Author Archives: Erin McKean

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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!

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Happy API-versary!

Wordnik t-shirt

Do you have a Wordnik API key? This could be yours!

We’re a bit late on this … we just realized last week that the Wordnik API has been open for more than a year!

To celebrate our data-versary, we’re going to give away some spiffy Wordnik t-shirts. We’ll pick five lucky developers from everyone who has registered for a Wordnik API key by Monday, November 15th, and send them each a t-shirt.

If you haven’t signed up for a Wordnik API key yet, you might wonder: what can you do with the Wordnik API? You can power games, make mobile apps (including feature-phone apps), and more.