Category Archives: books

by - 2 Comments

Power Up With Pocket Posh Word Power Dictionaries

cover of Pocket Posh Word Power
Perhaps you’d like to sound more intelligent, or you have a job interview coming up.  Maybe you’re wondering what words should be part of your lexicon, or you’re just looking for some fun words to say.  If so, these Pocket Posh® Word Power dictionaries are for you!

Wordnik has partnered with Andrews McMeel Publishing to produce these four pocket-sized dictionaries, available May 31:

    120 Words to Make You Sound Intelligent
    120 Job Interview Words You Should Know
    120 Words You Should Know
    120 Words That Are Fun to Say

Small in size but big on information, each dictionary includes pronunciations, parts of speech, definitions, usage in a sentence, and etymology information. 120 Words to Make You Sound Intelligent also has an index of Prefixes and Suffixes.

With 120 Words to Make You Sound Intelligent, you’ll adorn your conversations with precise and elegant words such as muliebrity, insouciant, extirpate, and vitiate.

Business jargon can get your foot in the door . . . or get the door slammed in your face. Learn the right ways and contexts in which to use words such as stakeholder, kanban, and throughput to get noticed for the “right” reasons inside 120 Words to Use in a Job Interview.

From absquatulate to zoilist to words found in between (such as hullabaloo, phantasmagorical, and obstreperous), 120 Words That Are Fun to Say offers a list of smile-inducing words that will raise your spirits along with your word power.

Words such as propinquity, armillary, and farrago should be vocabulary staples. Consult 120 Words You Should Know to determine other additions to your lexicon.

Whether for Father’s Day, a recent grad, or that word nerd in your life (or yourself!), the Pocket Posh® Word Power collection is a gift that promises to boost vocabulary prowess.  Pre-order your copies today!

Check out our Words of the Day over the next couple of weeks for more samples from all four dictionaries.

by - 2 Comments

The Audio Cyclopedia

vacuum tube schematicI used to work at the Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography, in a basement office within sight of where Alvin was built. The basement held another, less-heralded marvel: the free table. Whenever a lab was overhauled or a grad student moved on, they’d cull their detritus and dump it on the free table. Part of the pinko ethos that infects academia, no doubt, but a wonderful thing.

Usual fare ran toward outdated WordPerfect manuals, but you would sometimes find a collection of neatly piled Pyrex labware with a note saying “slightly contaminated.” Or a broken oscilloscope. Or five cartons of Hollerith cards. Pretty great to a technostalgic pack rat.

I especially loved finding specialized reference books. They’re usually de facto dictionaries, but the words are in situ, being put to good use as they’re being defined. One of my favorite free table gimmes was just such a book: The Audio Cyclopedia*, by Howard M. Tremaine. Probably bought in the seventies by someone working on sonar or recording whale songs, it’s a 1,700 page compendium of recording technology, in excruciating detail and with a weird Jeopardy! pose-everything-as-a-question prose style.

It is an absolutely tremendous source of of technicalese and audio industry terms of art, so yesterday I finally started a list I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time: Audio Argot, inspired by the Audio Cyclopedia. Please contribute, it’s an open list. Anything audio related fits the bill, I think—words needn’t come specifically from the Cyclopedia, but for those that do I’ll add a citation. Here’s the list.

* It seems to still be in demand. My scavenged copy is the 2nd edition, first published in 1969; the first edition was published in 1959 and it is not cheap.

by

Wordnik word of the day: frisket

Today’s word of the day is frisket. We chose it because it’s fun to say, even though the meaning is a bit of printer’s jargon. It rhymes with biscuit and brisket. The Century Dictionary defines frisket as “a thin framework of iron hinged to the top of the tympan of a hand-press. For use, a sheet of paper is stretched and pasted over the frisket, and from this paper spaces are cut out to permit contact between the type and the sheet to be printed, which it serves to hold in place when the frisket is folded down upon the tympan, and to keep clean in the parts not printed.” If you want to learn more about old-fashioned printing, we recommend Practical Printing: A Handbook of the Art of Typography by John Southward.

galley-press
A galley press.Image from Practical Printing: A Handbook of the Art of Typography by John Southward.

by - 5 Comments

Beautiful Libraries

A little Friday fantasia: in September of 2007 Curious Expeditions collected dozens of pictures of stunning old libraries in a post titled Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries, which was just sent to me by my old pal Magnolia. They’re incredible.

I’ve spent my entire life surrounded either by clean-lined modernism or an almost equally spare New England aesthetic, and it’s startling to be reminded that baroque and rococo (barococo?) confections like this were ever built, let alone on this scale and in such profusion. Likewise, information is now so ubiquitous, and incorporeal, and cheap, it’s jolting to think of a time when it was rare, and heavy, and expensive, and so justified the building of palaces like this to contain it.

Curious Expeditions says they’ll leave it to someone else to post a list of beautiful modern libraries, like Louis Kahn’s library at Exeter. If anyone knows of one, please let us know in the comments.

by - 4 Comments

Staircase Bookcase

This is the least practical staircase ever. Tabbed treads to throw off eye and foot. Stripped lines all over the place, and in every plane, to toy with your depth perception. Clearly an ankle breaker.

As for the books, they must get punted all the time. And a typical stair riser is not more than 7″ high, which means nothing but smallish trade paperbacks under there.

Still, it’s totally awesome, and I want one. Park a bookinist at the top, and you’re in the catbird seat.