Speaking of the big time, The Name Inspector is pleased to announce that Lexiophiles has included this blog among the world’s Top 100 Language Blogs for 2009 (#28, to be specific). Thanks to those of you who voted! What’s more, The Name Inspector ranked #3 among blogs by language professionals. #1 and #2 are Separated by a Common Language and The Shifted Librarian, respectively. Fritinancy, a fellow namer’s blog and one of The Name Inspector’s faves, is #4. Given the arbitrary nature of such rankings, let’s call that a satisfying dead heat. The Top 100 list is heavily skewed toward blogs about language learning (which isn’t surprising, since that’s a focus of the Lexiophiles site), and doesn’t include such heavy hitters as Language Log, so it isn’t comprehensive. But The Name Inspector is honored nonetheless.

Not so long ago, The Name Inspector’s younger son got his first pair of shoes at Nordstrom. As a little lagniappe, he also got a plush toy named Nordy, whose head is shown on the right above. This is definitely The Name Inspector’s favorite plush toy inspired by a sketch by a famous philosopher of language.

Nordy is an ambiguous toy. Aside from the dot for an eye and the protuberances vaguely suggesting snouts and/or head-tops, it has no facial features. If you look at it one way, it seems like the bigger protuberance represents ears, and the smaller one a little bunny-ish nose. If you look at it another way, the bigger protuberance looks like a proboscis, and the littler one suggests the top of a head.

In other words, Nordy looks like a stylized version of Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, pictured in the middle. Wittgenstein was interested in ambiguity and in the phenomenon of “seeing as”–what we experience when we first see the drawing “as a duck” and then see it “as a rabbit” (or vice-versa). What did he conclude from the duck-rabbit? Well, that’s not entirely clear. But the duck-rabbit is cute, right? Apparently some plush toy designer, perhaps a frustrated (or happy?) philosophy PhD unable to land an academic job, thought so.

Wittgenstein got the idea for his duck-rabbit from an American psychologist named Joseph Jastrow, who probably saw the picture at the left, which appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1892. Harper’s, in turn, seems to have swiped it from a German publication called Fliegende Blätter. To learn more about the provenance of the duck-rabbit, take a look at John F. Kihlstrom’s page on the topic.

Now, The Name Inspector realizes that the “millionth word” story is a ridiculous play for attention that’s not to be taken seriously, and that the folks at the Global Language Monitor know it. But the story has gotten people talking about what a word is, and that’s a topic that The Name Inspector can warm to.

The easiest criticism of the millionth-word story is that Web 2.0 isn’t a word, but a phrase. That’s the main thing that linguist Geoffrey Pullum had to say about the matter on Language Log. And that’s pretty disappointing, actually, because it ignores the fact that the whole enterprise of counting words that precisely is linguistically suspect.

Why would The Name Inspector object to counting words? Believe it or not, it’s not due to a perverse academic refusal to give simple answers to simple questions. The innocent word, which seems to be the very simplest little bit of language to understand, is remarkably hard to pin down. There are very clear examples of words, like dog, but around the edges the word category is fuzzy. That makes it hard to count words with any precision, let alone announce the exact time of day when a word enters the language.

Let’s start with the very dumbest definition of word, the one used by the “word count” function on your word processor: A word is a string of characters (lets say letters) with no spaces. Well, that would mean the following string consists of five words: jjj akjsdhfjkh auygfh tg drqwds.

We can do better than that: A word is a string of letters with no spaces that has a meaning and can be used in a sentence. By this definition, Web 2.0 doesn’t cut it. And many people who’ve weighed in on the issue in blog comments have raised just that objection. Some object to the space, some to the digits, some to the punctuation. Sorry, sorry, and sorry. If inclusion in a dictionary is the ultimate proof of wordhood, then consider this: Even the abridged online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary includes entries for deep six, 12-step, 20/20, 24-7, 3 D, and even 86ing (a slang term for refusing to serve a customer). All these include numbers, all but one include digits, some have punctuation, and one has a space.

Now about spaces. It’s commonly accepted that English has complex prepositions that consist of parts. In some cases the parts are separated by spaces, and in others they’re not. We write in lieu of as three chunks, and instead of as two, even though their structures are parallel, etymologically speaking. Then there’s notwithstanding.

There are many compound words in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (and others) that are written with spaces. A space is a purely orthographic entity, and it’s silly to define a linguistic unit based on orthography alone. Spoken language is primary. Written language is, ultimately, a representation of spoken language. There are compounds that some people write as “one word” and some people write as “two words”, though the pronunciation remains constant. Website/web site is one example. If you use the no-space criterion, you end up saying that such expressions are sometimes words and sometimes not words, based on orthographic variation. And that just doesn’t make good sense.

Of course, you might appeal to The Language Boss to tell you which version is “correct”. But people, it’s time to wake up and realize that The Language Boss is a fiction, like the Wizard of Oz. There are just different people, sometimes with different opinions, bumbling around behind their curtains. Pay no attention to that language maven behind the curtain!

Lurking behind the orthographic issue, of course, is a deeper linguistic one: If some words are made of pieces that are themselves words, how do we know when a group of words adds up to a complex word as opposed to a phrase or a random stretch of language? Here linguists begin to rely on criteria that distance the definition of word from the pragmatic, what-you-list-in-the-dictionary understanding of what a word is. The linguists might, for example, think about how an expression interacts with the rules of English stress assignment, or about it’s syntactic behavior. In any event, for a group of words to add up to a complex word, it has to be a conventional, cohesive unit.

And here there are no hard and fast rules. Idioms make things especially complicated. Merriam-Webster lists kick ass and kick the bucket under its entry for kick. So these idioms get a sort of honorary word treatment. But notice that idioms don’t always occur in exactly the same form: we can kick a little ass or kick some ass or even kick some Raider ass. In idioms, words begin to blend into grammar, and that’s where things get really tricky.

Some idioms, like kick the bucket and kick ass, are identified mostly by the presence of certain component  words. Others, however, are more like grammatical templates. Consider sentences like There’s only so far a car can go with a flat tire, There’s only so long you can sit before you have to get up and walk around, and There’s only so often you can talk or sneak your way out of a fight. There’s a pattern here that’s something like There’s only so X Y can Z, where X is a scalar measure or property of some kind,  Y is a noun phrase, and Z is a verb phrase. Most people wouldn’t call this pattern a word, but it’s hard to find the exact barrier between this pattern and something like kick ass. (To see lots of patterns like this, you might take a look at the Snowclone Database).

Even when you’re talking about words with simple forms, it can be hard to decide how to count them. That’s because words aren’t just forms–they also have meanings, and it’s often the case that the same form has more than one meaning. If the meanings are very different, we usually think of there being more than one word. For example, bank used in connection with a river is one word, and bank used in reference to a financial institution is another.

But what if the meanings are only a little different? How many “words” are represented by these different uses of the verb see?

Can you see the car?
I see that it’s raining.
I don’t see why you’re so angry.
Let’s go see grandma.
Are you seeing anyone?
I’ll see your twenty and raise you ten.
Let me see you to your door.
See to it that this doesn’t get out.

All these complexities don’t mean it’s impossible in principle to count the number of words in the English language. They do, however, mean that it’s very, very hard, and that you have to know what you mean by word before you start.

For The Name Inspector, this news conjures an image of two pigeons fighting over a moldy piece of hot dog bun.

For starters, Jobdango is just a silly name. Besides being phonologically inelegant after Job-, that dang -dango is either one of the most bizarrely gratuitous endings The Name Inspector has ever seen on a name, or it’s a cranberry morpheme that’s probably derived from the name Fandango, in which case it’s embarrassingly unoriginal. The -dango ending makes sense in the name Fandango, because fandango is a word for a Spanish dance that also happens to contain the word fan, which is kind of fitting for a site that sells movie tickets. The name Handango is clearly a play on the word fandango.

But what’s -dango doing in the name Jobdango, which bears no other resemblance to the word fandango? Well, what it’s probably doing is reminding us vaguely of successful commercial websites like Fandango, known to many through its TV commercials featuring hand puppets made out of brown paper lunch bags.

So Jobdango, you should be a tad embarrassed trying to protect -dango as if it’s some kind of special mark that’s uniquely associated with you. It’s not. You didn’t make it up, you weren’t the first to use it, and you might even benefit from people’s familiarity with -dango companies that have gone before you. So just drop it. Drop that moldy hot dog bun.

As you might gather from the title, the book isn’t about naming per se. It’s about a more general phenomenon: the growing need felt by ordinary people to craft short verbal messages that grab attention and stick in people’s minds. Think domain names, blog post titles, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This book will be a kind of Rhetoric 2.0. Or, to use a more timely point of reference, it will be like Made to Stick for language.

The Name Inspector would like to thank a few people who made this deal possible: Seth Godin, who kindly made a referral to his literary agent; Lisa DiMona, said agent from Lark Productions, who patiently helped with and represented the proposal through several drafts; Brendan Curry, Associate Editor at Norton, for championing the proposal there; and Brendan’s colleagues at Norton who gave the book project the thumbs up. Whew–past all those hurdles! Now all The Name Inspector has to do is write the damn book.

And here’s a new twist. The Name Inspector feels bad about excluding people who don’t live in the Seattle area, so if you want a long-distance consultation, we might be able to arrange one using the magic of telephony and PayPal. If you’re in Seattle, though, it works best and is more fun to meet face-to-face.

So what are you waiting for? The Name Inspector is getting in touch with his inner car salesperson. These prices are CRAZY!!

It’s come to The Name Inspector’s attention that lots of people would like a bit of his advice right now, but don’t want to pay a full consulting fee. At the same time, The Name Inspector would like to meet more of his readers and make some new connections. So he’s decided to have “office hours” at his favorite cafe, Victrola (on 15th). $20 for half an hour of conversation about your branding problem.

Be aware that brainstorming is not the best way to make use of this time. Thirty minutes is much too short for that. This would be a conversation about naming or verbal branding strategy, a particular name you’re considering, the right way to phrase a particular idea, or some topic like that.

Here’s how it works: you email The Name Inspector to set up a time, then show up at Victrola with a twenty and a question, and find the guy with the Name Inspector sticker on his laptop. Simple and painless, right? But hurry–this offer is a big bargain and a bit of a social experiment, and might end at any time.

The Name Inspector likes the sound of that.

Tags: obama, election, election2008