Author Archives: John McGrath

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You are what you read

Please forgive the self-promotion/cross-posting, but I just submitted one of the more interesting Librarything blog posts of late to Digg. Would love it if you’d take a second to go over and digg it, and pass it along to anyone else you know who might be interested:

http://digg.com/software/You_are_what_you_read

As noted in the comments of the LibraryThing blog post, there must be a bunch of similar things that could be done with one’s words, or a word cloud. Would love to hear any good ideas. I’m seriously considering wrapping my MacBook in a word cloud.

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See all comments on your words and lists

If you go to any one of your lists, or to your profile page, theres a “Comments” link where you can see all the comments that you yourself have written.

On that comments page there is now also a link to a new page, where you can see everything other people have written on your profile, your lists, and your words. Another way to keep track of what people are saying.

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Some Crap

I was poking around in the OED tonight — that’s right, the Online Etymology Dictionary — and came across an article on the etymology of the word “shit.” Apparently there’s a mistaken belief in some quarters that it’s an acronym. Which strikes me as transparently false: If ever there was a good, solid, Anglo-Saxon sounding word, it’s shit. The article is a bit shrill in makings its point, but nevertheless it’s an interesting read.

In a similar vein, you might want to check out Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-word, which is both fun and enlightening, or, drifting a bit farther, On Bullshit, by the tremendously named Harry G. Frankfurt, which I read over the holidays and loved. Would make an excellent gift for a Wordie, or for yourself, if you’re planning on exchanging that copy of The Redneck Dictionary you got for Christmas.

For some reason all this reminds me of a paper I read long ago, by one Quang Phúc Ðông of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (coincidentally my alma mater), titled “English sentences without overt grammatical subject.”

I’m not sure why it’s funny to take cuss words seriously, but it is.

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Comment feeds for words and lists

Just added a feed for the comments attached to every word and word list, so you can more easily keep track of discussions, or see if anyone has responded to a comment or citation you left. As always, please send me suggestions or bug reports for improving this feature.

Someday I hope to add email notifications for keeping track of various things, but feeds are easier to implement, so that’s what we have for now. Occam’s razor guiding me, as usual.

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Wall Street Journal: Wordie a "Time Waster"



Not Me

Aaron Rutkoff had a piece about Wordie on the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Online. He writes the “Time Wasters” column, naturally.

He nicely captures Wordie, I think, and points out that the site began as a bit of a joke. True enough, though I’d like to add that I do, at this point, take Wordie a little bit seriously.

The only bummer: they didn’t do one of those hedcut stipple drawings of me. If they had done that, it would make me take Wordie, and myself, very, very seriously.

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Word Clouds

A new way to view word lists: Word Clouds. Lets you see a list weighted visually, so that the more often the word has been listed, the larger it appears. Similar (ok, fine: identical) to the way Flickr does it.


To all you Christians out there, I’d like to wish you a very happy Christmas. And to everyone else, I hope you have the merriest of Mondays.

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Live Bookmarks, Vote Wordie

First, passing on a tip from Andrew Mager: the new “live bookmarks” feature in Firefox 2.0 is rad, and works nicely with Wordie feeds. Live bookmarks essentially let you bookmark a feed, and then see the contents of the feed as if the bookmark was a folder. It’s nice.

Second, Wordie has been nominated for a Mashable Social Networking Award in the “nice” (or maybe it was “niche”?) category. Vote for us with the big dumb button below, if you wanna. And rembember, a vote for Wordie is a vote for prosperity: