Here we go again. In June, we blogged about Pizza Hut experimenting with becoming “The Hut” (Pizza Hut drops the Pizza.. again - spoiler alert, Jabba was not pleased). Now Radio Shack, fresh off its announcement that Lance Armstrong will represent it (blog entry here), has announced that on August 6, it will be rebranding as – wait for [...]

(NOMO part 4 of a series of 4) Don’t blame John Mc Cain. Or at least don’t blame him for his problems with “alphabet soup”. Most acronyms are actually “nomonyms” – our word for unhelpful abbreviations, to which we say “NOMO!” We also discussed initialisms like “IBM” – which are also usually a really bad [...]

(Part 3 of a 4-part NOMO series about abbreviated brand names) Right, so this week we’ve dealt with nomonyms, our term for any unhelpful abbreviated names, initialisms like IBM, and whether they can be a brand at all. And later we’ll deal with the 25 worst acronyms of all time. But first: acronyms. And here’s my [...]

(Part 2 of a series about abbreviated brand names.) Yesterday, I ranted about the use of nomonyms (unhelpful abbreviations) in government. But of course, as you’ll read in this and subsequent posts, the problem of bad abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms goes far beyond government. But the two biggest problems of all are right in the [...]