As the massive oil disaster unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico, John Conway of the Cosmic Variance blog wonders what name we will eventually settle on for the environmental catastrophe. The "BP Deepwater Horizon Spill"? The "Transocean/BP Leak"? Read more here.

Last week, members of the Special Libraries Association were asked to vote on a radical renaming of their organization: it was proposed that the SLA become the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals, or ASKPro. The contentious wrangling over the proposal revealed deep ambivalence about the words library and librarian in the digital age. We asked Stan Friedman, senior research librarian for Condé Nast Publications, for some insights into the terminological debate.  Continue reading...

As far as I know, no university has a Department of Nomenclature. I've never heard of an internship in brand naming. So what's an aspiring name developer — or even an inquiring civilian — to do?  Continue reading...

You can read it. You can watch it. You can talk about it online with your friends. It's a sort of picture book — or, more precisely, a moving-picture book — but its inventors call it a Vook. That's Vook as in video + book.  Continue reading...

The passing of New York Times language columnist William Safire has been well noted here (by VT executive producer Ben Zimmer) and elsewhere. The death of Edward Gelsthorpe, who died September 12 and whose Times obituary appeared directly beneath Safire's on September 28, has been less commented on. Yet in his way Gelsthorpe had almost as powerful an influence on the world of words as did Safire.  Continue reading...

Have you heard? This economic slump we're in isn't just a recession: it's a mancession — a downturn that hurts men more than women. The term has been popularized by a University of Michigan economics and finance professor, Mark J. Perry, whose Carpe Diem blog employs lots of charts and graphs to drive home the point that male workers are taking it on the chin.

That's bad news. But it turns out there's one sector men in which men are doing just dandy. I refer, of course, to the market in man-words and man-brands.  Continue reading...