Billiam is currently transitioning the rebranding of his work into Flimflammery. (Guess who kept telling him WordPress is so much better than Blogger.) The journey to this end involved surfing through lists of old words and ongoing e-mail threads about the true origins of “whirlygigs” and “dirty puzzles.” (And surveying what domain names are available these days.) Flimflammery’s the winner, though, and I like it!

Since those conversations, I’ve been more watchful of Dictionary.com’s Twitter, particularly their Scrabble Words of the Day and Fun Word Fridays. The most recent of the latter seemed charmingly reminiscent of “flimflammery:”

Further inspection of “frippery” reveals another new Old World word, “gewgaws,” which is apparently synonymous with “trifles.” If one were to replace those gs with js, he or she would get an awkward reference to Semitic dentistry. This is how Billiam and I came up with Flimflammery’s No. 1 contender for Most Engaging Tagline: “Welcome to Billiam Robinson’s Flimflammery, full of frippery and gewgaws.”

Okay, really, this was all just an excuse to show my Flimflammery print that’ll be available at this year’s Alternative Press Expo:

A CHOW-chow CHOWing down on CHOW mein.

…We’re very un-secretly, quite blatantly, hoping that one day Billiam’s illustrations will just come to life. Who wouldn’t want to learn her ABCs from a professor schnauzer??