Nomenclatterrrr!!!

Yes,



but...

Nomenclature

How apt that you should merely motion, saying nothing: for this land has not yet been given a name, certainly not a Latin one; it does not yet exist.

- André Brink, An Instant in the Wind

Surrealest interview

INTERVIEWER: Clarice Lispector, where does this name, 'Lispector,' come from?
CLARICE LISPECTOR: I don't know. I asked ... It's a Latin name, right?

In Kafka's footsteps

Of course, one feels sorry for children burdened by their parents with airy-fairy, innuendo-laden or just plain ridiculous names. But I can't help the suspicion that Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii (from New Zealand) perhaps isn't au fait with the overtones of her chosen pseudonym, either.

Dull sense of humour

Vote due on link between village of Dull and US town of Boring

In which the most interesting points to note are that 

1) the good people of Dull find day-to-day existence so boring (or, indeed, dull) that they count the passage of cyclists through their village; and

2) that Boring is named after a US Civil War veteran, an area of nomenclature - 'Jubiliation T Cornpone', for example - not normally troubled by an excess of boring names. (Cornpone, in case you were wondering, was born in the town of Dogpatch.)

Tolkien tells the Nazis

... if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

- JRR Tolkien, on being asked by a German publisher whether he was of Aryan descent

[With thanks to Letters of Note.]

Coldplay and me

I am amused to read - in this article wot I found down the back of the internet - that Coldplay regret calling their last album Mylo Xyloto, not because it's stupid (which it is) but because it confuses the punters and is made up of "two words that you couldn't even google."

1) The journalist, Tim Jonze, concludes, entertainingly, that this is not actually true. Even more amusingly, a Google search for these two words [Ahhh... Was Chris Martin perpetrating a terribly clever bluff?] reveals plenty of results, foremost among which being Martin's insistence that it won't. There's even a guide to pronunciation, for those not classically trained in pop-gobbledygook.

2) As Jonze highlights, in fact, if you type in 'Mylo Xyloto', you're very unlikely to come up with much else. I had an editor a few years back who gave me no end of shit over my decision to write as 'ASH Smyth', rather than 'Adam' (principally, I suspect, because his layout monkeys had terrible difficulties remembering that my name was not actually 'Ash'). Try typing both into Google, and see what happens.