Author Archives: John McGrath

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Hit Ctl-b: The Boss Button

The Boss Button isn’t some really fine button. It’s an insurance policy that helps you maximize the amount of time you spend on Wordie, and minimize the consequences of getting nothing else done. Or at least it minimizes your chances of getting caught fecking off. There’ll probably still be consequences.

It works like this: You’re in your cubicle, half alseep, trying to come up with an amusing outfit for your vergerhade character, and you hear your boss trudging toward you. Casually hit ‘Ctl-b’ on your keyboard, and the browser window displaying Wordie will instantly go to one of a random assortment of work-appropriate* pages. For further verisimilitude, you can configure the Boss Button to go to a page suitable for your industry or workplace (click ‘edit personal preferences’ on your profile**).

Work is for suckers. Spend more time on Wordie.

* For the most part. Depends where you work. ymmv.
** I added hcard support to the profiles while I was mucking about. fwiw.

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Words on the Brink!

That’s the rather sensational headline on the cover of this week’s Nature. Inside are two papers on word evolution, with the more staid titles “Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history”* and “Linguistics: an Invisible Hand”.

The premise of the first is straightforward and rather commonsensical: words that are used a lot don’t change much. In other words, the rate at which words tend to morph is in inverse proportion to how often they’re used. For example, all Indo-European languages apparently use the same root form for the word “two.” It’s obviously a widely-used word, and it has evolved hardly at all. The authors do a statistical analysis of four large language corpora (language corpora: the subject of an upcoming post, btw) to back this up. Good stuff. This is apparently the process by which the once little-used “vergerhade” came to be defined as an animatronic groucho marx in a tutu and straitjacket.

Nature’s sister site, Nature News, has a good overview of these papers, geared towards a more general audience.

* Nature is trying to charge $18 to download this single article, which is, if you’ll pardon my French, fucking nuts, especially given that most of what they publish is publicly funded research–we’ve already paid for it! So I had one of my spies steal it. You can get the full PDF here.

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Tagging Words

Wordie was originally conceived as a joke: all tags, no content*. Well, the punchline has finally arrived. This weekend I added tagging**.

Tagging is a way to categorize things by adding descriptive metadata to them in the form of, well… words. On Wordie this may seem like gilding the lily, but tagging has been repeatedly requested since the site launched, and for good reason. Among other things, tags allow:

  • Glossaries and topical dictionaries. Want to create a glossary of beer-related terms? Use tags: http://wordie.org/tags/beer

  • Collaborative lists. Want to get a bunch of your pirate friends together and create the ultimate list of pirate words? Have everyone add a ‘pirate’ tag to their piratish words, and bob’s your uncle: http://wordie.org/tags/pirate

  • Lists for an event or organization. Create lists specific to a class or conference by having participants use a custom tag like MIT6001 or DefCon15.
  • Related Words. Want to show all synonyms and antonyms of a word? Use tags.

Tagging is useful right off the bat. And once a critical mass of tags has been entered it gets more useful still, as it becomes possible to extract interesting information based on site-wide tagging patterns. For starters, at the bottom of each page there’s a link to a site-wide tag cloud, showing the last 500 tags entered. Like the comments page, it’s a good view into what’s current and another way to watch Wordie happen.

It’s also a good opportunity for me to pimp another site of mine, TagsAhoy.com, which lets you search your personal tags across variety of services. It now supports Wordie. Yes, I’m mildly obsessed with tagging.

Since this launched quietly a few days ago, over 1,000 tags have been added, and as the pace picks up and more viewing and sorting options become available it’ll only get more interesting***. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback as this was developed, and to everyone who has added or plans to add tags to their words. Fun for you, fun for the whole family.

* It’s a joke no longer; it’s now the best site on the Internet, ever.
** If you’ve been on del.icio.us since 2004, if you think tagging is passé, well, it’s as useful as ever, so shut up! I have yet to see a better ad-hoc organizational technique, and I still believe. Back to the future!
*** Check out Tim’s great blog post on when tags work and when they don’t. Since many of the benefits of tagging on Wordie accrue to the person doing it, I’m hoping we fall into the “when they do” column.

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QToro! Toro! Toro!

My pal and fellow LibraryThing alum, Altay, has launched a fantastic new site, QToro. That’s right, the world first and best social network for lawnmower afficionados.

Actually it’s a new trivia site, with all questions contributed by members. It’s beautifully designed and executed, and horribly, amazingly addictive. Already Qtoro is without a doubt the best trivia site on the Interwebs, and it’s getting better by the day as people fill it with a plethora of questions.

It’s hard to say what’s more fun, writing questions or playing the game. Please check it out and decide for yourself–but only if you have at least an hour to kill.

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Citing Sci-Fi


This weekend I stumbled across the Science Fiction Citations project for the OED, run by noted lexicographer and F Word author Jesse Sheidlower. It’s an effort to enlist public help in finding antecedents for words commonly used in science fiction. Citations are added at a slightly slower rate than on Wordie (there’s been one addition to SF Citations so far this year, and four in all of 2006), and the process is, relatively speaking, somewhat rigorous, as you might expect of the OED. But if you’re a serious fan of either science fiction or the OED, it could be a lot of fun. And c’mon–getting a citation in the OED would give you mad, mad Wordie cred.