Author Archives: John McGrath

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Still More Glossaries

Here are a few more glossaries, which have also been added to the canonical Glossaralia post. My favorites in this batch are the weather terms and, despite the cheesois design, the Harry Potter words, many of which include audio files illustrating their pronunciation, or one person’s interpretation thereof. A nice touch.

Thanks to Cooper Green for the radio glossary, Katie for the investing and business links, and reesetee for the subtitling link. The glossaries:

Building Terms (contractorslicense.com)
Business Dictionary (BusinessDictionary.com)
Glossary of Cheese Terms (Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board)
Glossaries (glossarist.com, contains lots of broken links)
Harry Potter (Harry Potter Word Wizard, with audio)
Investing and Finance (investorwords.com)
Online News Terms (USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review)
Printmaking Terms (University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art)
Radio terms (University of Delaware)
Subtitler’s and Translator’s Tools (transedit.se)
Weather Terms (weather.com)

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25 Gifts for Wordinistas

For your literate friends and loved ones, a selection of gift ideas. Items are divided into three sections: stuff, books, and good causes.

Stuff

“Bookinist” chair. For the Wordie who has everything. It has space for 80 or so books, a built-in reading light, a secret compartment in the arms for your bifocals or whatever, and a wheel. €2,127 (US$3,154), presumably not including shipping from Germany.

Typewriter font coasters. For the Wordie who likes to drink. They’re from the Sundance catalog, which is kind of like the J. Peterman Catalog, but not as classy. The about page is unbearable: “In the beginning for us there was no end. Now, it’s hard to remember the beginning.” Robert Redford: not a Wordie. $8.

Typewriter key cuff links. For the well-dressed Wordie. Available in different keys. $38.

This is prolly my awesomest shirt. For the ironic Wordie. I threw this in because I know how many Wordies detest the words “prolly” and “awesome.” I saw some dude wearing this at my gym and wanted to hug him, but restrained myself, ’cause he prolly would have knocked my teeth out. $21.97.

Scrabble jewelry. For the Wordie who really, really likes Scrabble. Charm, $28. Also available: cufflinks, $85; necklace, $39.95.

Crappuccino Mug. For Wordies who support Wordie… and can’t resist a frothy mug of crappuccino. $12.99.

VoxTec Phraselator. For Wordies abroad. Developed for the U.S. military. Translates phrases from English into one of 60 other languages. It can’t translate in the other direction, but that doesn’t matter, since Americans don’t listen to foreigners. $2300.

Magnetic Poetry. For poets, I guess. Very retro ’90s, but still a crowd pleaser. $19.95.

Wrap a laptop with words. A little more DIY than the others, which is part of the appeal. Use a word list in cloud view as source material, or any other text. Around €25 (~US$37), including shipping.

Fischer Space Pen. For Wordies in Space. Also works well in New Jersey. Note that this image is not to scale: the Space Pen is not actually the same size as an astronaut. $50.

Flowbee. For the well-coiffed Wordie. This has nothing to do with words, other than having an awesome name, and just being… awesome. $59.95.

Sesquipedalian Onesie. Another fine Wordie product. All babies are aspiring Wordies. $10.99.


Books

The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two, by Anu Garag. $10.40.
Anu is the impressario behind WordSmith.org, and has been since 1994. I love that the title includes one of my favorite words ever.

That’s Amore!: The Language of Love for Lovers of Language, by Erin McKean. $8.07.
From Erin McKean, lexicographer to the stars and editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary. I’ve heard her other books are great too.

The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester. The classic true story of murder, insanity, and dictionaries. $11.16.

The F-Word, noted lexicographer and OED editor-at-large Jesse Sheidlower’s illustrated lexicon of the word “fuck.” $11.40.

On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt. Which totally sounds like a fake name–c’mon, Harry Wiener? He’s for real, though. He’s a licensed philosopher, at Princeton. This is perhaps more about meaning than language, though the two are intertwined, one would hope. In any case, it makes a fine companion volume to “The F-Word”. $9.95.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Whether you’re a Canadian, or just wish you were, you now have a first-rate dictionary from which to learn the origins of cougar, poutine, shit disturber, and other exotic gifts from the north. $32.59.

Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log, by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum. $22.00.
From the folks behind the language log blog.

Mo’ Urban Dictionary: Ridonkulous Street Slang Defined, compiled by Aaron Peckham.

Urban Dictionary is like Wordie’s bad older brother, who taught it to smoke and swear. That doesn’t stop me from thinking it wasn’t a great idea to put “ridonkulous” in the title.

The Oxford English Dictionary, edited by John Simpson and Edmund Weiner. Twenty volumes, 22,000 pages, 500,000 words, 2.5 million quotations. You know you want it. $6,295.00 for the blue leather edition, or $995.00 for the regular binding, plus $60.25 shipping. Or get the CD-ROM version (yes, they still make those) for only $235.00. Or a one year subscription to the online version for $295.00.

Would someone who works at a library please put the CD-ROMs on bittorrent? Please?

Good Causes

826 Valencia
“826 Valencia is dedicated to supporting students ages 6-18 with their writing skills, and to helping teachers get their students excited about the literary arts.”

Founded by meta-memoirist Dave Eggers. And they have a pirate shop!

 

First Book
“First Book is a nonprofit organization with a single mission: to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books.”

 

Book Aid International
“Book Aid International promotes literacy in developing countries by creating reading and learning opportunities for disadvantaged people, in order to help them realise their potential and eradicate poverty.”

Founded by “Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly,” who you might think is an 11 year old Harry Potter fan who rules an imaginary kingdom. You’d be wrong, though.

Reading is Fundamental
“Reading is Fundamental prepares and motivates children to read by delivering free books and literacy resources to those children and families who need them most.” Founded by Margaret McNamara, wife of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. I’d make a crack about RIF being some kind of black-ops front organization, except that they do such good work, and I’ve watched so frickin’ many of their PSAs, that I really can’t. I mean shouldn’t.

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Japanese Buzzwords

Fast on the heels of the OUP’s WotY, here’s a list of 60 words and expressions nominated for Japanese Buzzword of the Year by publisher Jiyu Kokuminsha.

A few seem uniquely Japanese (#35, “Tetsuko,” or female train fanatics), but in general the mix of political scandal, sports, and pop culture that spark coinage appears to be universal. Some (#49, “working poor”, #52, “inconvenient truth”) could have appeared on any list, in any language.

Thanks to Lampbane for the link.

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The Kindle: Books Don’t Need Saving

Todaythe tech and book blogs are all buzzing about the Kindle, Amazon’s attempt at an ereader. The tech blog reports are in-depth to the point of exhaustion, a bit hyperbolic, and overall what you’d expect. They’ve done this before.

That’s not so much the case for the book people, and there’s a whiff of desperation to the coverage, as if the Kindle is a deus ex machina that will help them maintain relevance.
Earth to publishing industry: people like books, and you’re doing just fine. You are not in the same sinking boat as the newspaper people, so chill out. Yes, some kinds of books aren’t so useful anymore (who under the age of 30 still uses a printed dictionary? The online options are superior in every way). But for the reading of long-form narrative, the best option is, and will remain for some time, a book.
For that to change, somebody, probably Apple, is going to have to come up with a far better device than the Kindle. Because I’m lazy, I’m just going to quote the obnoxious comment I left on the OUPblog:
“The older book demographic won’t buy [the Kindle] because they’re not gadget people, and young readers (yes, young people do read books) won’t because it’s fugly, and they’re already lugging around an iPod, smartphone, and laptop. On top of those devices, the Kindle is a redundant piece of crap.

Once again it’s going to be left to Apple to get this right. Schnittman is correct that any media device has to be networked, and have easy access to an enormous reservoir of content. But it has to be beautiful, or at least attractive, and it has do more than one thing. The iPhone is beautiful and multifunctional, for the same price as a Kindle. Speaking of price, who in their right mind is going to pay $14/month for the New York Times, in this emasculated, black and white, linkless form? Or $2/month for a bunch of otherwise free blogs? If they get 17 subscriptions, I’ll be shocked.

The Kindle is going to go down like the Lusitania.”

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Wordie Mobile, New Feature Roundup

This weekend saw the arrival of Wordie Mobile, a version of the site optimized for phones and other small-screen devices. This makes it much easier to add a word to your lists if you’re at the library, or on the bus, or wherever: Just point your phone browser to http://wordie.org/m. Thanks to Crystalover at Twitter for inspiring this. Other new goodies launched in the last week or two:

  • Updated, more wordie-esque design for Errata. Obviously.
  • Paging for past comments. You can now scroll back through all 36,367 of them.
  • Ads on every page, every day! Ok, so that’s not exactly a feature, but, well, baby needs shoes.
  • You can now leave comments on tag pages, like so.
  • A new search page, which lets you search comments, lists, or, via the Gooble, everything at once.
  • More sort options for lists, and maybe some other little niceties like that; I’ve probably forgotten something.
There’s more good stuff on deck, though the pace of development may slow a bit as I focus on other projects. More on that soon.

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NYTimes: Not Fucked Up

I have separate feed pages set up to follow media and language blogs, and was amused to see The New York Times pissing off both camps earlier this week.

The cause was a review by Kelefa Sanneh of a show by the Toronto band “Fucked Up,” which the Times decided to print as “********”.

Language Log, Languagehat and mediabistro were all full of sturm und drang over the asterisks, for reasons that didn’t make sense to me. Language Log seems to think the Times is being inconsistent, because they once printed the word “shit” when quoting a verbal attack on Eliot Spitzer’s dad. But a dispute involving public figures should be treated differently than punk music reviews. I think both punks and politicians would agree on that. Mediabistro, too, harps on “glaring inconsistencies.” Languagehat calls it “absurd censorship,” without giving a reason. With all due respect to Lenny Bruce, it’s been a while since you were striking a blow against censorship by saying the word “fuck.” While the Languagehat post is terse and unenlightening, the comments on it are far more thoughtful, and worth reading.

I love that The Gray Lady is doing such great things with digital media, and that they seem to be shedding their fear of the future. But the Times should always retain an element of old fashioned propriety, for nostalgia purposes if no other. It should always have a slight Man Men air about it, and holding itself to outdated standards of propriety is a fine way to accomplish that.

And it’s hardly an impediment to good journalism. In fact, the Times writers must love this shit–a little modesty is the perfect setup for fey wordplay and a wink at the reader. Language Log’s own Geoff Nunberg must have thoroughly enjoyed referring to the documentary film Fuck as “the film that dare not speak its name.” Who are we to take this away from him, or the Times writers?

The only criticism that made any sense to me is that it should have been rendered F****D Up, or at least ****** **. In the interests of clarity.