Author Archives: John McGrath

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Human Brain Cloud

Human Brain Cloud shows you a random word and asks you to enter the first association that comes to mind. From this it is creating a ginormous web of word and phrase associations: 531,316 unique words and phrases connected through 5,704,465 associations, contributed by 357,762 people, all since mid July.

It’s a fun diversion and as you can see the graphics are lovely–Kyle Gabler, the creator of the site, is a game designer. Shortly after launch Kyle reported a bunch of interesting statistics, but what most got my attention were his comments on the tenor of the contributions: “the number one thing that surprised me right off the bat with this experiment is that people are, in general, overwhelmingly funny, friendly, articulate, and willing to play along.”

Sounds familiar. I think playing with words brings out the best in people.

Mil gracias to Steve for the link.

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Pòg mo thoin

It’s been a while since we’ve had an installment of the Weird International Dictionary Series, so forthwith, I present MacBain’s Dictionary, aka An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, which was apparently “keyed in” by one Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle. To be specific, this is an html edition of a 1982 photo reprint of the 1911 2nd edition of a Gaelic dictionary originally published in 1896.

Somehow along the way all the words beginning with H, J, K, Q, V, W, X, Y and Z seem to have gone missing. Or perhaps Gaelic doesn’t have any such words.

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Csókol az én -m csacsi

For the frequent traveler: how to say kiss my ass in 36 different languages. Nice, though if they included a pronunciation guide, or audio, it would be nicer.

From a site about local motocross racing, naturally.

Update: This list is crap. My Spanish is good enough that I should have realized this, but I pretty much just snickered and posted. Apologies to anyone who used one of these in conversation and was made fun of.

I think some… motocross afficionado, I guess, just typed “kiss my ass” into babelfish a bunch of times, and posted the results. The correct Spanish is, I think, “besa mi culo”, but babelfish gives you “besa mis asno”, which means “kiss my donkey.”

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Transmogrified List Feeds

Lisa from Sophistechate has built a refurbished feed for Wordie lists using Yahoo! Pipes. It takes the feed from any list page, and adds the row of lookup favicons that appear under the words on the site to the words in the feed. Like so.

One thing to note is that once you’ve generated the pipe, you won’t immediately see the transmogrified feed on the Pipes page, which threw me at first. You first need to click the ‘My Yahoo,’ ‘Add to Google’, or, to see the raw feed, ‘More options’ link.

Thanks Lisa! This joins angharad and uselessness’s Wordie Bookmarklet as another very cool member-contributed utility.

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Pick Me! *sits up straight, waves hand wildly*

yahoo picksIt’s been a while since I bragged about a Wordie media mention*, but I liked the tone of this one: yesterday Wordie was chosen as the Yahoo! Pick of the Day. The kicker says it all: “¡Que viva Wordie! Romp through the “recent words” section, acquaint yourself with the top 100 citers, linger among the most recent themed attractions, and then declare yourself a wordie. Go forth, friends, and flourish linguistically.”

Right on, Yahoo!**. Right on.

* To balance the scales, here’s a gem from the archives. Read this list bottom to top.
** Question: if Yahoo! is the last word in a sentence, do you still use closing punctuation? It makes sense that you would, but man, it’s chugly.

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We Are Not Alone

While sniffing around for frostitute usages yesterday I stumbled across lingofactory.tribe.net. Wordie is many things to many people, one of which is a neological playground. In that sense it shares a common mission with lingofactory: to seed the world with madeupical words.

One notable difference is that lingofactory has a “publish or perish” policy: non-particating lurkers are subject to eviction. Wordie will never be so harsh, but I have to say, I admire their ruthlessness.