Contrived pronunciations and spellings of brand names are annoying. Glad to have The New York Times ask me and esteemed colleagues @fritinancy.bsky.social and @lexlanham.bsky.social about them.

Dr. Meh Live and Let Tie Dye

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.

What if our alphabet is just the 2D shadow of something bigger? What about the letters in higher dimensions we can't see? Even from Flatland, our letters let us describe so much, but imagine what a language with extra-dimensional symbols could express.

Dressing up tonight as spooky action from a distance 👻

The wildest #naming project I have ever worked on launched 25 years ago. I told the story behind the name Accenture to @fortune.com. Please read and enjoy! fortune.com/2025/10/26/t...

Higgledy piggledy Timothée Chalamet Has a name meriting Endless design Much like his forerunner Benedict Cumberbatch: Hexasyllabically, Easy to rhyme

August linkstack: political lingo, AI news, a new word game, a terrific new book, and more. Feat. @grammargirl.bsky.social @cwarzel.bsky.social @operativewords.com @awalkerinla.bsky.social @trufelman.bsky.social @caseynewton.bsky.social et al. fritinancy.substack.com/p/august-lin...

March links: Banned words, dead names, restored vowels, @newyorker.com style, and a close reading of a 1958 issue of “Male” magazine. Feat. @operativewords.com @bcdreyer.social @zinzin.bsky.social @grammargirl.bsky.social @emckean.bsky.social & more. open.substack.com/pub/fritinan...

Solid! 🙌🏼 But I think 'Trump Slump’ are the words you are looking for. #naming

Um, excuse me, it's Proto-INDO-European, not Proto-European.

Try searching for the file Bobbyfinalfinalfinal2finalreallyfinal3.jpg Best of luck!

Word of the week: Forestalgia, with notes on other -stalgias. Don't miss @operativewords.com comment about “lostalgia”! fritinancy.substack.com/p/word-of-th...

Announcement just now at SeaTac airport, calling out boarding group letters with joyful alternatives to the NATO alphabet: B as in “beautiful”, D as in “delightful”. Beautiful and delightful, indeed! Thanks, Alaska Airlines gate agent, for those little bits of joy! 🤩 #naming

'World Wide Web' contains fewer syllables than its intended short form, 'www.' The shorter version actually takes longer to say.

You can learn a lot about a word by the company it keeps.

This, dear readers, is why you don’t name your company BeyondTrust. Firstly, including Trust in your name invites suspicion. If you want to be perceived as trustworthy, be trustworthy. Second, if you are “beyond trust”, you are past trust: untrusted and untrustworthy. #naming

Color of the year! Words of the year! Mispronounced brand names! My December linkstack, feat. @lynneguist.bsky.social @tonythorne007.bsky.social @mashedradish.bsky.social @pkrugman.bsky.social @tomfreeman.bsky.social @operativewords.com & more #woty2024 fritinancy.substack.com/p/december-l...

These bang-on and bonkers color names: Stygian blue, self-luminous red, hyperbolic orange. A masterclass in descriptive #naming! 🙌🏼

On a literal level, "capricracy" means rule by goats. #naming

As marketers, how do we create slogans that not only capture attention but also leave a lasting impression? Well...it depends...

Absolute legend. A feature figure in my Lx studies. RIP #linguistics

If you need business jargon, it's all here. Every. Single. One. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-going-to-close-this-deal-using-business-words-ive-heard-men-yell-in-airports

Do you want your slogan to be liked or remembered? You can only pick one. My latest blog post is about the findings of ingenious experiments, in which researchers uncovered how specific linguistic properties of slogans and taglines govern their ability to be remembered or liked. Read and enjoy!

"One Undershaft" is a downer of a name for London's tallest (planned) building. www.bbc.com/news/article...

It’s like a full-body sign language. Are there actual gestural languages that make use of the full body like this? Actual question? #linguistics #signlanguage

Big congratulations to Operative Words' client, Growl, who today launched the world's-first connected boxing platform! Operative Words is super proud to have created the name Growl. Clients who make great decisions are the best clients. 🥰 #naming

Never realized how musical notation could be applied to prosody. Meters and feet, but with notes! As a linguist, I feel like I should have known this already? 🙄

If you see this, post a knight

I agree 💯

My first independent #naming project in 1990 was to name streets for a development near Monterey. I gave them three street theme options: Golf, Nature, and Spanish. They went with Nature. Anyway, please enjoy this delightful gift article about naming streets.

Ooh, I learned a word today (albeit one which has been around since at least the mid-2000s). Despite the meaning of 'narcotecture', on a phonetic level, this blend just really works.

Anyone else here at The Palace of Fine Arts for The Rest is History Live?

Well, would ya look at that: Mitsubishi means "3 diamonds" in Japanese, and Samsung means "3 stars" in Korean. #naming

chicago public library:

Hi! For those of you new to me, I name things. A good place to learn more about my weird job is this 2015 New York Times Magazine article that documents a naming project I directed, The Weird Science of Naming New Products. Read and enjoy! #naming www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/m...

📣 Operative Words is proud to announce that SparkCognition, a leading AI platform for infrastructure and industrial operations, has changed its name to Avathon! We are grateful for the opportunity to rename you. 🙏🏼 avathon.com #naming #AI

California is taking out the trash 🚮 #naming

I just used @blueark.app to import 1600 of my old tweets into Bluesky. Cost less than $6 bucks. So far so good! Recommended!

I recently named a women’s health app, Ourself. At the time I thought I invented the word myself, having forgotten I heard it first in the 1979 movie The Warriors. Thanks for the deep history of “ourself”, Stan! www.ourself.health

This week, I have predictions about what Trump 47 will be like, and how we have to act and think differently from we did during Trump 45. We know his game now. Also, a Gen X supergroup, a remarkable touchdown dance, and some other stuff that isn't doom. rangelife.substack.com/p/these-fami...

Post a pic YOU took (no description) to bring some zen to the timeline ☺️

sign language neology is the coolest theconversation.com/how-we-devel...

Thank goodness. This name grab by OAK was a terrible idea, and utterly oblivious to the obvious confusion that would (and has!) ensued. Oakland and East Bay are epic in their own right, no need to mimic our fair neighbor across the bay. #naming

I've been told it's helpful to resurface older content here, so I'll be sharing classic blog posts. Let's start with Creative Names the Easy Way, a tutorial on the "cloaked brief" #naming technique. Links within posts have not been updated; some may be 404. I hope you find this post useful!

How fun! "It is believed to be the first time a scientific name has been inspired by a brewery."

A recent eye-opening chat with an actual ontologist led me to Concepticon and the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS). Read about these powerful tools in my latest blog post update. For #conceptexploration, #naming, #brandarchitecture, etc, these tools are worth checking out!

If you see this, post a concert photo you took Here’s Phil Lesh from Ventura County Fairgrounds in 2022