Archive for the ‘Language and business’ Category

Turkish Neutrogena

September 7, 2023

Neutrogena hand cream (for dry or chapped hands), specifically. Which I’ve used as a moisturizer for dry skin and a healing cream for abraded skin, on various parts of my body (especially as an adjunct to the coconut oil I use daily on my feet, legs, hands, and arms); it comes in almond-scented and unscented versions. Unremarkable until recently. But yesterday it excited the interest of four linguists, in exchanges on Facebook.

Set off by Monica Macaulay:

— MM: This is a new one on me. I ordered some Neutrogena lotion and the picture looked like what I’m used to, but look what came!!! Is that Turkish? Something went awry with the space-time-language continuum? I’m very puzzled.


(#1) EL KREMİ in its tube

— Geoffrey Nathan: Definitely Turkish — i’s without dots, c-cedillas, s-cedillas. No idea what it means, however. Just remembered — eller means ‘hands’. From a morphology problem.

— AZ [who, once a teacher of introductory morphology, also recognized eller]: Had the same experience a little while back. The lotion seems to be unchanged, but the packaging was a surprise.

— MM > AZ: Really?!? So this is a known unknown? Very, very strange.

— AZ > MM: Well, known to me. You’re only the second person in my experience to have gotten Neutrogena in Turkish.

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Posted in Language and business, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Linguists, Turkish, Writing systems | Leave a Comment »

More watching this space

October 8, 2022

I’m still away meeting a writing deadline, so this posting is another Mary, Queen of Scots notice that I am Not Dead Yet. Meanwhile, I offer you a droll note I posted on Facebook back on 10/3, with a chain of punning responses, and some sad facts about the publishing industry.

What’s in a name? I wrote:

— AZ: Just came across a political reporter named Simon Schuster (talking about the war in Ukraine on MSNBC). I see from the net that he mostly goes by Simon D. Schuster (rather than, say, Simon & Schuster), probably a wise decision.

A p.r. photo of the man, looking genial:


Simon D. Schuster, not any sort of publishing company, much less a gigantic one (photo: Bridge Michigan)

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Posted in Language and business, Names, Puns | Leave a Comment »

May I use you?

September 14, 2021

Well, really, May I use your blog?

More adventures in blogging, this time in dealing with correspondents who want to use my blog for some purpose of their own, in exchange for something; the nature of these proposed deals is usually unclear to me, though I’ve been slowly learning. Here, two cases, of somewhat different sort, to which I’ve assigned the names: the Strong Family Circus; and Matt Thomas, Content Supplier.

With a cartoon for the occasion:


Cartoon from Gaping Void Culture Design Group (more on them below)

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Posted in Language and business, Linguistics in the comics, Music, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

News for penguins: hop on lovepop

April 27, 2020

In the mail today, lovable pop-up penguins! In laser-cut kirigami!


(#1) From Gadi Niram: “I figure it never hurts to send you penguins” (there’s a Page on this blog on my postings about penguins)

From the company’s site:

Lovepop creates beautiful laser-cut pop-up cards designed on ship-building software and handcrafted in the ancient art form of kirigami.

Some of the cards are wonderfully elaborate, little kirigami treasures.

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and business, Penguins | 2 Comments »

What was We thinking?

September 30, 2019

The header is the beginning of a piece in the NYT Opinion section on-line on 9/25/19 (in print 9/26), “Open Offices Are a Capitalist Dead End: One story from WeWork’s inevitable blow-up: Our offices offer few spaces for deep work” by Farhad Manjoo. The first two paragraphs:

What was We thinking? That’s the only question worth asking now about the clowncar start-up known as The We Company, the money-burning, co-working behemoth whose best-known brand is WeWork.

What’s a WeWork? What WeWork works on is work. The We Company takes out long-term leases on in-demand office buildings in more than 100 cities across the globe (lately, it’s even been buying its own buildings). Then We redesigns, furnishes and variously modularizes the digs, aiming to profitably sublease small and large chunks of office space to start-ups and even big companies. Well, profitable in theory: The We Company lost $1.7 billion last year.

The business story is remarkable — you don’t see expressions like clowncar start-up in the pages of the NYT very often — but my point here is a narrow linguistic one and (at first glance) an extremely simple one, which is that

Names Is Names (NIN): A proper name is a name.

Which is to say:

A proper name is a (meaningful) expression, and not merely a form. So that, in general, a proper name has the morphosyntax appropriate to any expression with the referent of that name.

/wi/ (conventionally spelled We) is the name of a company and consequently has the morphosyntax of such a name: 3sg verb agreement (We is ambitious), possessive /wiz/ (We’s business model), etc.  — like /ǽpǝl/ (conventionally spelled Apple): Apple is ambitious, Apple’s business model. The fact that English also has a 1pl pronoun /wi/ (conventionally spelled we) — (we are ambitious, our business model) — is entertaining, but essentially irrelevant, even though the name of the company was chosen with the pronoun in mind. The name was a little joke, a pun on the slant, and now Farhad Manjoo for the NYT has wielded it for a bigger joke, salting his article with instances of conspicuously 3sg (rather than 1pl) We.

Well, I will say a bit about the business story, because it’s funny-awful all on its own, and I’ll say a little more about NIN, both when it’s sturdy and straightforward (as here) and when it’s entangled in complexities.

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Posted in Agreement, Grammatical number, Language and business, Language play, Puns, Singular & plural, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

The GRP of Montpelier VT

May 8, 2019

GRP is short for Government Relations Professional (an actual job title — GRPs have their own professional association, even). The title above is an echo of the title of my 4/9/19 posting “The serial entrepreneur of Victoria BC”, referring to Richard Zwicky, whose latest business venture was a cannabis product distribution company. Yes, a cannabis business-connected Zwicky — and today we get another, Dylan Zwicky, of Leonine Public Affairs in Montpelier VT (at the other side of the continent from Victoria BC), the new vice-president of Leonine’s Vermont Government Relations team with the account of the Vermont-based Trace (representing the hemp and cannabis industries).

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Posted in Language and business, Names, Zwickys | 2 Comments »