Author Archives: John McGrath

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Depraved and Insulting English

The latest in the seemingly endless line of upper-middle brow treatises on bad words to come to my attention (thanks sionnach!) is Depraved and Insulting English, by Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea.

I haven’t read it yet, but judging from reviews and the tidbits sionnach has graced us with, many entries look almost medical–the authors seem to draw more on Latin and Greek than stalwart Anglo Saxon. Which probably makes it all the easier–and more fun!–to slip innocuous-sounding gems like lotium into conversation.

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Kids Still Read

Fred Wilson has a post on his family’s media consumption in which he talks about his kids’ attitudes towards movies, TV (watched as often as not on DVD), the web, video games, radio, magazines, newspapers, and books.

For the most part it’s what I’d guess kids would be doing: watching video, playing games, spending time on Facebook. There are a few happy surprises, though. Magazines are holding their own. Hard to say how typical this is–I don’t have any insight into the health of the magazine industry–but it surprised me. I had assumed magazines were in the same world of hurt as newspapers.

Most notable, though, is that reading books is apparently alive and well at the Wilson’s: “They still read books the way we did as kids. That doesn’t seem to have changed a bit. They read them for school, they read them for entertainment, and they read them lying in bed waiting to be tired enough to turn off the lights.”

I found that absolutely uplifting, and anecdotal confirmation of something I’ve previously blogged: there is no replacement for long-form narrative text. Eventually that text may be displayed on an improved Kindle, as soon as someone (Apple or Amazon, most likely) gets it right. The exact delivery method doesn’t concern me much. But that kids still take pleasure in reading books? That concerns me greatly, and it’s great to hear of books holding their own in a home full of other glittering distractions.

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Introducing Wordie Mini-Feeds

Wordie now has a Facebook-style mini-feed of your recent activity, like adding words or lists, making comments, moving words, and adding tags. If you go to a profile, you’ll see a link to this in the upper-right, available as either a web page or a feed.

By default this is turned on and visible to everyone. You can turn yours off by clicking the ‘edit personal preferences’ link on your profile. Activity is tracked (if you keep it turned on) from tonight forward; previous activity won’t be available.

This is a first step towards enabling some sort of watchlist feature, so you can more easily keep track of what friends and people whose words you like are up to–think Flickr contacts. Since it’s available as a feed, I’m hoping people will find their own good uses for it, as they’ve done with other Wordie feeds.

While I was mucking about on the server I also upgraded a bunch of other stuff (for the curious, I moved the whole shooting match to Rails 2.0), and probably broke something, or many things. As always, please let me know if I did, or if you have suggestions.

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The iPhone and the Death of Social Media

This post actually has nothing to do with social media, its death, or the iPhone, I just thought a sensational title that was also a transparent lie would drive traffic*. What this is really about is pimping my own post in the Silicon Alley Insider. Which is not a transparent lie (neither the fact of the post, nor its contents), but it is, like the title above, a naked, grasping attempt to drive traffic to Wordie/Errata, and to get my name in a blog I like.

* This will be the title of all Errata posts from now on.

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Maledicta

Maledicta, “The International Journal of Verbal Aggression,” has been in print on and off since 1977. Published by Reinhold Aman (whose interest in abusive language is more than just academic: he spent a year in the federal pen for sending his ex-wife threatening postcards), it’s a strange little artifact that might appeal to connoisseurs of foul language and/or wingnut ranters.

And Aman does seem like a true crank. He’s an ex-con with a Ph.D. in medieval German literature who publishes a journal–by turns scholarly and juvenile–on cussing. He consistently refers to his former employer, the University of Wisconsin, as “Dungheap U.” He put his time in the clink to use writing a book on prison argot in the form of a Herzog-style letter to Hillary Clinton.

He’s hung up on the Clintons. He attacks them repeatedly, though he’s not too particular about his sources. Or source, since most of his quotes come from one person, the thoroughly discredited Larry Patterson.

So, you’ve been forwarned: he’s not the most savory character. But Maledicta has serious freak value, and there’s some good linguistic bits sprinkled throughout.

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Pelf

While the language of law can reach tremendous heights, legalese is more often painfully, agonizingly dull.

So kudos to WSJ Law Blogger Peter Lattman for taking such unabashed delight in a word found in the austere setting of a legal opinion. And kudos to Judge Rosenbaum for dropping the hammer on the bad guys and showing off his mad vocabulary skills at the same time. High fives all around.