Last month ICANN, the organization that sets internet protocols and website naming conventions, announced that any “established public or private organization” can now register a top level domain (TLD).

Soon .ibm and .union may be join the ranks of .com, .org, and .net. The price tag to set up one of these vanity domains is $185,000, and ICANN is still working on the renewal fees.

TLDs have been introduced before to mixed results. Some TLD’s like .biz have taken a place as …

It’s September, soon to be October, and— ever interested in words—I again note the oddity that the root of September means seventh, October means eighth, November ninth and December tenth. Do the math: September isn’t the seventh month, nor is October the eight.

What other words do we use daily that no longer mean what they meant?
Congratulations, that’s so awful.
London’s St Paul’s Cathedral was built out of the ashes of the 1666 Great Fire. It’s said (perhaps apocryphally) that this masterpiece was described as awful, artificial and amusing. In those days, amusing meant amazing, awful meant awe-inspiring and artificial meant artistic.
Tell …

Every group, every profession, even every family has its own special words: Lingo. When you prepare marketing materials—email, print brochures and newsletters, web content—be sure you’re communicating in a language that the uninitiated will understand.

What do I mean by uninitiated? When I was becoming a fan of baseball, I was flummoxed by lingo such as Texas-league single, dinger, blooper, the other way, southpaw, and frozen rope. The more I learned about the game (initiated into its finer points by my college pal Jack, baseball’s biggest fan), the more fluent I became in baseball-ese.

Your business uses particular terms:  You know the …