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Word Clock

Another cool experiment in typography: the Word Clock, by Simon Heys. It’s a screen saver for the Mac or PC, which displays the time, beautifully, in text. It allows fine-grain control over typographic attributes like leading and kerning, and has two modes: linear is displayed in the screenshot at right; check the web site to see what rotary looks like (the video is worth more words than I’m willing to type).

There’s also an iPhone app, which I hope gets released eventually through iTunes. From the looks of it, the current app requires you to jailbreak your phone.

Like so many of the cool design items on Errata, Steve sent this one.

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Dinosaurology

Dinosaurs! They’re teh alesome, as any 8 or 38 year-old will tell you. In an ongoing effort to highlight brilliant Wordie content*, I present chained_bear‘s completely over-the-top collection of dinosaur and dinosaur-related lists:

Dinosaurs
Not a Dinosaur
Words of Dinosaurology
Archosaurs
Pterosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, and a Coupla Placodonts ‘R’ Us
Prehistoric and Extinct Mammals ‘n’ Stuff
Living Fossils
Prehistoric and Extinct Birds
Dinosaurs that weren’t, but should have been

These comprehensive lists are well-tagged, so they can be sliced and diced by, among other things, geologic age:

Jurassic
Paleozoic
Pleistocene

and Linnaean classification:

Therapsid
Sauropsid
Plesiosaur

Some related lists you might also enjoy, if you’re in a Jurassic mood:

Geological time scale, by mollusque
Dinosaur Comics, by AbraxasZugzwang

Plus there’s the fearsome tyrannosaurus reesetee. And last but not least, there’s our pal pterodactyl.

Kudos and thanks to chained_bear, this is a prodigious effort and well worth exploring. At least one of these is an open list, so if any budding dinosaurologists* want to contribute, or flesh out info on the dinosaurs and not-dinosaurs in the comments, have at.

Oh, and be advised: it pays to turn on image search when browsing dinosaur lists.

* Such posts will henceforth be tagged ‘teh alsome’ for your convenience.
** Or paleontologists, if you stand on formality.

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Private Notes on Words

A new feature launched this weekend: private notes on words. On any word page, where it says “Leave a comment, citation, or private note”, click on “private note” to leave a postit-style note for yourself.

This is kind of like writing in the margins of a book–if there’s something you’d like to remember about a word, or you want to leave yourself pronunciation tips or study notes or a comment-in-progress or whatever, and it doesn’t seem appropriate to make it public, write yourself a note.

I’m hoping students in particular find this useful, and also people using Wordie to create glossaries or dictionaries. I’ve corresponded with a few folks who have expressed an interest in such a use, and the combination of tags, private notes, and comments seems like a good emerging toolkit. One could use tags to aggregate the words in question (there are already a bunch of good de facto glossaries on Wordie as a result of tagging, like demon, archery and beer), then private notes while collecting definitions or usage notes, with the final result ending up as a citation in the comments.

Or, use it however you want. Any suggestions for improvements or additions are, as always, welcome.

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Rumor Mill

There’s a great comment by qroqqa on rumoured, which, lest it drift by too quickly, deserves to be highlighted. It starts:

“A highly unusual verb in Present-day English: it has only this one verb form. Although it was historically a full verb with all its parts (‘Come hither Catesby, rumor it abroad, That Anne my Wife is very grieuous sicke.’—Richard III, IV.ii), for most of us today it can only be a past participle.”

Read the rest on rumoured. And thanks, qroqqa, for the insight.

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Comma Kameleon

Merrill Perlman* has a nice piece in the Columbia Journalism Review** about a supposed gaffe Joe Biden made earlier this year during the primaries, when he was quoted as saying “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

That quote may be missing a comma. Perlman doesn’t delve in the politics of it, or try to plumb Biden’s intentions, and I won’t either. But she goes into some detail about restrictive vs. nonrestrictive clauses, and how something as small as a single comma can significantly change meaning, and have broad-reaching repercussions. If you care about the power of language and punctuation**, it’s worth reading.

* Whom I had the pleasure of hearing speak about copy editing last month. Great talk.
** Where I worked for a while in the late nineties.
*** And I know you do.

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What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I spent some time poking around in the database this week, in anticipation of adding stats showing frequently favorited words and lists. The most favorited list is, happily, gangerh‘s sweet tooth fairy.

The most favorited word is… a disappointment. The second-most is mellifluous, and the bronze goes to loquacious. I had to go all the way to 16th place, interrobang, to find something that wasn’t a retread from the hot 100.

Don’t hold your breath, but these kind of stats will start showing up on the site, someday. Perhaps after one of you suggests a good way to sieve out the interesting stuff.

Also look forward to the ability to add private notes to words, which I worked on recently in Vacationland after bestiary suggested it. That will launch in the next few weeks. I’m hoping this makes Wordie a little more friendly to SAT-prep and ESL users. While us chatty cathys are more visible, the silent majority of Wordies are using the site for vocabulary lists. I’m going to try to add a few small features, starting with notes, to facilitate that kind of educational use. Suggestions to that end are welcome in the comments.