When I first got car insurance, the company’s name was the up-to-the-minute 20th Century. Eventually, of course, that began to sound a bit passé. So they changed it to 21st Century. I suppose that began to sound a bit old-fashioned too, so they changed it to the embarrassing and inexplicable (to me, anyway) Toggle, which I live in fear of needing to say.
I misread "biannual" as "bilingual" and thought... oh, that's actually very clever, naming a publication after a number if you're trying to get something that lands in multiple languages!
The pair of media outlets with numerical names is really interesting to me, because that seems to be a much wider trend in digital media: 538, The 19th, Refinery29, etc. I'm curious why this took off like it did!
The number trend reminds me of the /oo/ trend in the early aughts and the -ify trend a few years later. Lots of double-O names in imitation of Google and Yahoo, as though orthography was the key to success. Likewise, dozens of -ify names in imitation of Spotify.
Were the disemvoweled sites and apps of the '00s and '10s (Tumblr, Flickr, the site formerly formerly known as Twttr) a follow-the-leader trend, or was it just a matter of trying to get the shortest possible urls?
When I first got car insurance, the company’s name was the up-to-the-minute 20th Century. Eventually, of course, that began to sound a bit passé. So they changed it to 21st Century. I suppose that began to sound a bit old-fashioned too, so they changed it to the embarrassing and inexplicable (to me, anyway) Toggle, which I live in fear of needing to say.
I misread "biannual" as "bilingual" and thought... oh, that's actually very clever, naming a publication after a number if you're trying to get something that lands in multiple languages!
The pair of media outlets with numerical names is really interesting to me, because that seems to be a much wider trend in digital media: 538, The 19th, Refinery29, etc. I'm curious why this took off like it did!
The number trend reminds me of the /oo/ trend in the early aughts and the -ify trend a few years later. Lots of double-O names in imitation of Google and Yahoo, as though orthography was the key to success. Likewise, dozens of -ify names in imitation of Spotify.
Were the disemvoweled sites and apps of the '00s and '10s (Tumblr, Flickr, the site formerly formerly known as Twttr) a follow-the-leader trend, or was it just a matter of trying to get the shortest possible urls?
Just a conjecture, but I'd say the latter in the early days, then the former. There were a lot of them: https://pin.it/4VvZ7MgM7