Econolinguistics. It isn’t even a branch of academia. Not even a word in the dictionary. But that’s what we do here at Never From Concentrate. We make shit up, poke at it and see what happens.

So where did this come from you may ask Valentin? I took a linguistics course called English Words through Time & Space in my last semester in university and ended up getting into a discussion with my professor on quantifying the value of a word or morpheme based on an analysis of the URL market. My professor quickly and wisely pointed out that the context is everything. For example, the word face in a URL has a different value than face in a trademark or in the copy of a print advertisement. But, in spite of this, would there be a way to quantify these words and come up with an index of the the relative value of each word? The trademark and URL market are the only two avenues I can think of that has a direct word to value association. I mean, you could analyze copy in advertisement and their relative success, but that would be much too difficult to disassociate all the confound variables that come attached with it.

Now, why would someone spend time to actually collect the data and conduct an analysis you may ask? The honest answer is mostly, just cause I kinda want to know. The business answer would be for marketers to use the index to create more effective copy in their advertisement.

But, before I continue to blab on and in hopes of broadening the discussion and blossoming field of econolinguistics, what are your surface level thoughts on the topic? Are there any tangents of the field you find interesting inherently from the conjunction of economics + linguistics?