Science fiction and fantasy have inspired the naming of many plants and animals. Some two decades ago, the intrepid zoological collector Harry Conley became the very first researcher to capture a maddeningly elusive species of crab, now named Harryplax severus.  In honour of this spectacular discovery, the crab was given Conley’s first name.  And, in honour of the crab’s impressive ability to keep its identity such a well-guarded secret, the illusive crustacean was given a second name inspired by Harry Potter’s teacher, Severus Snape. Writing in Zoekeys, Jose Mendoza and Peter Ng said they had named the new species severus as an allusion to the notorious and misunderstood potions master “for his ability to keep one of the most important secrets in the story”.

In 1969, two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, published a book on a pretty groundbreaking idea: that every culture in history, when they developed their languages, invented words for colors in the exact same order. They claimed to know this based off of a simple color identification test, where 20 respondents identified 330 colored chips by name. If a language had six words, they were always black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If it had four terms, they were always black, white, red, and then either green or yellow. If it had only three, they were always black, white, and red , and so on. The theory was revolutionary — and it shaped our understanding of how color terminologies emerge. To learn more, watch this short video from Vox.com, or click through to YouTube.

One of the many skills that helped enslaved Africans survive in the Americas was their in-depth knowledge of plant life. Modern linguists and ethnobotanists working together have revealed the importance of African names in revealing the breadth and depth of this collective naturalist knowledge. Ethnobotanist Tinde van Andel describes how such work has spawned new collaborations between botanists and linguists. (And you can read the original paper, published in PNAS, here.)

Albert, Lucy, Ollie, Penny, Pearl, Riley, and Yoshi – friends? Video game characters? Names from Beatles’ songs? They’re actually the names of startups, part of a trend of using familiar, friendly personal names for new businesses. At TechCrunch, Joanna Glasner looks at how startups name themselves and which trends are on the rise – and on the way out.

 

Databases of baby names are easy to find, but what about dog names? The New York City Health Department has made public its database of dog names collected from licenses.The interactive map lets you explore with your mouse or search for specific names. Each bubble on the map represents a dog name by frequency of occurrence – foe example, there are 1,195 dogs named Bella and 1,153 named Max, but only 7 named Spock and just one named Kirk. (Well, there is only one Captain Kirk.) Check it out and see how popular your favorite puppy names are in NYC!

 

 

 

 

Janelle Shane, a research scientist with a penchant for silliness, decided to train a neural network to generate new paint colors, complete with appropriate names. The results are hilariously bad, and range from the impenetrable (“Dondarf” for a lovely shade of cornflower blue) to the almost-there (“Ghasty Pink”, the color of Pepto-Bismol). Ars Technica has the details on how she did the training.

Her conclusions: “1. The neural network really likes brown, beige, and grey; 2. The neural network has really, really bad ideas for paint names.” Professional namers need not worry about losing business to AI just yet.

(She has also done a similar experiment with superhero names, and it went about as well as you would expect.)

 

In 2003, the United States tested a new weapon for possible use during the Iraq War.  That weapon was officially named the GBU-43/B Massive Ordinance Air Blast or “MOAB” for short.  Over time, that acronym underwent a curious onomastic shift in which the root full-form was replaced by a new name: “Mother of All Bombs”. According to the Business Insider journalist, Mark Abadi, this nickname was coined as a play on Saddam Hussein’s 1991 prediction that the Gulf War would be remembered in history as “the mother of all battles”.  That phrase caught on fire and soon everything was being described as “the mother of all…”.  14 years later, this name re-surfaced once again when the US dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb, or the “mother of all bombs”, in northeast Afghanistan. The Oxford Dictionaries blog has a detailed history of the phrase.