Our post on April 12, called Designing for the Wacky New Frontier, discussed some of the ways Web 2.0 is changing our language and presenting new challenges for designers. The Name Inspector is a blog that specializes in keeping up with these trends.
Christopher Johnson is his real name. He’s a self-proclaimed wordavor* with a PhD who has worked as a linguist and language technologist for over 15 years. His experience is vast and his education reputable. His blog discusses the linguistic meaning of words and brand names, defines their verbal harmonies, and describes their visual connotations. His posts are intelligent and interesting with phonetic representations accompanying most words being analyzed.
The site itself takes some time to understand and navigate but once you figure out what it’s all about, it makes for an interesting read. To get you started, here is a post about Liftport, a company that is building an elevator to space.
*a wordavor is a person or animal that eats words (I don’t think it’s in the dictionary yet).
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