In many ways, Prohibition was a social and legal failure, but in one respect it succeeded wildly: It vastly enriched our lexicons of slang and marketing, often to lasting effect.  Continue reading...

Do you find 21st-century life shallow and superficial? Take another look: In fact, ours is an era of extraordinary depth — linguistically speaking, anyway. As the 2011 song by Adele put it, we're rolling in the deep.  Continue reading...

The ubiquitous, and relatively recent, commercial sense of nation veers away from the word's earlier meanings. And it intersects in interesting ways with a related word that's also in the spotlight right now: nationalism.  Continue reading...

What will you remember about 2018? Among everything else, I'll remember some brand names that made headlines or just piqued my professional curiosity. Here are my top ten.  Continue reading...

Company names coined with the -ery suffix are a distinct trend, signaling "handcrafted" and "traditional" with a dash of "innovative" and a soupçon of "lovable."  Continue reading...

For a while, the trendy prefixes i- and e- may have been flashy signposts for this new era, but go communicates what they couldn't: urgency, energy, and, most of all, mobility.  Continue reading...