Its only words..

This post was inspired by a post called world of words, by a good friend, Neelu.

I wanted to respond to his post, as a comment, but then, suddenly, words started flowing that it felt longer than a typical response and so decided to write this post.

Stories related to words - and words in stories - have always fascinated me.

One of my favorite columns - long before blogs became popular, was a column called 'On Language' by William Safire on New York Times.

While I could find a reference to his book online, NYT could not find words to describe him.. or his column.. as all I got was

Anyway - getting back to some recent words and names that I found amusing..

A company claiming to reimagining emails is called hey

or another that is into video broadcasting is called mmhmm ... yes, that is the spelling..

When I started podcasting, one word that I found interesting was an outro..

An intro was understandable. an outro.. that is the end piece!

on similar lines, while i know don as a verb - to put on clothes etc, did not know that doff was the opposite.

while on and off are opposites, what would 'd' mean?

and the search for names of people sometimes is also very interesting and entertaining.

the most bizarre name was how Elon Musk named his kid.. X Æ A-12

to know how to pronounce this, read this article

I remember one joke from an old tamil drama - when asked to suggest a name for a baby that would easily get into one's ears [this sounds much simpler and elegant in Tamil], the suggestion was a 'kucchi' or a twig, that one might use to clean one's ears

What is the most amusing name or word you have come across?