An amusing footnote to the exchange between Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Pinker that unfolded last week: someone anonymously purchased the domain name Igonvalue.com on the day Pinker’s review of Gladwell’s new book, “What the Dog Saw,” a collection of essays first published in The New Yorker, ran in the Times.

A recap: in his review, Pinker took issue with Gladwell’s misspelling of the word “eigenvalue“—Gladwell spelled it “igon value.” Pinker wrote,

I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong,

thus catapulting the newly minted phrase to Twitter superstardom. (For more on the questionable spelling skills of good writers, see Claire Howorth’s recent post on the Vanity Fair site.)

Gladwell graciously defended himself on his blog, writing that that he has the utmost respect for Pinker, and that Pinker is right to be upset with his spelling, but that their differences on certain topics—in this case quarterbacks—might “owe less to what can be found in the scientific literature than they do to what can be found on Google.”

Our reader David Quigg tweeted the discovery of the domain name. After blogging about the Pinker/Gladwell exchange, he noticed an upsurge in traffic corresponding to the sudden popularity of the phrase, which he detailed in an e-mail to us:

It would be interesting to know if this is something unusual or not. For all I know, there may be speculators out there who buy up domain names for each fleeting catchphrase, hoping that its 15 minutes of fame will endure long enough for someone to want to pay a ransom for the domain name’s release. “Igon value” did have a good little run. For a couple of days there, almost all the traffic to my blog was via people—literally all around the world—who had Googled “igon value.”

Quigg hopes that it’s Gladwell himself who bought the name: “He could turn this into something great by writing a book called “The Igon Value Problem” in which he would use his vast explanatory skills to educate readers about the uses and misuses of math and statistics.”