I'd give a kidney if there were no more euphemisms, but then I'd be out of a job, so let me rethink that. In the meantime, here are some euphemisms — all harvested fresh and ready to transplant into your interoffice memos and supersized tweets.  Continue reading...

Apparently, one of the things that is making our Facebook feeds appetizing is a sauce—a combination of metrics mixed in exactly the right proportions to make this particular meal ever appealing.  Continue reading...

Fictional eponyms are a new frontier for brand naming, and the territory is quickly becoming well populated. A partial list includes Amazon's Alexa, the health insurance company Oscar, the "intelligent oven" June, and the mattress brand Eve. The first-name brand isn't your boss – it's your buddy.  Continue reading...

The names of some of the world's most successful brands – from Accenture to Zantac – were widely ridiculed when they were first announced. Today those names are not just accepted but admired. It turns out there's a reason and a name for the attitude shift: The more we're exposed to something unfamiliar, the more we like it. Welcome to the Zajonc effect.  Continue reading...

When the British entrepreneur Kevin Ashton was searching, in 1999, for a term to describe a network of computers with their own means of gathering information and understanding the world, he didn't resort to a noun pileup like "Object Connectivity Matrix." He didn't coin a cute word like "Sensorius." Instead, he gave this dawning phenomenon a name that incorporates one of the oldest words in the English language. He called it the Internet of Things.  Continue reading...

Here's the latest case study of real-life copywriting in action graciously sent to us by Sarah Williams, the head of Wordsmith in England. Thanks, Sarah! (Check out our interview with her here.)

The project:
Bizlinx International, a business networking organization (though, for reasons that you'll learn below, business networking is really not the term I should use here) was looking to re-brand and re-position itself after four or five years of successful trading in Australia and New Zealand. (They also have a small presence in the UK.) Wordsmith was appointed to write all the new material for web and print, as well as re-write and re-brand all the existing material. We were also tasked to project manage the whole undertaking, liaising with branding specialists, designers and web developers to deliver a finished product to the client.

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