You know that feeling when you walk into a shopping mall and are so overwhelmed by all the distractions you lose track of what you came there for? That’s the Gruen Transfer or Gruen Effect, named for Victor Gruen, the architect who designed...
Andrea in San Diego, California, noticed a new restaurant with a name spelled in a curious way. Is there a term for this kind of intentional misspelling used in advertising? Onomastics is the study of naming, and a good source for information about...
Online recaps of Mad Men or Breaking Bad can be as much fun as the shows themselves. So why not recap classic literature — like, say, Dante’s Inferno? A literary website is doing just that. And, you’ve heard about the First World and the...
Name developer and language observer Nancy Friedman tweeted this curious tracking notice from UPS: “Your package has experienced an exception.” This is part of a complete episode.
Nancy Friedman, who writes the blog Fritinancy, tweeted this haiku for National Grammar Day: “Dear yoga teacher/ if you say down once more/ I’ll hurt you, no lie.” This is part of a complete episode.
Nancy Friedman’s blog Fritinancy is a great source of information about how products get their names. For example, the names Twitch and Jitter were rejected before the creators of Twitter finally settled on the well-known moniker. This is part...