iPad, etc.

Nancy Friedman, who always has interesting things to write about naming and branding, doesn't seem terribly impressed with "iPad." Me neither. Maybe if Apple didn't already have a product with a basically identical name ...

Other midweek links:

• Woody Allen's mind-bending powers of sentence construction.

• How the copy desk got that way, and why we're doomed (YMMV), by David Sullivan. There's a lot being written now on why slashing copy desks is a bad idea, but Sullivan explains why the people who make these decisions don't understand why you can't just replace us with spellcheck.

• Mark Peters on brand names going generic.

• A quick but fun word game (h/t Talk Wordy To Me).

• And last, from this morning's Washington Post: "On New Year's Eve, conservative activist James O'Keefe telegraphed across the Internet that he was up to something big."

Yes, the writer used "telegraphed" correctly. No, sometimes that doesn't matter. This was my note of perspective for the day when I read it on the bus, and it's a good place to leave things this evening.

(UPDATED, 8:34 p.m. on Jan. 29) I'm way more torn about "telegraphed across the Internet" than I thought I'd be. CONS: It's gratuitous; there are shorter, cleaner ways to write that lede; if it is a joke, it's not sold very well. PROS: English is a strange little language, and we ought to celebrate that instead of diminishing it. So this gag didn't work -- the next one might, and I don't want to discourage the attempt.

You make the call.