This Week’s Language Blog Roundup

It’s Friday again, fellow word nerds, which means it’s time for our Language Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the highlights of our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news.

Yesterday was Bloomsday, and if you’re still jonesing for some Joyce, check out our blog post, which gives a bit of history and a roundup of all things Ulysses around the web.

Fritinancy’s vote for word of the week was the Streisand Effect, or the “backfiring of an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information,” named for Barbra herself when her “attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity.”  Word Spy spied some excellent words including bacn and champagne problem. However, our favorite was timmolation, “the destruction of a person’s career or reputation caused by lewd or insensitive Twitter posts.” Speaking of which, The New York Times offered a medley of “my bads.”

The NYT also noted that justices seem to be turning more and more to the dictionary for help in the courtroom while Johnson, The Economist’s language blog, warned that the dictionary isn’t the law, at least not in a courtroom, and that “rather than rely on dictionaries, statute-writers should be as careful as possible to use words in the way that they are commonly understood (especially in quality edited writing).”

Johnson also noted a Chinese artist defying the laws of censorship with secret puns and homophones ( Fǎ Kè Yóu, you French-Croatian Squid!) while Wired deciphered the secret meanings in text message punctuationK International was excited about automatic sign language and “Tattúínárdœla Saga, the ‘Star Wars’ story rewritten in the style of the Old Norse Sagas and translated into Old Norse as well” (sure, why not).

Dialect Blog wondered when Americans stopped talking “British”; pondered the Scots-Irish influence on Appalachian English; and puzzled over the multiple meanings of the Irish dialect word, craic. The Virtual Linguist took a look at philogynist, the opposite of misogynist; bridewell, a lovely-sounding place but not a nice place to be; and grockle, a West-Country word for “tourist.” Arnold Zwicky came across some cool words too, including foofaraw and garmento, as well as several portmanteaus, such as murderabilia, viewmongous, mathemusician, and Newtiny.

Daily Writing Tips discussed the changing meanings of the word freak, while The Independent reported on one man’s war on cliches. Meanwhile, the Oxford University Press Blog proposed that teaching proper comma usage wouldn’t necessarily improve writing.

Language Log mused on minimal pairing and why some jokes won’t die (a priest, a rabbi, and the Dali Lama walk into a bar. . .). Stan Carey at Sentence First discussed the evolution of the language organism, while Boing Boing examined how visual perception varies across languages; the NSA Style Manual; and a house made of bookcases (in the inimitable words of Cory Doctorow: WANT).

In more “want” news, the British Library announced they would be releasing “more than 1,000 rare books [from their 19th-century collection] in the form of a single app for the iPad.”

Finally, you may have heard about the gentleman who was kicked off an airplane for swearing. He was speaking “Brooklynese,” he insisted, and claimed that Brooklynites “curse as adjectives.” Others would beg to differ.

That’s it from here.  Remember, if you have a tip or would like your language blog to be included in our weekly roundup, let us know in the comments, via email (feedback AT wordnik DOT com), or on Twitter.

Happy Bloomsday!

Every June 16, James Joyce fans everywhere celebrate the Irish writer’s mammoth tome, Ulysses.

Serialized from 1918 to 1920, Ulysses was first published in its entirety in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, who started Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Deemed “obscene” due to a passage that included the main character, Leopold Bloom (for whom the holiday is named), masturbating, Ulysses was banned in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom till the 1930s.

Bloomsday began in 1954 “on the 50th anniversary of the events in the novel, when John Ryan (artist, critic, publican and founder of Envoy magazine) and the novelist Flann O’Brien organised what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the Ulysses route.”  Now 57 years later, Ulyssean festivities are still going strong.

The little bookshop that started it all is displaying artwork from artist Stephen Crowe’s “Wake in Progress, his ongoing project to illustrate every page of [another Joyce novel] Finnegans Wake.” In Dublin and New York, Joyceans celebrated with Bloomsday breakfasts. Broadway is putting on a daylong, celebrity-studded marathon reading, while tweeps are attempting to tweet all 256,000 words of Ulysses in 24 hours.

Meanwhile, author Frank Delaney is deconstructing one line of Ulysses a day; photographer Motoko Fujita put together a book of Joyce-inspired photographs; and Rory McCann, an Irish software developer, created an algorithm to solve the Ulyssean riddle, can you cross Dublin without passing a pub? (The short answer: yes but it’s not easy.)

Feeling less ambitious? You can see the what, where and when of 16th June 1904, as well as just the where.  Or if you’ve always wondered what the entire text of Ulysses translated in 2D barcodes looks like, you’re in luck. Of course we at Wordnik aren’t empty-handed – we have lists for this, Ulysses, Ulyssean, and Joycean.  And with the end of the Ulysses copyright next year, who knows what will happen (Bloomsday flash mob, anyone?).

Whatever you decide to do (or not do), you have 365 days to read, or re-read, the novel for next Bloomsday.  Or you can watch the movie.  We won’t tell.

The WotD Perfect Tweet

Today we’ll be launching a new weekly challenge for our Twitter followers.

Use any word of the day (WotD) from this week in a sentence that best demonstrates its meaning in context. However, your sentence must be no longer than 140 characters – in other words, a perfect tweet!  Send us the link to your tweet via Twitter, and at the end of the week, we’ll pick our favorites and feature them on our blog.

What do we mean by “meaning in context”?  We mean show the word in action instead of simply repeating the definition.  For example, the definition for today’s WotD, lorette, is:

a name for a woman who is supported by her lovers, and devotes herself to idleness, show, and pleasure; — so called from the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, in Paris, near which many of them resided.

A sentence demonstrating its meaning is:

Aurore’s mother seems to us, du reste, the perfect type of a Parisian lorette, the sort of woman so keenly attractive with the bloom of youth and the eloquence of passion, — but when these have passed their day, the most detestable of mistresses, the most undesirable of companions.

Of course this sentence is far too long for a tweet. 🙂

How can you keep up with all the Words of the Day?  Follow us on Twitter or subscribe by email.  (Or both!)

The rules again:

  • Use any Word of the Day from this week in a sentence
  • @ us the link to your tweet (presuming you don’t want “@wordnik” taking up your 140 character limit)
  • We’ll feature our favorites on our blog on Friday the following Monday
  • No hash tag necessary

We look forward to seeing your perfect WotD tweets!

This Week’s Language Blog Roundup

It’s time again for our weekly Language Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite blogs and the latest in word news.

We love lists, and so does the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.  Their exhibit, “Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations,” is open now through October 2, and features lists such as “bills to pay, things undone, failings in oneself and others; lists of people to call, stuff to buy, errands to be accomplished,” as well as “lots of lists of artworks, real and imaginary.”

Another very long, very old list is “the 21-volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia and its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects, unspoken for 2,000 years but preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions deciphered over the last two centuries,” which was finally “completed by scholars at the University of Chicago” this week after a 90-year effort, as reported by The New York Times.

Arnold Zwicky poked a bit of fun at The Gray Lady and its demure coverage of New York hot dog chain Papaya King’s suggestive marketing for its new Hollywood location.  (See for yourself.)

Speaking of, um, weiners (yes, we went there), Johnson (*sigh*), The Economist’s language blog, lauded the congressman’s real apology (as opposed to a fauxpology) but questioned his characterization of his indiscretions as “mistakes.”  Johnson also discussed the berk-wanker (sorry) language spectrum of descriptivists and prescriptivists.

Meanwhile, Language Log explored the origins of the phrase, “that’s mighty white of you” (which surprisingly did not always have to do with race); how language style matching may predict relationship attraction and stability; and the Navy SEALs of snowclones.  Language Log also took on speech-based lie detection of Russian ATM machines, and discussed more trouble with translation, Italian this time.

K International talked about some Italians who were unhappy with the Jersey Shore cast, pronouncing them supercafoni, or superboors, as well as the challenges of translating humor.  Sentence First considered the origins of a “thick” Irish expression while Dialect Blog mused on the “foreign” Welsh accent; estuary English; Pittsburghese; and objected to objections about a particular British dialect.

Bananagrammer reviewed the good and the not-so-good of the new Scrabble words in the British Collins dictionary; Online Universities aggregated “40 fascinating lectures for linguistics geeks”; and Word Spy spotted the SoHo effect, “when the artists who made a neighborhood cool and exciting are forced to move out because they cannot afford the rents after the area becomes gentrified.”

Ken Jennings, Jeopardy! uber-champion (the Navy SEALs of Jeopardy! champions, perhaps?), was so inspired by chatting with Merriam-Webster dictionary editors at last week’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, he put together a list of “songs about looking words up in dictionaries.”

Finally, while we at Wordnik love words and everything about them, sometimes no words, whether spoken or texted, is better, especially during a movie.

That’s a wrap!  Remember, if you have a tip or would like your language blog to be included in our weekly roundup, let us know in the comments, via email (feedback AT wordnik DOT com), or on Twitter.

Secret Word Wednesday: So long, and thanks for all the fish

This week marks our last round of Secret Word Wednesday as we go on hiatus for the summer. It’s been fun tweeting clues and hints, as well as reading everyone’s guesses. We’ve had some nail-biting rounds!

Here to date are all the past Secret Word winners (by Twitter handle):

March 24, 2010 –  justkristin
March 31, 2010 – TCarterRoss
April 7, 2010 – a_wordnik
April 21, 2010 – specgram
June 9, 2010 – 4ndyman
June 16, 2010 – TIE: Sara_GG_TGC and xascha
June 23, 2010 – TIE: mdcclv and ecormany
June 30, 2010 – TIE: StanCarey and observacious
July 7, 2010 –  justkristin
July 14, 2010 – specgram
July 14, 2010 – telofy
July 21, 2010 – specgram
July 28, 2010 – davidseawell
August 4, 2010 – MariaHench
August 4, 2010 – hallowdmachine
August 11, 2010 – NextMoon
August 18, 2010 – specgram
August 25, 2010 – bgzimmer
September 1, 2010 – melanie_seibert
September 8, 2010 – bgzimmer
September 15, 2010 – bgzimmer
September 22, 2010 – bgzimmer
September 28, 2010 – melanie_seibert
October 6, 2010 – fuyunoakegata
October 13, 2010 – melanie_seibert
October 20, 2010 – justkristin
October 27, 2010 – TIE: specgram and camillaisa
November 3, 2010 – telofy
November 10, 2010 – telofy
November 17, 2010 – melanie_seibert
December 1, 2010 – melanie_seibert
December 8, 2010 – LawanaFL
December 15, 2010 – theroseinbloom
January 5, 2011 – 4ndyman
January 12, 2011 – bgzimmer
January 19, 2011 – 4ndyman
January 26, 2011 – williecostello
February 2, 2011 – Doc_Harding
February 9, 2011 – justkristin
February 16, 2011 – marissamakes
February 23, 2011 – telofy
March 2, 2011 – telofy
March 9, 2011 – inventrix
March 16, 2011 – TankHughes
March 23, 2011 – ecormany
March 30, 2011 – 4ndyman
April 6, 2011 – melanie_seibert
April 13, 2011 – MariaHench
April 20, 2011 – wrdnrd
April 27, 2011 – ecormany
May 4, 2011 – ecormany
May 11, 2011 – northboundlane
May 18, 2011 – northboundlane
May 25, 2011 – TIE: melanie_seibert and bananagrammer
June 1, 2011 – bananagrammer
June 8, 2011 – bgzimmer

Great job everyone!

But just because we’re not hosting Secret Word Wednesday doesn’t mean you can’t play. Pick a word and tweet some clues! All you’ll be missing is Pee-wee.

This also doesn’t mean we’ll be Twitter-game-free. We’ll be launching some more tweeting interaction (tweeteraction?) soon, but if there are any Twitter games that you particularly enjoy, please let us know.

2011 Spelling Bee Recap

Late last week in the word world, it was about everything Bee – the Scripps National Spelling Bee, that is.  Every year 275 spellers enter, and one speller leaves – this year that speller was 14-year old Sukanya Roy of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, winning with cymotrichous, which means “characterized by having wavy hair.”

We here at Wordnik celebrated the Bee in a couple of ways.  We hosted a Spelling Bee Bingo, in which we invited you to guess as to what the winning word might be for a chance to win a Wordnik T-shirt and other schwag.  While no one guessed the wavy-haired word, someone did pose three guesses that ended up in the final roundandouille, grison, and polatouche – and for us that’s close enough.

Congratulations to Amy Goldstein!  Not only is Amy a repeat Secret Word Wednesday winner, she made it to the final round of the Bee in 1998 before missing on the word aitch, which, understandably, is her least favorite word.

In addition to bingo, we live-tweeted the last day of competition. Rather than try to summarize, we’ll let our Tweets speak for themselves!

Finally, the Bee looked like so much fun, we can’t wait till next year. So we’ll be hosting our own spelling bee in the near future, and would love any suggestions from those of you in the Bay Area for bars that might be interested in hosting such an event. Drinks, prizes, and give-aways will be available!

Till then, study up!