September 17, 2014
You may have noticed that breakfast has become the primary battlefield for the fast food heavyweights. Burger King has the Croissan’wich, Taco Bell has been making inroads with the breakfast burritos and waffle tacos they introduced last March, and McDonald’s has been offering the Egg McMuffin for decades. And most recently, along with bolstering their […]
September 4, 2014
Early yesterday, Samsung made a surprise announcement that they would be releasing two new oversized smartphones, the Galaxy Note Edge and the Galaxy Note 4. The Android-based Samsung Note phones have already been pushing the boundaries on phone screen size since the very first Note in 2011. Their comically large screens led to the phones […]
September 18, 2013
I confess, I’m a sucker for a portmanteau. There’s just something so satisfying about forming a new word by squishing two old ones together. Smog (smoky fog), jeggings (jean leggings), murses (male nurses): portmanteaus are clever and fun, and they’re the ultimate in verbal economy. So I really perked up when I came across a […]
June 28, 2012
I heard it on the radio the other day when I was driving: a commercial touting something called a “Yourgage.” Whaaa? Without any context, my immediate associations were of yurts and yogurt. I didn’t have a clue what the announcer was talking about. And then, as it became clear that this was a plug for […]
December 8, 2011
When it comes to wordplay, I’m as big a fan of the portmanteau as the next person. (For those of you who don’t know, a portmanteau is a word formed by squishing parts of two other words together.) Snapple (snap + apple), smog (smoke + fog), jeggings (jeans + leggings): I love how elegantly these […]