Author Archives: Erin McKean

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All-Star Words

In honor of tomorrow’s All-Star Game, we’re happy to announce a new word-of-the-day list from Paul Dickson, the author of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, Third Edition (and more than fifty other books)!

Why are baseball words so hugely entertaining (even if you’re not a hard-core baseball fan)? Paul puts it best:

Baseball is a metaphoric circus.

The game has a particular infatuation with what one critic of sportswriters termed “the incorrect use of correct words.” There are hundreds of examples, but the point can be made by simply listing a selection of synonyms for the hard-hit ball or line drive. It is variously known as an aspirin, a BB, a bolt, a clothesline, a frozen rope, a pea, a rocket, and a seed. A player’s throwing arm seems to be called everything but an arm: gun, hose, rifle, soupbone, whip, and wing, to name just a few. The arm is not the only renamed body part. From top to bottom, players have lamps (eyes), a pipe (neck or throat), hooks (hands), wheels (legs), and tires (feet).
So many allusions are made to food and dining, including pitches that seem to fall off the table, that a fairly well-balanced diet suggests itself in terms like can of corn, cup of coffee, fish cakes, banana stalk, mustard, pretzel, rhubarb, green pea, juice, meat hand, grapefruit league, and tater. Among the many terms for the ball itself are apple, cantaloupe, egg, lemon, orange, pea, potato, and tomato. Implements? There is the plate (also known as the platter, pan, and dish) and, of course, the forkball. Dessert? The red abrasion from a slide into base is a strawberry and the fan’s time-honored sound of disapproval is a raspberry.
The game proudly displays its rustic roots and there is a tone to the language of the game that is remarkably pastoral. If any imagery dominates, it is that of rural America. Even under a dome, it is a game of fields and fences, where ducks [sit] on the pond and pitchers sit in the catbird seat. New players come out of the farm system and a farm hand who pitches may get to work in the bullpen.

You can sign up to receive Paul’s baseball words here; and if you have a Nook Color, we’ll be featuring baseball words this whole week via the Wordnik Nook Word of the Day app! [Want a hard copy of the Dictionary? You can find one at any of these fine booksellers.]

We hope you enjoy exploring this rich slice of English … and if you’ll be in Pasadena, CA this Sunday, the 17th of July, you can also see Paul Dickson at the Baseball Reliquary, where he will be presented with the 2011 Tony Salin Memorial Award for his commitment to the preservation of baseball history.

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Wordnik’s Word Pages: now with 86.5% more resplendence

We’re happy to announce today a new look for the (millions and millions of) Wordnik word pages:

The new pages are cleaner, easier to navigate and read, more colorful, and have been shown in controlled, double-blind experiments to increase the love of words, writing and speaking skills, and vocabulary retention by up to 115% in test subjects*.

New features include an expanded Related Word (thesaurus) section, with a new “Reverse Dictionary” section:

screenshot of related words at "better"

Word pages now include list previews, so you can easily see information about the lists that include the word you’ve looked up:

We’ll be rolling out more improvements and more new features across all of Wordnik.com over the next few weeks. As always, you can send us your thoughts via feedback@wordnik.com or by leaving a comment here.

[*test subjects may or may not have been Wordnik employees and their families.]

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Flowing into the river of English …

From this week’s “THE WORD” column in The Boston Globe, by Wordnik founder Erin McKean, about words related to the Mississippi River flooding:

The spillway (“a path designed to take away overflow safely”) was opened because the waters of the Mississippi are cresting at record highs, with a flow rate of 625,000 cubic feet per second, leading to worries that the river would overtop the levees that hold it back. The amount of water that the Army Corps of Engineers expects to flow past the barriers is the inundation estimate. Should the levees fail, especially on the west bank of the river, the Mississippi could leave the path it takes now — the one on which massive industries and the city of New Orleans both depend — and be captured by the Atchafalaya River, which offers it a faster, steeper shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico.

Read the whole column here.

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Tag Questions Are Useful, Amirite?

From this week’s “THE WORD” column in The Boston Globe, by Wordnik founder Erin McKean:

You know what tag questions are, don’t you? Tag questions are those little questioning upticks, usually found at the end of a sentence — like that don’t you? — that grease the conversational wheels. Linguists see these questions as coming in two different flavors: the kind that ask for information or confirmation (“you’ve got the tickets, right?”), called “modal” tags, and the kind that try to connect with the hearer’s feelings, softening a statement or opening the door for more conversation, called “affective” tags (“that was certainly unexpected, wasn’t it?”).

Since they help keep information flowing, you’d think that tag questions would be appreciated for their importance to the language, or at least held up as a useful communications tool, but in fact, they’re almost ignored, and occasionally even mocked.

Read the full column here.

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What’s missing from your personal dictionary?

From this week’s “THE WORD” column in The Boston Globe, by Wordnik founder Erin McKean:

You can get an intriguing look at our cultural obsessions by surveying the words supposedly expunged from the personal dictionaries of famous people. There’s Pope Benedict XVI: On the occasion of his first visit to the United States in 2008, The New York Times’ Pope blog said that “political correctness is not in his dictionary.” There’s Chairman Mao: “The word regret was not in his dictionary,” according to “The Private Life of Chairman Mao,” by Li Zhisui, who was Mao’s private physician for more than 20 years. And P.T. Barnum, in his “Struggles and Triumphs: Forty Years’ Recollections,” chastises his manager and son-in-law for being less than enthusiastic about some of Barnum’s plans with “have I not told you often enough, the word can’t is not in my dictionary?”

Read the full column here.

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Wordnik for Nook!

We’re thrilled to be powering the official word of the day application for the Nook Color, now available at the Nook Apps store!

Learn interesting words every day — and really understand how they’re used by seeing how they’ve been used in great books available in the Nookbooks Store. (And the app includes audio pronunciations, too!)

Interested? There’s more information here.

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Support Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Efforts

Over the past several days we’ve seen a significant increase in searches for tsunami and other earthquake-related terms on Wordnik. In light of that we’ve added a banner to the top of many of these pages linking to the American Red Cross donations page, and to the Google crisis response page, which has more detailed information about relief efforts. (The Google page also includes a form to donate directly to the Japanese Red Cross, to which Wordnik.com is making a donation.)

If you see additional words that do not have the banner that you’d like to suggest get the banner treatment, please leave a comment here … thank you!