoney, head of marketing for Chevy, speaking to the Detroit Free Press about the Bolt electric vehicle, whose name is strikingly similar to that of the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. In fact, a Spanish speaker would pronounce the two names identically. (Hat tip: Jonathon Owen.)
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I’ve been saying this for ages, but now I can quote the Harvard Business Review: Group brainstorming is a waste of time.
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“A brand of snack bars is made ‘in small batches at our own makery’. Makery? I am guessing that ‘makery’ is a portmanteau for ‘made-up bakery’.” Steven Poole on why the language of food packaging makes him sick. (Hat tip: Lynne Murphy.)
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Remember wack slacks, lamestain, and swingin’ on the flippity-flop? Of course you don’t. Why grungespeak was the greatest language hoax of the 1990s.
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Chart: How to say “It’s all Greek to me” in 30 languages. (For Greeks, it’s all Chinese.)
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Negative polarity item, critique drift, and other terms—many of them linguistic—that have caught the eye of tech writer/editor Mike Pope.
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Lindström, Minnesota, is getting its umlaut back.
English is the language where diacritics go to die. Except in Minnesota. #missionumlaut. h/t @SPNoir @JKealing pic.twitter.com/8q80R4n6nR
— Patrick Cox (@patricox) April 15, 2015
And don’t forget all those gratuitously umlautted brand names!
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