What’s in a Name?

Here are a couple sites making the rounds that visualize name data. (Ooo. I love visualizing name data!) The first is the World Names Profiler. Punch your last name into the box, hit “search,” and you’ll see the distribution of folks who share your name all over the globe. Here’s mine: There you go—quite a bit U.S.-heavy, with smatterings in … 

The Year in Buzzwords.

The New York Times “Week in Review” writes up its take on the state of English lingo in Buzzwords 2007: All We Are Saying. What follows is by no means a complete list of the words that took our attention this year, but rather a sampling from the thousands that endured long enough to find a place in the national … 

Analyze This.

The New York Times ran a cartoon by Ward Sutton last week called “Reading Tea Leaves and Campaign Logos.” If you’ve never seen the prognostication possible from a simple campaign logo, give it a look. And the next time I tell you that writing a paper in Comic Sans can reflect badly on you or dilute your message, perhaps you … 

Limericks & Pi

Here are a quick couple of links relating to curiosities we glanced at in class: You can find The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form here Mike Keith’s story, “Cadaeic Cadenza,” based on the first 3,000 or so digits of pi is here. Enjoy!

“Museum” of Misused Quotation Marks

Ok, ok…technically, they call it a “gallery,” but that title serves to illustrate a point. And for the “quotationally challenged” of you out there (and you know who you are…or may not, actually…) that point may be worth making. If you’d just like to take a look, hop over to The Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks, and have at it. If … 

Erudition.

Behold: “100 Words That All High School Graduates — And Their Parents — Should Know,” as chosen by the editors of the American Heritage dictionaries. If nothing else, it makes for a great band name generator. I hereby lay claim to “kinetic kowtow,” “fatuous xenophobe,” and “vacuous nanotechnology” — though I shall probably shorten the last to “vacuous nanotech,” once …