hey, it's noah
October 2011
30 posts
“Depending on how you define the word, advertising is as old as language. Historians place the first printed ad (for a prayer book) in 1472, and the first newspaper ad (a reward for lost horses) in the mid-17th century. But it was 5,000 years ago that the ancient Babylonians identified some of their most important buildings with clearly written words. This doesn’t sound like a terribly savvy act of marketing, but calling attention to a thing is the very definition of advertising. After all, the word we use comes from the French advertir: to call attention.”
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The Atlantic is doing a series on advertising: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/category/ads/
Posted with Percolate
“In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents this week fell 40 per cent and there were no fatal accidents.”
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Traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi decreased significantly during the BlackBerry outage.
BlackBerry cuts made roads safer, police say - The National
Posted with Percolate
Backronyms →
noahbrier.com
This morning I was having a conversation with Leila about the word “phat” which she informed me stood for “pretty hot and tempting.” Surprised, I turned to the internet, specifically Snopes (I think someone needs to come up with a term for the feeling you get when you just know you’ll find something in Snopes and turn out to be right).
According to the site, phat is an example of a “backronym”: “Phrases constructed after the fact which are attached to existing words and presented as those words’ sources.” I just sort of love the word and idea, which apparently came from a competition held by the Washington Post:
Meredith Williams, in an entry to a competition in The Washington Post on 8 November 1983, seems to have coined bacronym, as a portmanteau of back and acronym. Previously, lexicographer Ben Zimmer tells me, the form was called, somewhat cumbersomely, a prefabricated acronym as well as a reverse acronym. The word was popularised in July 1994 by another contest, in New Scientist, though it was then said to be a reinterpreted acronym, neither the original nor the current principal sense.
Some serious etymology for a Saturday morning.
