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“It used to be my little secret, my secret that is until I found out that many of the writers I know practice the same habit. We love to read the dictionary. Many times I have pulled out the dictionary to look up the spelling of a particular word and then another word on the page catches my eye. Twenty minutes later I am still engrossed in the dictionary, browsing through the less familiar definitions.” —Creating Copy by William Ackerly

It’s true for more than just advertising copywriters: people love the serendipity of a dictionary. They like to get lost for a while, to be distracted, to learn something new.

We like to do that, too, so we’ve made many ways to explore Wordnik.

For example, you can explore another user’s lists. You can look at the related items for a word. You can check out zeitgeist and see what other words people are visiting right now.

But for my money, tags are the feature that offers the most subtle pathways to the unexpected. You can find tags on the right-hand side of a word’s main page.

There’s nothing particularly Linnaean about tags. They’re not meant to be universal. No governing body is going to insist on a hierarchy, a structure, or a form. Unlike Wordnik lists, which can have a mission statement (such as “words I found while reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens“), tags’ intentions are usually silent.

Tags are personal. They are a way of classifying a word in a way that suits you. Beyond “don’t be a knucklehead,” there aren’t really any rules. You can use short tags, long tags, tags in other languages. You can tag a lot or a little. You can let that basic human need to sort and organize take over. Tag like a maniac in any way that is useful to you or the world.

In lieu of rules, I offer two tag guidelines that have been helpful to me:

1. Make your tags true as far as you know.
2. Make your tags memorable to you.

That way, you’ll have left clues for yourself (if you forget the word) and for other serendipiters who come across the same word. (See, I used a new word there and then tagged it with “neologism.”)

Tags are so personal that often the only obvious intention behind a tag is to demonstrate a connection between two words. For example, if someone tags the word basilect with language, then there’s a pretty good chance that basilect has something to do with language. That’s about as much as we can glean.

However, if someone tags the word language with cvccvvcv, most people are going to be mystified. It doesn’t even look like a word! But there was indeed a connection there for somebody, and, it turns out, the tags are useful if you need to know something about the orthography of a set of words. (Hint: each “c” stands for “consonant” and each “v” stands for “vowel.” Full explanation here.)

Remember that a word can both be tagged and can be a tag itself. At the top of every word’s tag page you’ll see “words tagged” with the word you’re looking at and at the bottom you’ll see “the word has been tagged.” Check out the tag page for neologism to see what I mean.

If you want a bit of guided serendipity, you can browse the tags made by any user who has a public profile. Here are some of mine.

If you’re looking for a little more about tagging from an insider’s point of view, I recommend the book Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web.

Happy tagging!

Photo by Paula Rey. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I used to work at the Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography, in a basement office within sight of where Alvin was built. The basement held another, less-heralded marvel: the free table. Whenever a lab was overhauled or a grad student moved on, they’d cull their detritus and dump it on the free table. Part of the pinko ethos that infects academia, no doubt, but a wonderful thing.

Usual fare ran toward outdated WordPerfect manuals, but you would sometimes find a collection of neatly piled Pyrex labware with a note saying “slightly contaminated.” Or a broken oscilloscope. Or five cartons of Hollerith cards. Pretty great to a technostalgic pack rat.

I especially loved finding specialized reference books. They’re usually de facto dictionaries, but the words are in situ, being put to good use as they’re being defined. One of my favorite free table gimmes was just such a book: The Audio Cyclopedia*, by Howard M. Tremaine. Probably bought in the seventies by someone working on sonar or recording whale songs, it’s a 1,700 page compendium of recording technology, in excruciating detail and with a weird Jeopardy! pose-everything-as-a-question prose style.

It is an absolutely tremendous source of of technicalese and audio industry terms of art, so yesterday I finally started a list I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time: Audio Argot, inspired by the Audio Cyclopedia. Please contribute, it’s an open list. Anything audio related fits the bill, I think—words needn’t come specifically from the Cyclopedia, but for those that do I’ll add a citation. Here’s the list.

* It seems to still be in demand. My scavenged copy is the 2nd edition, first published in 1969; the first edition was published in 1959 and it is not cheap.

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.

The Times ran another interesting piece on dying languages this weekend, this one full of examples from various near-dead languages. My favorite illustrated how the same construct can be used for different purposes in different languages. For example, in Rotokas, a language used in Papua New Guinea, doubling a word is used to indicate repetition:

tapa = to hit
tapatapa = to hit repeatedly

kopi = a dot
kopikopi = spotted

kavau = to bear a child
kavakavau = to bear many children

But in Eleme, a Nigerian language, a similar doubling pattern is used for negation:

moro = he saw you
momoro = he did not see you

rekaju = we are coming
rekakaju = we are not coming

You’ll also learn a variety of useful words for describing castrated reindeer. Worth a read.

Yesterday The New York Times had a good piece on endangered languages, which describes a joint effort between the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages to record languages on the verge of extinction. My favorite factoid: a group of Andean natives called the Kallawaya, who speak Spanish and Quechua in daily life, have a secret language that’s mostly used to describe medicinal plants.

Wordie is doing its small part to preserve language. Long after Wrigley has thrown in the towel on strappleberry, this important word will remain forever enshrined here.

Hey grammar nazis, this one’s for you.

Back in March I linked to Ficlets. I’ve been a steady user of the site since then, and I’ve published 66 short stories there so far.

When I first found Ficlets, I enjoyed a fun literary culture similar to the one here on Wordie. The other users were intelligent, thoughtful authors; the atmosphere was encouraging and clearly valued good writing. A good number of the contributors were published authors in the real world of considerable fame, and it was fun to rub shoulders with them.

In two months, that has changed dramatically. I’m not sure what happened exactly, but it seems the site has been overrun with children. Generally I’m pretty laid-back about bad writing and will just overlook it, but it’s gotten to the point where nearly every Ficlet published reads more like a text message than a literary work.

In the good old days (ha ha) the serious writers would rank garbage as garbage: one star out of five. The hope was that people would get the message and step it up. Unfortunately they didn’t, and they now outnumber the rest of us. To add insult to injury, the kids consistently rank the worst stories with the full five stars so the entire ranking system is useless. Most of the good writers have apparently fled in terror by now.

There’s an underlying attitude here, I think. It’s apathy toward all things grammar, or more. Sometimes I detect outright contempt for it. It’s never capitalizing anything. It’s never breaking text into paragraphs. It goes beyond not knowing how to spell; it’s not _caring_ how to spell. It’s waiving the single- or (already extreme) double-exclamation points in favor of eight or ten or fifteen of them.

I don’t intend to use Errata as a soapbox for my frustrated rants — though it’s probably too late now — but I’d like to hear your thoughts. I’m concerned that SMS and “IM-speak” is bastardizing communication amongst the youngest generation. Is it really that important in the big picture? Are we dealing with lasting illiteracy or a short-term fad? What does a disregard for even the simplest writing conventions mean for the future in, say, thirty years?

I’ve become a grumpy old man. Get off my lawn.

(originally posted on the old errata by uselessness)

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time on a handful of word-related sites. I’ve built some bookmarklets for my most frequent look-ups, and you may find them helpful too. They work in Firefox on Mac and Windows, and I haven’t tried them in any other browsers or systems (sorry). There are two ways to use each one:

1. Loading the bookmarklet will prompt you for a word or phrase to lookup; type it in the box and click OK.
2. Highlight a word or phrase on any web page, then load the bookmarklet to skip the prompt and look it up immediately.

Let me know if you have trouble with any of these. Right-click any of the links below and select “Bookmark this link” to add it to your bookmarks menu.

• Acronym Finder
• dictionary.com
• thesaurus.com
• RhymeZone
• Wikipedia
• Wordie: Add

(Note that this Wordie bookmarklet is a modified version of angharad’s original, designed to function the same way as the others listed here. It also recognizes null values and doesn’t try to add them.)

And now, the pièce de résistance of this post, Visuwords.

I just discovered this site and I was flat dazzled. You can look up any word to find definitions, synonyms, antonyms, acronym meanings, and possibly more that I have yet to find. I like the snazzy interface, which effectively shows the associations between each item. The site seems to understand concepts too, and links words to other related things. Fun to play around with, and possibly a valuable time-saver when those bookmarklets just don’t do it for you. It’s also darn quick. Possible inspiration for your next case of writer’s block?

Click the picture above to hop on over, and don’t say I never gave you nothing.

(Originally posted by uselessness)