January linkstack
Three podcasts, two newsletters, one audiobook, and last year's best and weirdest names.
It’s been a tough couple of weeks in the public and private spheres. I won’t address the public issues except to say I’m appalled but unsurprised, and I won’t bore you with my personal miseries. Instead, I’m going to shower you with links to stuff that made me feel a little less glum this month.
Before I go there, though: A grateful welcome to the new subscribers who’ve signed up since the publication of my December linkstack. I invite all readers to drop me a line in the comments — scroll down for the link — if you have tips about names, brands, or the language of commerce.
And if you haven’t yet taken my reader survey, it’s still open, and I’m still eager to read your responses.
Listen up
Three good podcasts:
The Lives They’re Living: Ben Yagoda, author of Gobsmacked! (read my review) and of the Not One-Off Britishisms blog, launched his delightful podcast eight months ago, but he managed to keep it a secret (from me, anyway) until recently. I’m making up for lost time and thoroughly enjoying every minute. Each episode profiles someone remarkable who is “a little more under the radar” than he or she deserves to be. All of the episodes are wonderful, but the May 2024 episode, in which Michael Tisserand talks about comic artist and screenwriter Jules Feiffer, is a good place to start: Raise a glass to Feiffer, who died on January 17 at age 95.
(journalist and author of The Bluestocking newsletter) teams up with Armando Iannucci (Veep, The Thick of It, The Death of Stalin, In the Loop) to talk about the use and abuse of political language. Recommended: “Words of the Year.”Lingthusiasm. Linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne celebrated their podcast’s 100th episode with 100 reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics. Here’s a fun fact: “Turn that frown upside down” is confusing to speakers of British English, for whom “frown” means “furrowed brow” rather than “scowling mouth.”
Listen up some more
One audiobook I liked a lot:
Feh: A Memoir. Author
narrates this bitter-hilarious memoir whose theme is “the Yiddish word for yuck.” I was in the mood for some gallows humor — let’s face it, I’m always in the mood for some gallows humor — and this book scratched the itch. A tasty line: “Writers in Hollywood perform a sort of reverse prostitution, in which they have sex first and only afterward do the clients decide if they want to pay.”New to Substack
I’ve followed
, aka Lynneguist, for many years on many platforms (and even met her once IRL). I’m delighted that she’s now publishing on Substack. Here’s her January 19 post on the US-to-UK word of the year, landslide, and the UK-to-US WOTY, fortnight. isn’t new-new to Substack, but his newsletter has a new name: The New Curiosity Shop. He writes that the old name, Technohumanism, “wasn’t getting at the range of things I was writing about.” Quentin has been a tech journalist, a foreign correspondent, and a lot more, and I always learn something new when I read him. I’m still thinking about his recent post on “Momwork” (which is quite not what you might think it is.)Anachronyms
What do tin foil, subtweet, and run of the mill have in common? They’re all anachronyms: anachronisms that take the form of words or phrases. (“Anachronym” literally means a name from the wrong time period.) Heddwen Newton has collected 36 anachronyms on her website; you can also find Heddwen here on Substack.
{city name} STRONG
“In the face of tragedy, ‘Strong’ has become cities’ branding of choice,” writes
. The latest example, in response to the devastating January wildfires: “LA Strong.” Ben Zimmer wrote about “strong” branding back in 2013: “An Army of Strong Slogans.”Two takes on one inaugural speech
Both takes were written last week, before we knew what we know. Here’s former Carter speechwriter
on “the worst part of a terrible speech” () and former Obama speechwriter David Litt on “how to drink from a firehose” ().Words for our time
“Is ‘immersive’ the new ‘extreme’?” by
. on the latest algospeak: language designed to subvert an algorithm.Parlez-vous?
James Harbeck on how to pronounce 64 French expressions, including one that’s all-too-frequently mispronounced, coup de grâce. James is a co-founder of the Strong Language blog, but this post — with video — appears on his own blog, Sesquiotic.
Best, worst, and weirdest names
surveyed professional name developers about branding hits and misses in 2024. Caitlin herself picked Ayoh! Mayo: “I love that it’s a greeting AND that it’s easy to see how it signals ‘mayo,’ the most beautiful condiment.” Rampant nationalism
King Frederik of Denmark changed his country’s coat of arms “in apparent rebuke to Donald Trump.”
“The Strunk Cost Fallacy”
“It seems that nothing will ever stop people peeving pointlessly about split infinitives, double negatives, passive voice, singular they, &c.,” writes Stan Carey, the other co-founder of the Strong Language blog. Renouncing usage myths like these “means accepting that we’ve wasted our time, so instead we double down.” Stan calls this response “the Strunk Cost Fallacy,” in (dubious) honor of the co-author of The Elements of Style.
Tempo vs. Sceptres
Name developer Andris Pone on two new team names: “Toronto Tempo, the new moniker for the city’s WNBA franchise, nails it like a nothing-but-net three-pointer. In contrast, Toronto’s new PWHL team fanned on their name: Sceptres.” (Coin Branding)
Big, bigger, biggest
Dell, my computer brand of choice over many tech generations, has replaced its laptop sub-brands — XPS, Latitude, and Inspiron — with “Dell,” “Dell Pro,” and “Dell Pro Max,” each with a “Plus” sub-sub-brand. “Do those names sound familiar?” asks naming pro Rob Meyerson. “If you've shopped for an iPhone in the past five years or so, they should.” Creative Bloq is harsher: “Sure, the names are simpler. But weren’t there any other words for ‘powerful’ and ‘bigger’ that Dell could have found in the thesaurus?” Speaking as a name developer myself: Honey, it ain’t that simple.
The last word
My interest in fashion has waned lately (guess why), but I’m glad I didn’t skip over a mention in The Jones Report of an unusual garment with a remarkable history. It’s called simply “Beige Linen Shirt SLOVO,” and it’s sold by a Ukrainian retailer, Etnodim. Here’s the description on the English-language website:
The legendary Slovo House in Kharkiv was built especially for writers in the 1920s. Architect Dashkevych symbolically designed the house in the shape of the letter “C”.
Some legendary figures of our culture became happy inhabitants. But they were all trapped.
In 1933, a specially gathered intelligentsia was repressed and destructed [sic] systematically.
The Cyrillic letter “C” stands for Слово (slovo), Ukrainian for “word.”
A Wikipedia entry tells more of the story:
Built in the late 1920s, [Slovo House] accommodated Ukrainian writers and poets, many of whom were later shot by the Communist authorities at Sandarmokh in Karelia. Today they are known as the “Executed Renaissance”.
And here’s the shirt:
Canadian here (though born in the U.S.A. nearly 62 years ago), Brit parents, translator and copy-editor, so well versed in the differences between Brit and U.S. English and how Canadian English straddles the two. Gobsmaked that I've lived all this time never knowing that a frown was anything other than a furrowed brow.
Of course, the biggest sports team name drama this month was the news that "Utah Yeti" is dead :(