As a lover of fandoms, this article was particularly exciting to read. I’ve never even thoguht about how we naturally smush names together for couples. For me, it seems like something that has existed forever, but after further reading, I understand there are many key parts to a great ship name. The main 5 aspects of a successful ship name include overlap, stress match, onset conservation, orthographic transparency, and lexical neighborhood evaluation. This seems way more complicated then “let’s put Brad and Angelina together to create Brangelina”. However, after reading this, I am starting to understand the importance of these components, because if we understand the parts of a successful ship name, we can continue to create new words. This may sound like a stretch, but McCulloch touches on ship names that we use in everyday life, such as brunch and smog. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a world without brunch. And to think this is only the beginning of text analysis.

McCulloch, Gretchen. 2015. “A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping.” The Toast. September 30. http://the-toast.net/2015/09/30/a-linguist-explains-the-grammar-of-shipping/.