What was the word of the year for 2022? It depends on whom you ask and how you frame the question. Maybe your personal word of the year, after two years of pandemic restrictions, was vacation. Maybe you feel strongly about the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. …

Name development is my profession; keeping track of interesting names is my avocation. And so when each year winds to a close, I like to look back over the upper-case names that stood out over the past year. …

In May 2022 a New York fashion stylist, Allison Bornstein, posted a series of TikTok videos explaining what she called the three-word method for finding your personal style. Pull out the clothes you wear most often, she suggested, and identify three adjectives that describe them. …

Retail’s a tough business. Margins are small, survival rates low. If you fail, it’s game over. Second chances are rare. Third chances? Impossible. Unless … This is the story of a retail brand that in its 34-year history has gone under not once but twice, and somehow, remarkably, is thriving…

With Musk-era Twitter in turmoil, some users are seeking alternatives that scratch the familiar social-media itch. One popular alternative to 16-year-old Twitter is 6-year-old Mastodon, the decentralized open-source service that has grown rapidly since late October 2022, when Elon Musk took over Twitter. I use both services (my handle on…

To the average civilian, the concept of name taxonomies or categories is vague at best. Unless you’re a naming professional, you probably think of corporate and product names as short or long, trendy or stale, available as an internet domain or not. And that’s about it. Those categories are more…

Previously in Travel Notes: SFO to NYC, Aboard the Queen Mary 2, London, Bristol. Does Wales have the coolest flag in the world? It’s possible. Cardiff, the Welsh capital, is a mere one-hour train ride from Bristol, where I’d been staying with friends Jane and Andy. We decided to make…

Previously in Travel Notes: SFO to NYC, Aboard the Queen Mary 2, London. You can board the Great Western Railway in London’s Paddington Station and arrive in Bristol, on England’s west coast, in an hour and forty minutes. It’s a short trip but a big contrast. My destination was 41…

Previously in Travel Notes: SFO to NYC, Aboard the Queen Mary 2 This was my third visit to London, but my last visit was a long time ago. In fact, except for a short trip to Vancouver, BC, in 2017, I hadn’t been outside the US since 1995. …