Words, words words

Color Us Impressed

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-30T11:24:00-04:00

We were delighted to see the New York Times address the topic of names and naming in today’s paper, with specific reference to the changing style of color names in the paint industry. It seems that more companies are taking the opportunity to let the name tell a story or describe an experience, rather than being merely descriptive. As paint names and colors are apparently never retired, and as there are only so many ways to say ’green,’ we’re not surprised to hear about the marketers looking to leverage the name to help themselves stand out in the increasingly crowded marketplace. We think the name is the single most overlooked opportunity to leverage one’s marketing dollar.

Feathery Names

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-24T14:18:04-04:00

We note an essay in the forthcoming New York Times Book Review discussing the tradition of authors using a ‘nom de plume,’ the reasons they may do so, and the interesting complications that may ensue. These days, with anonymity quickly being relegated to the pre-web days, the essay points out that multiple online personas are hardly a rarity, but are most often used to bolster or attack someone’s reputation. Very different from the much older and once more commonly held view that pseudonyms exist primarily for 1) women writing as men; 2) writers with a secret to hide; or 3) otherwise well-regarded individuals “slumming it” in genre writing.

Imbalanced Humours?

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-24T13:57:16-04:00

We tend to think of all things medical as being rather serious and humorless, but this article rounds up several instances of potentially problematic names for medical conditions requiring a doctor’s care. The name of the article speaks for itself: Ten Serious Medical Problems With Cutesy Names

Brand Iniquity

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-24T13:12:25-04:00

According to an article in today’s Guardian, even Osama bin Laden had a sense of the importance of names and naming. Apparently aware of al Qaeda’s decline in popular perception and reputation within the worldwide Muslim community - a result of his killing of countless innocent Muslims - he had been seriously contemplating a name change and rebranding of the organization prior to his inglorious demise. The article contains some interesting commentary on the unclear origin and meaning of the al Qaeda name itself.

Chatty Catty

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-23T13:40:18-04:00

Sign of the impending apocalypse? Proof that animals have souls? As the kids say, whatisthisIdon’teven... Kitty stays on message, and addresses his target audience in a language they can understand...

First Impressions Last

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-23T10:54:46-04:00

Well, this is bound to give rise to argument... A recent study shows an apparent link between academic success and a child’s first name. While naming traditions vary across cultures and socioeconomic strata, the study seem to show that certain names saddle the bearer with preconceptions that have a negative impact on classroom grades, which in turn limits further opportunities as the child grows. More simply put: some names give the impression that the bearers are more stupid than they may actually be, and people will treat the bearer accordingly.

Patience is a Virtue

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-22T18:11:21-04:00

You may have heard about this: the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago has finally completed a project they’d begun in 1921 - they have published the final volume in a comprehensive dictionary of the ancient Akkadian language, bringing the project to a close after 21 volumes. The dictionary covers a huge scope of time, ranging from 2,500 BC to 100 AD, and describes the language that brought the world the Code of Hammurabi, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and which was spoken in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Though usually written in cuneiform, the language is the earliest example we have from the Semitic language family, which includes Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Nabatean, Amharic, Syriac and several others. Perhaps the most interesting angle to us is the name of the dictionary itself: the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which was the name by which the language was known when the project started. These days, after a century of scholarship, archeology and argument, the language is known as Akkadian, reflecting the empire run by Sargon the Great from the city of Akkad, commonly held to be the first empire in human history. You can read more here.

Art & Artifice, Language & Logs

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-20T16:14:03-04:00

We love this art project underway in Vermont, where a gentleman whose passion runs toward preserving endangered alphabets is in the process of creating a sculpture which features a poem transcribed into languages including Baybayin, Inuktitut, Bugis, Mandaic, Tifinagh and Nom. He rightly notes “Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters. While we acknowledge that it is the nature of language to change, we agree that something essentially human is lost when a form of expression passes from this world.

Reason to Win

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-20T12:01:28-04:00

An interesting theory is making the rounds, wherein it is argued that the development of reason and logic was prompted not by a noble search for truth, but for the more prosaic cause of winning arguments. This, of course, presupposes the existence of language and communication before the constraints of critical thinking. I guess we’ve all seen examples of that earlier state even today... The comments on the article are again interesting in their own right. We delight in the recursive quality of the arguments about argumentation...

Hair Band Word Salad

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-20T11:42:10-04:00

The BBC addresses an issue that has confounded us for decades: what is a “Bohemian Rhapsody?” The associated comments are equally enlightening. Fun fact: Queen’s guitarist Brian May is an actual rock star scientist.

The Sacred in Science

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-20T11:26:30-04:00

A lovely blog post at NPR’s “13.7” is the most recent to use the Shakespearean “what is in a name?” trope in asking about the use of the word ‘sacred’ in modern times, and how the religious/scientific divide we’ve come to know has separated the scientific community from the etymological roots of that word, once closely related to the focus and attention that we now associate with a scientific world view. We particularly liked this quote, pointing out the truism that language change is constant: “Every generation has the right, indeed the responsibility, to take the language it was given, listen to its resonances and use them for the purposes at hand. To do anything less would be to kill the language through atrophy.”

Tempus, tempus...

team@nomenon.com — 2011-06-20T10:52:04-04:00

We wish we could claim some glamorous excuse for the distinct lack of updates here, but alas, nothing other than things getting away from us as we tend to business. We’ll be offering a host of interesting links in the next day or two in an effort to play catch-up, and to keep our interested readers engaged and, umm, interested. Here’s a start: The political aspect of names, particularly the names of disputed geographical locations or entities (called toponyms) came into play when National Geographic was noticed to have changed the names of many places on their most recent map of Tibet away from Romanized Tibetan names to Romanized Pinyin Chinese. The arrows will fly... This points to the importance and relevance of making sure your name for your product, service or company is sensitive to more than just the immediate set decision makers. Nomenon’s Native-Speaker Language Checks can make sure no-one will giggle at your name in Guyana, or throw Molotov Cocktails at your bureau in Barcelona...

Yogi, Magic, and Big Baby

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-12T14:06:51-04:00

A clever article that brought to light a trend we had not noticed: nicknames in sports have become far less popular in recent years, and some ascribe that trend to the forces of marketing - the players have become their own brands. See “Be Like Mike” for an example. Another suggestion: the personal names of the players have become far more varied than they had been back in the day. There was a practical reason for being able to tell one Joe, Mark or John from another, whereas these days, there aren’t too many LeBrons, Tikis, or Hidekis on the field at the same time... Cocktail fact 1: the word ‘nickname’ was once actually an ‘ic nama’ - “a name I call myself”... Like ‘apron’ [once “a napron”] and orange [once “a norange” - see Spanish “naranja”], it picked up a change along the way. Cocktail fact 2: George Herman Ruth wasn’t called “Babe” until he signed with the Orioles, who already had a George in the line-up.

Put In Words

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-12T12:45:56-04:00

We came across a rather lyrical and enthralling article which describes the job of being a lexicographer - one who compiles dictionaries. Written by a working lexicographer, of whom there are few in this world, the article describes the process and the history of this noble and obscure profession. We are reminded of a story told by the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith at a Harvard luncheon, where he told of his experience testifying before a congressional panel on the economy. A senator, being unfamiliar with a word the Professor had used in his presentation, had an aide look up the word for him. He then addressed the speaker, saying he’d had an aide look up the word ‘febrile,’ and went on to say that Galbraith had used the word incorrectly. The Professor responded thusly: “Being that I sit on the Usage Committee of the American Heritage Dictionary, I shall have them emend the entry.”

Play On

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-11T17:13:43-04:00

While it may be a small stretch to see this as ‘on topic,’ we’re gobsmacked and delighted to note the Library of Congress has built a virtual national jukebox with selections of now-public-domain recordings from wax cylinders, old Victrolas, 78s and the like. A true link to the past, these recordings offer a way for the contemporary listener to forge a sensory link with the day-to-day life of our predecessors. The brain regions associated with playing music are the same as those linked to both language and to chess, located roughly above the left ear. One can see some evidence of the linkage in children’s songs, where simple tunes serve to reinforce lessons on language rules and usage - even the alphabet song performs a similar function. Neat cocktail fact: the alphabet song uses the same tune as ‘Baa baa, Black Sheep” - and a Mozart concerto.

And Thanks For All The Fish

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-09T16:58:13-04:00

We note with excitement the reports of an experimental effort being called CHAT, for Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry, which for the first time seeks to establish a two-way communication with dolphins. While researchers have been working on communicating with dolphins using pictures and sound since the 1960s, all previous efforts have been, in essence, one way, with humans directing the dolphin’s activities - and with no opportunity for the dolphins to communicate their needs to the humans. Remarkable things have been shown through these earlier efforts, including the dolphins’ ability to recognize and keep track of more than 100 words, and to respond appropriately to changes in syntax [‘bring the surfboard to the man’ versus ‘bring the man to the surfboard.’]. In this new experiment, divers are working with the dolphins to create a mutually agreed upon series of sounds to represent concepts. This is the first real step towards true interspecies communications, and we’re excited about the possibilities, and what can be built on the outcome of these experiments. We’re especially pleased to know the researchers are really getting down to basics and examining the preconceptions, going so far as to wonder if dolphins even have words, as we understand them. We’ll be keeping our eye on this one...

Science Diction

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-06T16:05:42-04:00

We like this nice list of snappy zingers from scientists across the centuries, and hope it will add some cheer to your weekend. Comments at the link are worth a readthrough, too.

From A to Chimpanzee

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-06T12:14:48-04:00

You thought we were kidding about monkey news, eh? The BBC is reporting on an article in the journal Animal Cognition regarding the cataloguing of the ‘gestural repertoire’ of chimpanzees [yes, we know chimpanzees are apes, not monkeys] studied in the wild by a team from the University of St. Andrews. Yes, a dictionary of deliberate movements and their meanings. There are, apparently, as many as 66 recognizable signals, which more than doubles the roughly 30 that had been observed in chimps in captivity. Perhaps most interestingly, by comparing the films to those made of orangutans and gorillas, the researchers are seeing a significant number of overlaps, and this suggests that the common ancestor of all great apes - including humans - used at least some of the same gestures still used today.

No Bones About It

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-05T12:41:18-04:00

An interesting article in the International Herald Tribune regarding the history and changing perception of one of the western world’s earliest and most easily recognized logos or brands - that of the skull and crossbones. The terror associated with the mark taps in to a primal fear of death, and the symbol was used to indicate death well before it started showing up on pirate ships - we note the tombstone of a Colonial-era governor buried nearby dating from 1680, featuring a primitive and spooky version. Nowadays, we see little skull-and-crossbones prints on baby blankets and clothes, or dog collars, and the like. The design has been sapped of its capacity to sow fear, and where once its display was cause enough for hanging, it now seems to indicate not much more than a wee bit of naughtiness. While there has been much written about semantic drift in words, it’s pretty cool to see a visual brand change meaning across time...

Turning to Japanese...

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-04T17:21:50-04:00

The New York Times reports today on recent academic investigations on the origins of Japanese and the Japanese people. The findings suggest a much later arrival of the language than commonly held, and thus that the indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherer culture, whose presence has been dated to 30,000 years ago, were not the immediate forebears of the Japanese of today. Instead, the study seems to indicate the Yayoi people brought the language that became Japanese with them when they brought their agricultural “wet rice” culture to the Japanese islands from the Korean peninsula about 2,200 years ago. We have some reservations concerning the fact that the lead researcher is not an historical linguist, and that the methodology relies on something called Bayesian phylogeny and computer-generated charts of language relation later sampled for statistical relevance. We can see a lot of potential problems here, but some professionals in the field - with far more knowledge of the actual work done than we have - are lauding the findings and suggesting it fits with previously known facts about the culture and settlement activity in the area. The internal and sociopolitical repercussions amongst the famously insular Japanese will be something to watch.

Dated Puns

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-04T10:35:55-04:00

As was pointed out this morning in the shop, today is apparently Star Wars Day, as in “May the 4th be with you.” We’ll be celebrating with ewok burgers and beers after work.

Linkfest the First

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-03T19:42:59-04:00

As promised earlier, here’s a quick rundown of some of the stories that caught our eye over the past week: One of the features that we humans had held as self-defining has now been observed in monkeys, namely, the ability to recall qualities and positions of objects that are not present. The more we learn about what our primate relatives can do, the more alike we seem... A new study claims to show a link between personalities and language in multilingual individuals, with different perceptions and ways of behaving when using different languages. ...Hesitation particles are an important part of a child’s first language acquisition, as they serve as verbal cues that the upcoming word is potentially important or, ummm, new... After 120 years, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray will finally be issued in its uncensored form. ...We noted a fantastic introductory guide to the field of Historical Linguistics, with great comments worth reading through... Well, if we thought we could stop Skynet from becoming self-aware using humor, we’re out of luck, as a program has been developed which allows computers to recognize and produce dirty jokes of the “that’s what she said” variety. We think we’re going to love this book by Arthur Phillips, a novel about the purported discovery of a lost play by Shakespeare. The final third of the book features the manuscript in question, and the reviewers are crowing about the fantastic faux-Shakespeare presented therein. We have a soft spot for Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Viennese philosopher of language who changed the way we think about the world, and the role of language in thought and perception. Having published only one volume in his lifetime - the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - it is beyond amazing to learn of a discovery of a trunkful of his notes and writings that will revolutionize our understanding of the man and his mind. ...A seventeenth-century book, whose popularity was rife but which seemed to be unremarkable, turns out to be a very discreet sex manual of sorts, with enough metaphors to make it past the censors of the day...

Our Worst Nightmare

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-03T18:21:08-04:00

An article in today’s Science section of the New York Times discusses a less-well-known form of dementia which affects the language region of the brain, known as Primary Progressive Aphasia. Similar to, but not related to Alzheimer’s, this degenerative disease robs those who suffer from it of their ability to find or use the right word, or even use sign language, as that relies on the same area of the brain. The most terrifying aspect is that the patient is painfully aware of the progression, and the eventual disintegration of the faculty of speech. As people who work in the world of words, and who view the world through that particular lens, the thought of losing our ability to communicate - or interact with the world - fills us with the worst kind of dread.

Tempus Fugit

team@nomenon.com — 2011-05-03T11:45:55-04:00

Holy Molé! It has been more than a week since the last update - no way to start our blog.... We’re pleased to have been busy, but have let many interesting and thematically relevant stories get by us. Check back later today for some good reading, and a whole bunch of catching up. As for the title of this post, here’s a neat little experiment in parsing: how many different ways can you understand the following sentence? Time flies like an arrow.

Word Search

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-19T13:10:38-04:00

The English language is a vast, wonderful thing. It is, in fact, the language with the largest number of words, and arguably the best documented, with most every word tracked to its sources, etymology and first use in print courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary We note with pleasure a new attempt to corral a large number of the words we have in English which have no apparent derivation - ‘orphan’ words, in the field. Prof. Anatoly Liberman at the University of Minnesota has made this effort is life’s work. He seeks to account for words we use every day, but which have no apparent source or discernible etymology. Words like frog, boy, girl, oat, dwarf or heifer seem to have shown up out of nowhere, and while getting a first date of use for many of these will be easy, sorting out their backstory seems nigh on impossible to us. Brave lexicographer, credit to linguists everywhere...

Double Plus Ungood

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-18T11:14:28-04:00

We noted an article over the weekend that got our goat good. Apparently, the fine folks at the TSA now take the position that being upset at TSA screening procedures is indication of terrorist intentions. So now expressing concern that one’s constitutional rights are being abrogated is sufficient cause to have those rights taken away. So much for freedom of speech, or from unreasonable search & seizure. George Orwell’s ghost must be jealous he didn’t come up with this idea first.

A more considered response...

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-15T12:14:08-04:00

To follow up on yesterday’s post regarding the latest theory in the field of historical linguistics, Sam had posted this comment in a thread elsewhere on the web: ...There is no such thing as a constant rate of change when we talk about language. Contemporary Icelandic is, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same as Old Norse, such so that a schoolchild in Iceland can read the thousand year old eddas and sagas in the original with no issues. Compare English, and how we almost need a dictionary for Shakespeare, written only four hundred years back. ... Comparative Historical Linguistics, as an academic pursuit, relies on actual evidence when reconstructing protoforms, and thus can only make claims about the common ancestor of two or more languages of which we have actual evidence, usually of the written variety. This pretty much only goes back about 5,000 years, with the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda being the oldest attested Indo-European language we have, therefore closest to the protoform. In the same way that one can reconstruct Latin if one knows about French, Italian, Spanish, Romanche, etc., it is possible to reconstruct I-E with knowledge of Old Church Slavonic, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hittite, etc. I know of no proof of efficacy for any attempt to posit relations between the larger language families like Semitic, Altaic, Bantu, Sino-Tibetan, and I-E, etc., and call anyone out on the verifiability of any such claims. We have an awful lot more than a few words in proto-Indo-European, actually, and a very good idea of the society and belief system in which they were spoken. ... Here's a good cocktail fact for example: the words 'naked' and 'night' are, in fact, etymologically related -so we can posit that the Indo-European speakers probably wore no pyjamas... ...The claim is that the phonemic inventory (i.e., the set of allowable sounds within a given language) shrinks the further one gets from southwest central Africa, but they've only sampled 504 languages. It is generally agreed that there are about 5,000 to 7,000 languages in the world, so why is the sample so small? The grammars of most all of these languages have been published over the years, so the data are available...

Could it be? Naaah...

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-14T16:36:54-04:00

Some news in the unusually dusty and arcane field of historical linguistics today, as an article in Science Magazine posits evidence of a single origin point for all of human language, as well as a time frame. Without getting into the academic and political considerations, this is a controversial position to take. However, from what we’ve read about the article, we’re skeptical. Aside from the obvious impossibility of proving anything about spoken communications that may have occurred tens of thousands of years before anything like a record of a language exists, we note that the crux of the argument relies on an [admittedly clever] count of phonemic inventories - allowable sounds in a given language - across a geographic swath ranging from Southwest Africa to the Pacific Island, it apparently only looks at a sample size of 500 languages. As linguists generally place the number of living languages across the globe at somewhere between five and seven thousand, we see red flags at the conclusions being drawn from the size of the sample... We’d love to hear the arguments, and welcome more technical questions form the readership. We’ll be following this one pretty closely...

Metaphors Make This World

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-12T14:10:10-04:00

We’re delighted to see David Brooks’ column (currently the top most emailed article from nytimes.com) make prominent mention of a book we consider central to our way of seeing the world and a foundation of our approach to naming. Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, a classic now in a second edition, broke new ground in linguistic analysis by categorizing, classifying and organizing the metaphors that pervade our everyday speech. We recommend the book to anyone who wants to better hear the poetry that surrounds us every day.

The Monkey's Eyebrows

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-11T17:53:20-04:00

We’ve just come across a delightful bit of linguistic history in the form of a dictionary [or perhaps more accurately a phrasebook] of slang from the 1920s taken from an issue of Flapper magazine. One function of slang is to define group boundaries - you either understand and you’re “in,” or you don’t, and you’re “out” - and we are made privy to the concerns and mindset of the cool kids of our (great-) grampa’s generation with this peek. While the number of terms relating to dancing as a social function seems outsized to the contemporary reader, there are an awful lot of entries dealing with sex and drugs. Plus ça change... Some of the definitions themselves seem to be wink-wink end runs around the censor - or the disapproving parent. This all makes for entertaining reading. We note the number of phrases that still pepper contemporary English: a swan, a grubber, ‘the bee’s knees,’ and those whose usage is lost to time, even if the topic is still regularly broached: “Mustard Plaster”? An “unwelcome guy who sticks around.” These days, actual mustard plasters have been replaced by adhesive bandages, which we usually call “bandaids” - but we’ll address that whole brand dilution kettle of fish some other time. Like any window to another world, we enjoy this article for opening our eyes and teaching us something about our recent past. As a snapshot of the ever-changing river that is language, we’re grateful for the wisdom we can glean from this find.

Ways of Being, and the Power of Words

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-10T16:19:29-04:00

We’re big fans of Virginia Heffernan, and glad to see she now has her own column in the Sunday New York Times. On today’s op-ed page, she has a piece exploring the way we use words to shape opinion, with specific reference to “internet addiction.” We found the article to be thoughtful and thought provoking on several levels, and the comments in response were good reading in their own right. She observes: “In general, if a pastime is not classy, those who love it are “addicted.” Opera and poetry buffs are “passionate.”” This echoes George Lakoff’s work on “Framing” rather pithily. The words we use to describe an object or condition have everything to do with how we perceive it, individually or as part of a group. To paraphrase the Simpsons, a rose would not smell as sweet if it were called a stench blossom, or a crapweed. At Nomenon, we’re keenly aware of the power and effect of words well-chosen, and we’d be glad to bring our expertise to bear on your naming and branding needs, ensuring positive response in your target market.

BBC on LOL in OED

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-10T11:03:50-04:00

In the wake of the recent announcement that the Oxford English DIctionary will be including ‘LOL’ and ‘OMG’ in the future editions, an article on the BBC News web site takes a look at some aspects of ‘txt.’ The article makes some interesting observations on language chance, written vs. spoken language, etymology, and other things that float our boat around here. The comments on the article are just as interesting. We particularly enjoyed the sidebar on non-English variations on the theme: LOL around the world ...French version, from the initials of "mort de rire" which roughly translated means "dying of laughter" ...The letter ח is pronounced 'kh' and ה is pronounced 'h'. Putting them together makes "khakhakha" ...Thai variation of LOL. "5" in Thai is pronounced "ha", three of them being "hahaha" ...Swedish abbreviation of the term Asgarv, meaning intense laughter ...Afghan abbreviation of the Dari phrase "ma khanda mikonom", which means "I am laughing" ...Moral of the story: be sure to know the colloquialisms of the target market you are aiming for, in terms of both geography and language, or your product name could have people ROFL[T]AO. Nomenon’s Native Speaker Language Checks can ensure that no one giggles at your big overseas launch.

Shakespeare, again?

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-08T18:06:25-04:00

Well, this one doesn’t show any signs of slowing down... Another scholar seeks to diminish The Bard asserting proof of Shakespeare as “collaborator” - there’s a loaded word - as divined by computer analysis of the text of his 58 (?) plays. The evidence is that a three-word phrase appears once in Henry V, and then nowhere else in Elizabethan plays but a fourth edition of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Perhaps we’re straw-manning it a bit, but that seems a tough one to swallow. The most interesting bit about the story is the existence of a program built to spot plagiarism in the work of law students. What, do they doubt the ethics of those who seek to enter that noble profession?

Whew...

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-08T13:15:14-04:00

Well, we’re up and running with the new site. I’m sure there will be a few kinks to be sorted during this ‘shakedown cruise,’ and we’d be glad to hear about any issues on any platform or browsers, etc. We’ve activated comments on the blog, and hope to build a regular readership and an active set of fans. We’d be glad for your edits or notes on any element of our new site, suggestion on topics you’d like to see addressed here, or a simple hello from friends old and new, and those not yet met.

Hello Wor(l)d

team@nomenon.com — 2011-04-06T12:26:50-04:00

After many years of talking about it, we’re getting down to business and arriving fashionably late to Web2.0. We see this forum as an opportunity to let folks know what goes on in the minds of the word-oriented people who work here, what news captures our attention, how we see language in action in all parts of the world, what we think about new product names, or names and language in the news. A regular reader will find plenty of cocktail facts, advances in linguistics and language research, monkeys in the news, and discussion of things we find interesting. Check back regularly for the latest word, or for a bit of knowledge to make any day a day where you have learned something new.