To create a good name, you need to create a lot of names. Okay, I'm cribbing a bit. It was the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling who originally said, "To come up with a good idea, you need a lot of ideas." But his observation bears repeating and paraphrasing. In creative endeavors, quantity often begets quality.

Nancy Friedman runs a verbal-branding consultancy called Wordworking, and contributed today's "Candlepower" column on naming. She suggests these blogs on language, branding and media:

Wordmall. "The labor of love of retired English teacher Michael Sheehan (who also contributes to the excellent online magazine Vocabula.com). Each post takes a familiar word or term -- one of my favorites is "bogus" -- and examines its history, etymology, and usage."

The Language Guy. "The lessons of linguistics applied to advertising, journalism, politics, and society. Written by a retired linguist, this blog is invariably well researched and feisty."

You know what "booze" means, of course, but what if you asked someone in London for a definition -- say, 500 years ago? Lexicographer Jonathon Green will tell you the word is a lot older than you might think. He's spent the last quarter century studying slang, and its history, in the English language. The respected editor of the authoritative Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon's written over a dozen books on the subject and has collected a database of over 100,000 slang words. He's now working on a mammoth multi-volume dictionary, due out in 2008, that will cover a half a millennium's worth of words, phrases and figures of speech -- salty and otherwise -- that have seeped into English as slang. We talked to Jonathon about his passion:

I came across this list of terrific writing books as a sidebar to a Detroit Free Press article on storytelling. To read the article, please click here. [Editor]

For me, luck and timing played important roles in getting my first book published. I've dreamed of being a writer ever since Mrs. Jacks, my grade five teacher, first put a gold star on one of my stories (I should note that, as a child, I also wanted to be a veterinarian, a psychiatrist and a racehorse jockey). Throughout my teens, I wrote mounds of poems and short stories; kept a journal for seventeen years; and even tried my hand at a Harlequin Romance-type book. That particular attempt proved to be a dreadful waste of typewriter ribbon.

It all came to an abrupt halt when, in my late twenties, the man I'd lived with for six years died in a motorcycle accident. For whatever reason, I got rid of my typewriter, packed away my paper and pens, and didn't write again for the next fifteen years. Yet my desire to create continued to simmer beneath the surface.

Elementary school teacher Brian Crosby is a technology-in-the-classroom innovator whose efforts have earned him an Apple Computer "Apple iLife Educator Award" honor. He's also the author of a popular educational blog called Learning Is Messy, the tagline of which is, "rollup your sleeves and get messy." It's a credo Brian puts to work at the Agnes Risley School in Sparks, NV, where he teaches at-risk students with the help of a wireless connection and seven-year-old laptops. Reading his blog, we were impressed by Brian's creativity, determination and passion for teaching and technology. When we contacted him we found his enthusiasm infectious -- and deeply inspiring. Here's our conversation:

VT: How can technology energize teaching?