Errata: The Wordie Blog

Best. Map. Ever.

2009-04-03T12:27:00.004-04:00

You can't buy this, sadly (it's "art"), but it's wonderful. I hope the books correspond to the states in which they're shelved, though that would make Maine illiterate, which we know isn't the case. Thanks to kad, who first saw it on ohdeedoh.com.

Birdie Num Num

2009-03-22T03:16:00.003-04:00

Yesterday chandas tweeted one of the more technically awkward web pages I've seen in a while, but the content is great. It appears to be a rather large dictionary of bird names, saved as a single html page from a Microsoft Word file. It's all text with no images or links, there's no obvious indication of who wrote or compiled it (it's hosted on the Weisblum Lab Antibiotics Webpage, where it's linked to as "Arthur Smith's Bird Dictionary"), and it weighs in at a browser-crashing 12 MB.

Once you get past that it's chockablock with good stuff—bird names and their synonyms starting with Aasvogel (“the name for the larger vultures by the Dutch colonists in Africa”) and ending with Zeldonia, the generic name for the Wrenthrush. The whole thing is a good potential source for some of the better bird lists on Wordie.

UPDATE: This one must be making the rounds. Language Hat blogged it a few days ago.

Beautiful Libraries

2009-03-20T12:20:00.001-04:00

A little Friday fantasia: in September of 2007 Curious Expeditions collected dozens of pictures of stunning old libraries in a post titled Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries, which was just sent to me by my old pal Magnolia. They're incredible.

I've spent my entire life surrounded either by clean-lined modernism or an almost equally spare New England aesthetic, and it's startling to be reminded that baroque and rococo (barococo?) confections like this were ever built, let alone on this scale and in such profusion. Likewise, information is now so ubiquitous, and incorporeal, and cheap, it's jolting to think of a time when it was rare, and heavy, and expensive, and so justified the building of palaces like this to contain it.

Curious Expeditions says they'll leave it to someone else to post a list of beautiful modern libraries, like Louis Kahn's library at Exeter. If anyone knows of one, please let us know in the comments.

The Morbid Language of Newspapers

2009-03-12T17:20:00.005-04:00

BoingBoing has a short but sweet post (the comments are worth reading too), sent to me by harrisj and mentioned on Wordie by VanishedOne, about the death-tinged tone of journalism jargon. Beat, kill (sometimes for a fee), morgue, widow, orphan, slug, bullet. I'm guessing this stems more from the sometimes bleak nature of what journalists cover than the overwhelmingly bleak current state of the industry—these are old terms, after all. They might also have roots in the noirish self-image a lot of newspaper people have of themselves: secretly every jschool grad from the 'burbs wishes he or she was Bogart in "Deadline U.S.A."

Some other good journalism lists on Wordie: newspaper names*, this one of tabloid phrases, and my own short list of tabloid headlines, which could use a shot in the arm**.

* Consistently the most common source of search traffic to the site.
** It's an open list, so feel free.

Yes We Scan

2009-03-06T12:37:00.000-05:00

Carl Malamud is the "rebel archivist" who has been working for years to make government documents freely available, and he has started a campaign to be appointed Public Printer of the United States, head of the Government Printing Office. Malamud says he's inspired by Augustus E. Giegengack, "a working printer and regular leather apron man" who FDR appointed to head the GPO after a similar grassroots effort.

Malamud's background is ideal for the position, and his appointment would go a long way towards furthering Obama's campaign pledge to increase transparency in government. For more info and to offer your support, visit Malamud's delightfully-named campaign site, Yes We Scan!

After Deadline: Murky Passages

2009-03-04T12:35:00.000-05:00

I just discovered that After Deadline, an internal New York Times newsletter on language and writing, is also adapted for inclusion in the Times Topics blog. The most recent post is on murky language and overstuffed sentences, and there's a nice stash of earlier posts on grammar, usage, words, and other things language-related.

Among them is a piece on the rise of the word we love to hate, the s-word. Even if it pains you to see it in print, the post has some interesting statistics on the rise of this scourge word, which, amazingly, wasn't used in the Times a single time in 1980, and only once in 1985 (by my nemesis, William Safire). Usage crept up through the ninteies, and set a record last year with over 40 appearances. The author, Philip B. Corbet, doesn't offer any theories about the source of the plague, though he does suggest it's time to give it a rest. Here's to hoping it goes the way of the Bush administration.

Beware the Econorrhea

2009-03-03T02:26:00.000-05:00

Trevor Butterworth is the editor of the absolutely fantastic STATS.org blog, which has been my favorite media watchdog publication for the past few years. They post authoritatively on topics like media coverage of health issues and the use and abuse of statistics, and happily their quantitative bent is accompanied by a joy in language, particularly of the so-bad-it's-good variety.

Last month Trevor posted a Wordie list, subtitled Econorrhea, of neologisms and portmanteaux having to do with the economic implosion, which he has now worked into a Jabberwocky parody* on Recessionwire—which is itself compiling the beginnings of what could be something fun: a recession lexicon. It's all worth checking out, in particular STATS.

* Check the comments too: he's being pursued by the Lewis Caroll Society.

Getting Back on the Bike

2009-03-02T11:40:00.002-05:00

So, I've been the worst blogger ever. Got my head turned by Twitter, other parts of life flared up, and next thing I know I haven't posted to Errata in over four months.

This is a tentative step towards getting back on the bike. I spent this weekend refactoring some of the innards of poor neglected Wordie. The results of this ongoing effort will be largely invisible, and mostly for my own benefit--some of the internals were written in such haste that now, months or years later, what's going on under the hood is a little hazy, even to me. So I'm reorganizing internals*, fixing a few longstanding bugs, and along the way hopefully improving performance, to handle the slow, steady increase in traffic Wordie continues to see. Once I've cleaned house I'll be in a much better position to start adding some new features.

One small feature you can see right now is a new link to Forvo.com under each word. Forvo is sort of like Wordie--user submitted words--but it focuses on audio pronunciations, rather than, uh, whatever it is that Wordie focuses on. Click the last little square under antipodes for an example. It'll bring you to a page on Forvo where you can hear the proper Canadian pronunciation of the word.

* For those who care, I'm also bolting on, after the fact, a proper test suite, having recently gotten the TDD religion.

Happy 80th, OED

2008-10-12T16:00:00.005-04:00

In 1857 the “Unregistered Words Committee” of the Philological Society of London published the report On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, calling for the creation of a new comprehensive English dictionary. Sixty-one years later, on April 19, 1928, the final fascicle of the Oxford English Dictionary was published, covering Wise to the end of W. (Curious about the fate of X, Y, and Z? Me too, but I'm just parroting Wikipedia.)

In celebration of the 80th anniversary of the OED, the Oxford University Press is hosting a series of events around the world. And for the rest of this year, they're offering the full 20-volume print edition for the low low price of £450 or $850. You can't afford not to buy it! It'll probably hold its value better than your stock portfolio, and it's certainly a lot more fun.

October 12-13
Oxford University, Oxford, England
with:
Charlotte Brewer
Ammon Shea
John Simpson
Simon Winchester

October 22
Century Club, New York, NY
with:
Simon Winchester
Ammon Shea
Jesse Shedlower

November 13, 6:00pm, Brattle Theater
Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge, MA
with:
Ammon Shea
Jesse Sheidlower
Simon Winchester

November 18, 7:30-9:00pm
Philadelphia Free Library, Philadelphia, PA
with:
Ammon Shea
Jesse Sheidlower
Barbara Wallraff

Best Library Ever

2008-10-09T15:38:00.004-04:00

It's a bit rococo, possibly even tacky, but I love Jay Walker's library. Sputnik? Check. Enigma machine? Check. An amazing assortment of medieval books on science and natural history, along with originals of the Kelmscott Chaucer, Nuremberg Chronicle, and Coverdale Bible, all mixed in with cheesy Franklin Press reprints?
Yes, yes, yes, and, oddly, yes. This is heaven, as envisioned by a bookish 15 year old.

Thanks to Magnolia (and her research assistant, Arlo) for the link.

Leviathan of Forensics

2008-09-29T23:12:00.000-04:00

According to CNN, this morning Obama spokesman David Wade called Sarah Palin a “leviathan of forensics.”

I can't get those words out of my head, and I'm beginning to think it's the best phrase anyone has ever uttered. I almost pissed myself laughing when I first heard it, and Wade now occupies a special place in my heart.

Contrast the austere pomposity of “leviathan”—the Bible, Hobbes, Melville, Auster—to the person he's describing. Coupled to the near-obsolete use of “forensics”—he wasn't talking about CSI: Miami—and it's perfect. Perfect!

Politics can be so ugly, it just warms my heart that this guy pulled such a ludicrous phrase out of his ass. He's my new hero. And it has nothing (well, very little) to do with partisan politics, or ill-will to Palin. Her recent PR troubles notwithstanding, she really isn't bad at, er, forensics, if you check her past debates on YouTube. And Biden is a well-known loose cannon, so it could go either way.

But “Leviathan of Forensics,” it's just too good. Here's the full quote from CNN's politicalticker:

“She's very skilled and she'll be well-prepared,” said Barack Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod Sunday night, flying with Biden back to Delaware to help him get ready.

“As you saw at the convention she can be very good. So, I think it would be foolish to assume that this isn’t going to be a really challenging debate. We're preparing for that, on that assumption.”

Taking it one step farther, Biden spokesman David Wade later added, “He's going in here to debate a leviathan of forensics, who has debated five times and she's undefeated.”

Word Clock

2008-09-14T23:14:00.003-04:00

Another cool experiment in typography: the Word Clock, by Simon Heys. It's a screen saver for the Mac or PC, which displays the time, beautifully, in text. It allows fine-grain control over typographic attributes like leading and kerning, and has two modes: linear is displayed in the screenshot at right; check the web site to see what rotary looks like (the video is worth more words than I'm willing to type).

There's also an iPhone app, which I hope gets released eventually through iTunes. From the looks of it, the current app requires you to jailbreak your phone.

Like so many of the cool design items on Errata, Steve sent this one.

Dinosaurology

2008-09-04T01:11:00.002-04:00

Dinosaurs! They're teh alesome, as any 8 or 38 year-old will tell you. In an ongoing effort to highlight brilliant Wordie content*, I present chained_bear's completely over-the-top collection of dinosaur and dinosaur-related lists:

Dinosaurs
Not a Dinosaur
Words of Dinosaurology
Archosaurs
Pterosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, and a Coupla Placodonts 'R' Us
Prehistoric and Extinct Mammals 'n' Stuff
Living Fossils
Prehistoric and Extinct Birds
Dinosaurs that weren't, but should have been

These comprehensive lists are well-tagged, so they can be sliced and diced by, among other things, geologic age:

Jurassic
Paleozoic
Pleistocene

and Linnaean classification:

Therapsid
Sauropsid
Plesiosaur

Some related lists you might also enjoy, if you're in a Jurassic mood:

Geological time scale, by mollusque
Dinosaur Comics, by AbraxasZugzwang

Plus there's the fearsome tyrannosaurus reesetee. And last but not least, there's our pal pterodactyl.

Kudos and thanks to chained_bear, this is a prodigious effort and well worth exploring. At least one of these is an open list, so if any budding dinosaurologists* want to contribute, or flesh out info on the dinosaurs and not-dinosaurs in the comments, have at.

Oh, and be advised: it pays to turn on image search when browsing dinosaur lists.

* Such posts will henceforth be tagged 'teh alsome' for your convenience.
** Or paleontologists, if you stand on formality.

Private Notes on Words

2008-09-02T01:09:00.000-04:00

A new feature launched this weekend: private notes on words. On any word page, where it says "Leave a comment, citation, or private note", click on "private note" to leave a postit-style note for yourself.

This is kind of like writing in the margins of a book--if there's something you'd like to remember about a word, or you want to leave yourself pronunciation tips or study notes or a comment-in-progress or whatever, and it doesn't seem appropriate to make it public, write yourself a note.

I'm hoping students in particular find this useful, and also people using Wordie to create glossaries or dictionaries. I've corresponded with a few folks who have expressed an interest in such a use, and the combination of tags, private notes, and comments seems like a good emerging toolkit. One could use tags to aggregate the words in question (there are already a bunch of good de facto glossaries on Wordie as a result of tagging, like demon, archery and beer), then private notes while collecting definitions or usage notes, with the final result ending up as a citation in the comments.

Or, use it however you want. Any suggestions for improvements or additions are, as always, welcome.

Rumor Mill

2008-08-28T23:10:00.005-04:00

There's a great comment by qroqqa on rumoured, which, lest it drift by too quickly, deserves to be highlighted. It starts:

"A highly unusual verb in Present-day English: it has only this one verb form. Although it was historically a full verb with all its parts ('Come hither Catesby, rumor it abroad, That Anne my Wife is very grieuous sicke.'—Richard III, IV.ii), for most of us today it can only be a past participle."

Read the rest on rumoured. And thanks, qroqqa, for the insight.

Comma Kameleon

2008-08-26T21:33:00.005-04:00

Merrill Perlman* has a nice piece in the Columbia Journalism Review** about a supposed gaffe Joe Biden made earlier this year during the primaries, when he was quoted as saying "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

That quote may be missing a comma. Perlman doesn't delve in the politics of it, or try to plumb Biden's intentions, and I won't either. But she goes into some detail about restrictive vs. nonrestrictive clauses, and how something as small as a single comma can significantly change meaning, and have broad-reaching repercussions. If you care about the power of language and punctuation**, it's worth reading.

* Whom I had the pleasure of hearing speak about copy editing last month. Great talk.
** Where I worked for a while in the late nineties.
*** And I know you do.

Best Typo Ever

2008-08-20T01:02:00.001-04:00

From prick, courtesy of skipvia:

"His top contenders are said to include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Less traditional choices mentioned include former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, an abortion-rights supporter, and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent."

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gxVW-aUPQsPkU0JKEleSPNCyxSsAD92L2HJ80

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2008-08-17T23:48:00.001-04:00

I spent some time poking around in the database this week, in anticipation of adding stats showing frequently favorited words and lists. The most favorited list is, happily, gangerh's sweet tooth fairy.

The most favorited word is... a disappointment. The second-most is mellifluous, and the bronze goes to loquacious. I had to go all the way to 16th place, interrobang, to find something that wasn't a retread from the hot 100.

Don't hold your breath, but these kind of stats will start showing up on the site, someday. Perhaps after one of you suggests a good way to sieve out the interesting stuff.

Also look forward to the ability to add private notes to words, which I worked on recently in Vacationland after bestiary suggested it. That will launch in the next few weeks. I'm hoping this makes Wordie a little more friendly to SAT-prep and ESL users. While us chatty cathys are more visible, the silent majority of Wordies are using the site for vocabulary lists. I'm going to try to add a few small features, starting with notes, to facilitate that kind of educational use. Suggestions to that end are welcome in the comments.

The Regional Assembly of Text

2008-08-08T00:27:00.004-04:00

The Regional Assembly of Text is a gift store dedicated to text, replete with old filing cabinets and typewriters, chalkboards, quilted letters, journals, stationary, and other ephemera. And they host a monthly letter writing club, with tea and cookies.

That there is a place where such a store can make ends meet makes me want to move to Vancouver post haste. That and the free heroin.

Thanks to Magnolia and her beautiful sidekick, Arlo, for the link.

Joe Makes Tea

2008-08-04T22:54:00.004-04:00

Telescopic Text is the most delightful use of hypertext I've seen in eons. Just keep clicking. When you're done, reload and repeat in a different order. So simple, so pleasing, and so happily reminiscent of a recent conversation which took place on, of all words, teeth. It'll make you want a nice cuppa, even if it is the middle of August and roasting.

Make sure to telescope the byline, too, and eventually you'll end up at the lovely line-drawn site of the guy responsible for it, Joe Davis.

Mil gracias to Steve for the link.

GiveVaccines.org

2008-07-27T23:01:00.005-04:00

Here's another do-good-while-wasting-time word site: givevaccines.org. Like freerice.com it's a multiple-choice game, which presents you with a word and four possible meanings. Every time you guess the correct meaning, .01ml of vaccine is donated to the GAVI Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to making vaccines available to the world's poorest countries.

It's not quite as elegant as freerice, which has a broader assortment of English words. But Givevaccines has a unique option: in addition to "English words" there's a "medical terms" category. Not being a doctor I'd never heard of most of these, but I enjoyed guessing meanings based on the root and learning some new words in the process.

Thanks to quotato, who was the first to find givevaccines, and to Dr. Sam Rabinowitz, the creator of the site, who wrote to enlist our help. If any Wordies want to either create new questions or proof existing ones, send contributions to contact@givevaccines.org.

Most Active Threads

2008-07-16T01:11:00.003-04:00

Not that I don't love lists like this, but we've all long wanted more ways to sort through and view the river of comments on the front page. So I just added a page listing the most active threads of the past 24 hours, as dreamed up by Prolagus a few weeks ago.

They're listed in order of the number of comments on the item (words, lists, and profiles), and show excerpts of the three most recent comments.

This needs some work--I'd like to add different ways to sort, make it look nicer, and include comments on tags, which I forgot. But better half baked than nothing, and this way you guys can tell me where it should go.

Though before I revisit this, I'll add a most commented on list to the front page, which is a fantastic idea (thanks pterodactyl!).

I just added this same post on comments, in case people would rather discuss refinements to this in situ.

uʍop ǝpısdn

2008-07-15T22:22:00.000-04:00

A million thanks to whichbe for teaching us all how to flip our fonts, and to Reverse Fad Productions (great name) for being an enabler.

Upside-down and chained_bear's little gift to Prolagus just made my evening.

Egan: Save the Press

2008-07-03T08:10:00.001-04:00

I don't usually pay much attention to newspapers-are-dying stories. Yes, they are, and it's a bummer, but whining about it is typically more part of the problem than the solution.

This elegy by Timothy Egan, though, is worth reading.

Capitol Words

2008-06-24T14:09:00.001-04:00

Capitol Words, a project of the Sunlight Foundation, is an amusing and nuance-free look at what our elected representatives are bloviating about at any given moment.

It might be better named "Capitol Word," because that's all it actually provides: the single word most frequently used by the U.S. Congress on any given day, determined by having a computer plow through the text of the Congressional Record. It goes back to January 2000, and they even have an API.

Thanks to Derek for the link.