Archive for the 'Orthography' Category

Why the “millionth word” story is silly

Posted in Bad Linguistics, News, Orthography, Uncategorized, Words on June 12th, 2009 1 Comment »

On Wednesday the Global Language Monitor “announced” that English got its one-millionth word at precisely 10:22 am GMT that day. And the word was Web 2.0, so naturally, blogs such as  Mashable, John Battelle’s Searchblog,  and TechCrunch took notice.
Now, The Name Inspector realizes that the “millionth word” story is a ridiculous play for attention that’s [...]

Q gotta be kidding

Posted in Company Names, Names, Naming Stories, Orthography, Trademark Issues, Words on September 27th, 2007 2 Comments »

Last Friday’s New York Times had an article about QVC, described as “the leading home shopping network”. QVC is one of those boring abbreviation names—it stands for “Quality, Value, Convenience”. Apparently QVC wants to jazz up its image with a rebranding of sorts, and has a new ad campaign prominently featuring the letter Q. The [...]

Village of the dots: The name Kijiji

Posted in Company Names, Foreign Word Names, Names, Orthography, Real Word Names on July 11th, 2007 4 Comments »

We’re really getting a chance to enjoy the graphic possibilities of the letters i and j lately. If you’re a blogger you can put a Lijit Wijit on your blog. And now there’s Kijiji. Actually, there has been Kijiji for a while now in other countries, but eBay has just launched a U.S. version of [...]