47 curious things I learned about language in 2021

All year, I cherry-picked tidbits of writing wisdom and esoterica, from ideas for naming brand palettes to what you call baby Roman numerals. Let’s word nerd out together.

Cherries image by Mae Mu on Unsplash

1. These days, everything is a journey—even in business. Fortune 500 execs used the word journey 3,091 times in investor calls (up more than 70%). Such as “We’re on a pricing journey.” —Bloomberg
2. In a study of 100 million Facebook posts, the most effective phrase to use in a headline is will make you. Like so: 10 happy dogs that will make you smile like a Cheshire cat.
3. If you write 25 headlines or titles for every blog, story, or email you write, you’ll usually come up with a winner. This practice was also a favorite of David Ogilvy.
4. In an evergreen experiment, Vox republished 88 old articles (some with significant edits), and got more than 500,000 new hits on their website.
5. We’re more likely to believe phrases that rhyme. So if you’re looking to persuade people of something, come up with a slogan that is a tingle of a jingle. —1999 research study
6. A stinky pinky is a two-word rhyming phrase, like flower power.
7. A great way to figure out which headlines are most compelling is to test them in the wild, on real readers. Often, The Atlantic publishes the same article with 2+ headlines and lands on the one that entices the most clicks.
8. In business, garbage language abounds. Syncs are “the worst kind of meeting — the kind where attendees circle the concept of work without wading into the substance of it. Syncs are filled with discussions of cadences and connectivity and upleveling as well as the necessity to refine and iterate moving forward.” Molly Young in Vulture
9. Illegal alien is out. Non-citizen is in. A look at the language of the Biden administration.
10. Modern grammar books tend to define about 8 parts of speech, from nouns to adjectives. But some vintage guides went deep and defined up to 33.
11. The phrase master bedroom has its roots in slavery. To sidestep this connotation, try calling it the owner’s suite or main bedroom instead. via Conscious Style Guide
12. There are yearly competitions to write palindromes, a word or phrase that uses the same letters forward and backward. A standout from 2020 was covid-themed: “Risk same cafe? Sure, talk later.” “Use face mask sir.”
13. As far back as 1856, words in ALL CAPS have meant shouting.
14. Atelophobia is the fear of imperfection, of not being good enough.
15. Homographs with accents on different syllables help differentiate their parts of speech. To contract, record, and address are verbs. The identically spelled contract, record, and address are nouns. — via Tumblr
16. Every argument you’d ever need for using the pronoun they (vs. he or she.) Friends, this teardown is from 2009. Why are we still talking about this?
17. A woman named Ann Fisher “first enshrined the notion that the masculine pronoun covered all humanity.”
18. The letter V is the only letter in the English language that is never silent. (Now I’m trying to think of a word in which an l is silent.) —Reader’s Digest
19. Younger people tend to skip punctuation in texts and instant messages. Want to really freak them out? Send them a terse k.
20. “Marley was dead: to begin with.” Five amazing examples of punctuation in literature, from Nabokov to Levi. — Kathryn Shulz
21. Yes, it’s possible to write a poem about punctuation.
22. In 1946, George Orwell wrote a rant called Politics and the English Language in which he bemoaned the decline of English and the rise of cliche, replete with examples like Achilles heel.
23. A naming study showed that picking the right name for a drug can spike your sales. Names with Z are out (bye, Prozac). Names ending in O or A (hello Latuda) tend to appeal more to those who speak the Romance languages in Europe and South America.
24. Want to charge $26 for French toast? Throw a $1,000 frittata on the menu. This helps make expensive items seem more palatable. —Wall Street Journal
25. If you’re ever in the joyful position of getting to name brand colors, think outside the Crayola box. Try using names that show personality, speak to your values, or tie back to your company name. A fab example is Pentagram’s branding for IFundWomen, where all the colors start with the letter I. And they even dubbed a bright color Idea.
26. The goal of walking 10,000 steps per day isn’t based on research. It came about because the Japanese character for 10,000 万 looks like a person walking. Clever marketing sparked a movement. —The Atlantic
27. Buried deep in Unicode is a set of 12 ghost characters in Japanese. They mean nothing and might have stemmed from cut and paste errors. Like, actual cuts and pastes on literal paper. — Dampfkraft
28. A great question to ask on customer feedback surveys is: “What nearly stopped you from buying from us?” This can help skyrocket your sales.
29. A litter of kittens is called a kindle, are you for real? And a herd of buffalo is an obstinacy. Just so. I could see it being pretty difficult to get a herd of buffalo to move.
30. Families have their own secret languages called familects. —The Atlantic
31. “Our teeth and ambitions are bared” is a zeugma. Be prepared.
32. When we read, we don’t actually read every word. Our eyes jump quickly from shape to shape, like a rock skipping across a pond. This rapid eye movement is called a saccade.
33. A word in which an l is silent is colonel. I didn’t, in fact, think of this.
34. A micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of death. Just being alive is about 24 micromorts per day, skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump.
35. A solecism is a misuse or misspelling of a word or phrase (often intentionally, for effect), like the brand name Anthropologie.
36. A Roman numeral in lowercase (such as i. ii. iii.) is called a romanette.
37. 1 in 5 of the hardest words to spell in spelling bees tend to come from French. Like clafouti, a French dessert made of custard. —Babbel
38. If an AI bot were to write a Bob Ross TV episode, it might sound like this. “Bob paints a mountain, the one from nature.” The best part — aside from all of it — is when he introduces the three colors we’ll be using today: baby blue, hot pink, and hot baby. — Keaton Patti
39. AI bots that present as female often get the same online harrassment as human women. —New Yorker
40. To get a better response from a group, tweak the way you invite questions. Example: What questions do you have for me? vs. Any questions? via this Twitter thread, which is full of other gems
41. By writing emotional stories about random trinkets, researchers sold $129 worth of riff-raff on eBay for $3,612. See also the infamous Craig’s List post for the 1999 Toyota Corolla.
42. A company in New Jersey sells up to 5,000 typewriters a year to prisoners in the U.S., as they’re often not allowed computers. A person in Texas used his to write a letter and stave off his execution.
43. An excellent short story rife with clever internet-speak, including honeybruh. “Local fool collapses on unnecessary journey.” — Orange Crushed
44. Books from the 18th century looked almost exactly like smart phones (about 6 by 9 inches, easy to hold in your hand or slip in your pocket).
45. Butler University publishes a journal called Word Ways, which is full of linguistic wordplay. Great source of wordy games.
46. In Canada, a sign war started between Dairy Queen and Speedy Glass — and blew up from there.
47. A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter in the alphabet. You’ve likely seen the most famous one: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” But there are all sorts of other fun ones, like “How vexingly quick daft zebras jump.” —Reader’s Digest