Author Archives: John McGrath

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NYTimes Buzzwords 2007

The “Word of the Year” roundups just keep coming. Grant Barrett’s guide to this year’s award season starts with Webster’s nomination of “grass station” on October 31st* and runs through the American Dialect Society’s 18th annual WotY vote, to be held January 4. It includes a full 17 events, including The New York Time‘s Buzzwords 2007 piece, also by Grant, which came out today and is the best of the lot so far.

Grant makes no pretense at being complete or authoritative, though as a professional linguist, author of The Lexicographer’s Rules, and host of the radio show “A Way With Words” he’s more qualified than most to do so. This is a list of words and phrases that caught the eye of someone whose business it is to pay attention to such things, and it’s a welcome change from the typical pseudo event.

Most importantly, Grant has a good eye, and ear. Earmarxist, crowdsource, and ninja loan are delightful, as are most of the others on this list.

* Amazingly Webster’s New World doesn’t seem to have a blog entry or even a press release about it. Here’s a newspaper article.

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Holiday-O-Matic

The whole War on Christmas nonsense drives me crazy. I lived for years in a predominantly Islamic neighborhood, and currently live in a predominantly Jewish one. Just because I celebrate Christmas is no reason for me to assume my neighbors do, and a seasonal greeting like “Happy Holidays” is simply more polite. More Christian even, if you believe one should love thy neighbor. The only war here is the ongoing one by the religious right against everyone else, including the silent majority of open-minded and compassionate Christians.

Now you can strike a blow for freedom, and conveniently punt on this whole issue, with the Holiday-O-Matic! Its three Wheel of Fortune style wheels, each containing 20 or so holidayish phrases, mix and match to form a ridiculous and ecumenical holiday greeting. And for every spin of the wheels Worktank, the creator of the site, will make a donation to Rotary First Harvest. A lovely holiday sentiment indeed.

Cheers to SonofGroucho for the link, and for the friendly and civil discussion he got rolling on Merry Christmas.

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6 Gifts for Wordinistas, last minute edition

A few more good Wordie gifts have come over the transom since last month’s Wordinista gift roundup. If you order immediately, you just might be able to get something shipped in time for xmas. Though you have plenty of time to order a nice New Year’s gift for yourself.

Anything from the Shorthand Press. Erin Healy makes beautiful things–cards, notebooks, clothes–with words on them, and those same words transliterated into shorthand. They’re witty and delightful. Starting around $2.75.

Artificial Larynx. Wordie loves text, but let’s not forget the oral tradition, of which an important part is the Darth Vader voice. “Luke, I am your father!” $529.96

Self-referential shrinky-dinks necklaces. Why have anything, when you can just explain it instead? Via Away With Words. $25.

Helvetica poster. “Meet the cast” poster from the blockbuster “Helvetica.” $20.

Navajo Code Talker GI Joe, for the translator in your life. Says 7 different phrases in Navajo code and English. I stole this one lock, stock and barrel from Language Log.

Noa’s Calendar. From Finland, where all the best calendars come from. More fun with text as graphics–words embedded in sentences. $35.

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Flipping like Mitt Romney

Peter Sokolowski over at Merriam-Webster graciously responded to my rant against their Word of the Year list and shed some light on their selection process, which I thought was pretty stand up of him. My favorite nugget: their online dictionary gets over one beeellion pageviews a year. All the more reason to appreciate his taking the time to respond to a gnat like Errata.

Now I just need to hear from Safire. Bill, it’s Christmas time. Come in out of the cold.

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Text Post Redacto

Jeff Jarvis has a provocative piece on BuzzMachine, titled Post-text?, in which he speculates about the waning of text as it becomes easier for computers to handle audio and video. It reminded me of a comment made recently by my old friend and professor Andrew Lih, that he now listens to the web as much as he reads it.

I love movies. I love This American Life so much that I’ve considered stalking Ira Glass. Last winter we went on a bender and watched all seven seasons of Buffy in three months. But I’m re-reading Neil Postman’s Building a Bridge to the 18th Century right now, and no other medium could possibly convey the depth and breadth of ideas Postman achieves in that slim volume. If books were to be relegated to the same Siberia as, say, epic poetry–a quaint form read in school and by a few eccentrics–it would be a great loss. Not just for nostalgic reasons (though I’m as susceptible to those as anyone), but because the richness of information in a book, and the particular flow state possible when in the thrall of a good one, can’t be equaled by other media.

I think Jarvis and the sources he mentions may be on to something: a lot of the pithy nonsense text on the web is being replaced by pithy nonsense audio and video, which is tantamount to replacing twinkies with snowballs.But long-form narrative is still best conveyed textually.

And for that reason I’m not actually too worried about the fate of text, at least not in the form where it matters the most, in books. There, it still does what it does best. And I know too many kids who are as possessed by books as they are by the rest of the media constellation. But if, God forbid, a text-less dystopia does comes to pass, Wordie is going to be like Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck in On the Beach: the last holdouts, singing “Waltzing Matilda” while we wait for the world to end.

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Group Lists

Wordie now lets you create collaborative lists. Families, create a shared list for the Airing of Grievances! Friends, list your private slang. Classes, build vocabulary lists, or list and discuss words from a book you’re reading. Create a collaborative dictionary for your profession or a project. Lots of uses here.

To start, create or edit a list. You’ll see two new fields: a radio button which lets you choose whether it’s an individual or group list, and a field where you can invite others, by Wordie name or email. People you list will be sent an invitation to contribute (and join, if they weren’t already a member). Contributors see the same ‘add word’ box as the owner of the list, and the list shows who contributed what.

While I was messing with lists I took the opportunity to clean things up a bit. Everybody’s list of lists now has its own page, instead of appearing as a heap of illegible text, as had been the case.

As per usual, I’m sure I broke tons of shit when launching this, so let me know if anything is amiss, or if you have any suggestions.

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m00t

I know it’s not cool to be a prescriptivist, but can I just say that Merriam-Webster picked the dumbest fucking word in the universe as their Word of the Year 2007? I’m aware that M-W itself didn’t make the choice, the eleven year olds who use their web site did, but isn’t that why they have all those lexicographers lying around? To point out when the rest of us are being idiots, and shut us down?

A few people wrote this week about M-W’s announcement, and I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t have anything nice to say. Actually I have one nice thing to say, which is that some of the comments on Wordie’s page for it are pretty good, including the links to various etymologies, and, especially, the prior art from Chaucer. But I got a few more emails today and figured, fine, I’ll uncork myself and spew some bile.

I’m not even sure I don’t like the word, but I hate that they picked it, and I’m not alone. It’s not just the winner that sucks, it’s the whole list. Conundrum? Apathetic? What do these words have to do with anything interesting or topical? The only good word of the lot is Pecksniffian, though why it’s on a list of words for 2007, and not 1857, is beyond me.

M-W is in the doghouse, along with William Safire. I’m now doubly glad M-W got voted off the island a month or so ago, when by unanimous consent they were replaced by OneLook as one of the sites Wordie links to.