OK, now I'm on the WOTY thing

See here. NPR interviewed Ben Zimmer on the best Word of the Year candidates.

Good product names, 2010

Team Verb as a group has yet to as much as yawn about the impending Word of the Year and various associated festivities, as far as I can tell. That's not a bah humbug deal but more that we've all been really busy.

But this morning one of us stumbled across Fritinancy's Nicely Named post on cool product names. And they are cool. Two examples:

A New Zealand company that makes wool clothes with a

unique “Baacode” in each garment allows the customer to trace the garment through the entire supply chain.

Nice. And then there's the new pie company, Four & Twenty Blackbirds, with this motto:

Keep your fork—there’s pie!

Now, some people may be bothered by the possible connection of this name and motto to the early modern tradition of actually baking live birds into pies. But a little undercurrent of shock might be just what they wanted ... .

The pace of blogging here will pick up again, but in the meantime, Happy New Year.

Verbing: world domination edition

Whoa, this is a little scary:

Image from here.

We Are the Verb!

This is too awesome! "We are the ones who make a brighter day by making theories..." (I think there might be a gratuitous reference to a deity in there, but I choose to disregard it, in the spirit of the season.)

Welcome to Wississippi: tragic blending

A key member of Wisconsin's legislature is going to work to turn us into a right-to-work state, the governor-elect is going to try and break state employee unions and that's barely the beginning. No wonder I've heard a whole set of people say that we're becoming Mississippi.

In response to this morning's news that Wisconsin's new governor has succeeded in getting $810,000,000.00+ dollars of federal funding taken away from Wisconsin for high speed rail (we may get to keep 2 mill! see here), a colleague said she'd heard somebody say:

Welcome to Wississippi.

Mississipians will be more offended by this than the governor-elect, I'm sure. As the link above says:

"A month before he's even been sworn into to office, Governor-elect Walker has lost good jobs for Wisconsinites," U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore of Milwaukee said in a written statement.

The South, for all the anti-government rhetoric from there, lives high on the federal hog, paid by our federal tax dollars.

American citizen can get along pretty well in his native language of English

See this, from the Onion.