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Introducing Wordie Mini-Feeds

Wordie now has a Facebook-style mini-feed of your recent activity, like adding words or lists, making comments, moving words, and adding tags. If you go to a profile, you’ll see a link to this in the upper-right, available as either a web page or a feed.

By default this is turned on and visible to everyone. You can turn yours off by clicking the ‘edit personal preferences’ link on your profile. Activity is tracked (if you keep it turned on) from tonight forward; previous activity won’t be available.

This is a first step towards enabling some sort of watchlist feature, so you can more easily keep track of what friends and people whose words you like are up to–think Flickr contacts. Since it’s available as a feed, I’m hoping people will find their own good uses for it, as they’ve done with other Wordie feeds.

While I was mucking about on the server I also upgraded a bunch of other stuff (for the curious, I moved the whole shooting match to Rails 2.0), and probably broke something, or many things. As always, please let me know if I did, or if you have suggestions.

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The iPhone and the Death of Social Media

This post actually has nothing to do with social media, its death, or the iPhone, I just thought a sensational title that was also a transparent lie would drive traffic*. What this is really about is pimping my own post in the Silicon Alley Insider. Which is not a transparent lie (neither the fact of the post, nor its contents), but it is, like the title above, a naked, grasping attempt to drive traffic to Wordie/Errata, and to get my name in a blog I like.

* This will be the title of all Errata posts from now on.

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Maledicta

Maledicta, “The International Journal of Verbal Aggression,” has been in print on and off since 1977. Published by Reinhold Aman (whose interest in abusive language is more than just academic: he spent a year in the federal pen for sending his ex-wife threatening postcards), it’s a strange little artifact that might appeal to connoisseurs of foul language and/or wingnut ranters.

And Aman does seem like a true crank. He’s an ex-con with a Ph.D. in medieval German literature who publishes a journal–by turns scholarly and juvenile–on cussing. He consistently refers to his former employer, the University of Wisconsin, as “Dungheap U.” He put his time in the clink to use writing a book on prison argot in the form of a Herzog-style letter to Hillary Clinton.

He’s hung up on the Clintons. He attacks them repeatedly, though he’s not too particular about his sources. Or source, since most of his quotes come from one person, the thoroughly discredited Larry Patterson.

So, you’ve been forwarned: he’s not the most savory character. But Maledicta has serious freak value, and there’s some good linguistic bits sprinkled throughout.

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Pelf

While the language of law can reach tremendous heights, legalese is more often painfully, agonizingly dull.

So kudos to WSJ Law Blogger Peter Lattman for taking such unabashed delight in a word found in the austere setting of a legal opinion. And kudos to Judge Rosenbaum for dropping the hammer on the bad guys and showing off his mad vocabulary skills at the same time. High fives all around.

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NYTimes Buzzwords 2007

The “Word of the Year” roundups just keep coming. Grant Barrett’s guide to this year’s award season starts with Webster’s nomination of “grass station” on October 31st* and runs through the American Dialect Society’s 18th annual WotY vote, to be held January 4. It includes a full 17 events, including The New York Time‘s Buzzwords 2007 piece, also by Grant, which came out today and is the best of the lot so far.

Grant makes no pretense at being complete or authoritative, though as a professional linguist, author of The Lexicographer’s Rules, and host of the radio show “A Way With Words” he’s more qualified than most to do so. This is a list of words and phrases that caught the eye of someone whose business it is to pay attention to such things, and it’s a welcome change from the typical pseudo event.

Most importantly, Grant has a good eye, and ear. Earmarxist, crowdsource, and ninja loan are delightful, as are most of the others on this list.

* Amazingly Webster’s New World doesn’t seem to have a blog entry or even a press release about it. Here’s a newspaper article.

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Holiday-O-Matic

The whole War on Christmas nonsense drives me crazy. I lived for years in a predominantly Islamic neighborhood, and currently live in a predominantly Jewish one. Just because I celebrate Christmas is no reason for me to assume my neighbors do, and a seasonal greeting like “Happy Holidays” is simply more polite. More Christian even, if you believe one should love thy neighbor. The only war here is the ongoing one by the religious right against everyone else, including the silent majority of open-minded and compassionate Christians.

Now you can strike a blow for freedom, and conveniently punt on this whole issue, with the Holiday-O-Matic! Its three Wheel of Fortune style wheels, each containing 20 or so holidayish phrases, mix and match to form a ridiculous and ecumenical holiday greeting. And for every spin of the wheels Worktank, the creator of the site, will make a donation to Rotary First Harvest. A lovely holiday sentiment indeed.

Cheers to SonofGroucho for the link, and for the friendly and civil discussion he got rolling on Merry Christmas.