A column in The Wall Street Journal discusses the difficulties involved with creating and marketing new trademarks in the pharmaceutical industry. COVID-19 vaccine shots are more popularly designated by the company that produced the vaccine rather than their proper names. “Moderna” and “Pfizer” are likely more recognizable than “Spikevax” or “Comirnaty”. While one executive from Moderna is quoted as favoring either “Spikevax” or “The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine”, she notes that a unique and catchy name is still necessary.

Read more about how pharmaceuticals navigate these tricky trademark-naming waters in The Wall Street Journal.

“Rodney, Roddy, Roderick, Rudolph, Rudy, Rollo, Roland, Reggy, Reginald, Romeo.” All of the preceding names have two things in common: they begin with the letter “R” and they were all finalists for the name of Santa’s ninth reindeer in Robert May’s story “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” A recent column in The Chicago Tribune tells the story of the famous reindeer and its creator, a Montgomery Ward copywriter who penned the book as part of an ad campaign. On May’s handwritten list of names—located in a special collection at Dartmouth College—only “Rudolph” and “Reginald” are circled.

Read more in The Chicago Tribune!

Author JK Rowling reading from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (Public domain)

In a column in The Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman explores the cultural impact of the Harry Potter series by sifting through onomastic data from naming records in the United States. According to the US Social Security Administration, virtually all names that appear in the Potterverse—those of protagonists and antagonists alike—saw a meteoric rise in use after the year 2000. Gamerman also interviews Harry Potter fans who named their children after the characters; only some of these children became Harry Potter fans themselves.

Read more in The Wall Street Journal.

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Mary Norris explores the use of the Greek language to designate disasters. She writes:

“What is this penchant for using Greek to designate disasters? During hurricane season, if meteorologists use up the approved letters of the English alphabet, they have traditionally turned to Greek for naming storms. In recent years, we got as far as Hurricane Iota. During the pandemic, scientists with the World Health Organization are relying on Greek to make the variants of the coronavirus easier to talk about and to avoid associations with the names of places where the variants were initially detected; for instance, the strain with the designation B.1.617.2, which was first identified in India, is popularly known as the Delta variant. Although it was unlikely that, even with global warming, a single hurricane season could yield enough storms to run through both alphabets, the pandemic threatens to deplete our store of Greek in no time. Having reached omicron (ο), we are already more than halfway through the alphabet.”

Read more in The New Yorker.