A few seem uniquely Japanese (#35, “Tetsuko,” or female train fanatics), but in general the mix of political scandal, sports, and pop culture that spark coinage appears to be universal. Some (#49, “working poor”, #52, “inconvenient truth”) could have appeared on any list, in any language.
Thanks to Lampbane for the link.
Todaythe tech and book blogs are all buzzing about the Kindle, Amazon’s attempt at an ereader. The tech blog reports are in-depth to the point of exhaustion, a bit hyperbolic, and overall what you’d expect. They’ve done this before.
Once again it’s going to be left to Apple to get this right. Schnittman is correct that any media device has to be networked, and have easy access to an enormous reservoir of content. But it has to be beautiful, or at least attractive, and it has do more than one thing. The iPhone is beautiful and multifunctional, for the same price as a Kindle. Speaking of price, who in their right mind is going to pay $14/month for the New York Times, in this emasculated, black and white, linkless form? Or $2/month for a bunch of otherwise free blogs? If they get 17 subscriptions, I’ll be shocked.
The Kindle is going to go down like the Lusitania.”
This weekend saw the arrival of Wordie Mobile, a version of the site optimized for phones and other small-screen devices. This makes it much easier to add a word to your lists if you’re at the library, or on the bus, or wherever: Just point your phone browser to http://wordie.org/m. Thanks to Crystalover at Twitter for inspiring this. Other new goodies launched in the last week or two:
On the heels of yesterday’s New York Times asterisk imbroglio, human asterisk Barry Bonds may be headed towards the pokey, and E*Trade may be going out of business.
Tough week for the asterisk.
I have separate feed pages set up to follow media and language blogs, and was amused to see The New York Times pissing off both camps earlier this week.
The cause was a review by Kelefa Sanneh of a show by the Toronto band “Fucked Up,” which the Times decided to print as “********”.
Language Log, Languagehat and mediabistro were all full of sturm und drang over the asterisks, for reasons that didn’t make sense to me. Language Log seems to think the Times is being inconsistent, because they once printed the word “shit” when quoting a verbal attack on Eliot Spitzer’s dad. But a dispute involving public figures should be treated differently than punk music reviews. I think both punks and politicians would agree on that. Mediabistro, too, harps on “glaring inconsistencies.” Languagehat calls it “absurd censorship,” without giving a reason. With all due respect to Lenny Bruce, it’s been a while since you were striking a blow against censorship by saying the word “fuck.” While the Languagehat post is terse and unenlightening, the comments on it are far more thoughtful, and worth reading.
I love that The Gray Lady is doing such great things with digital media, and that they seem to be shedding their fear of the future. But the Times should always retain an element of old fashioned propriety, for nostalgia purposes if no other. It should always have a slight Man Men air about it, and holding itself to outdated standards of propriety is a fine way to accomplish that.
And it’s hardly an impediment to good journalism. In fact, the Times writers must love this shit–a little modesty is the perfect setup for fey wordplay and a wink at the reader. Language Log’s own Geoff Nunberg must have thoroughly enjoyed referring to the documentary film Fuck as “the film that dare not speak its name.” Who are we to take this away from him, or the Times writers?
The only criticism that made any sense to me is that it should have been rendered F****D Up, or at least ****** **. In the interests of clarity.
The number of rock simple yet high concept all text web sites set in Palatino just doubled, with the launch of Seedy Stories. The site, built by Richard Mavis, is a sort of mini-mad-lib machine, which asks you the six basic questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how. You can enter as many answers as you’d like, and see random combinations of responses drawn from all answers.
It’s intended as an idea generator, meant to spark thought through permutation, combination, and juxtaposition; a sort of constrained bibliomancy. It just launched, and doesn’t have a lot of content yet; it’ll be interesting to see how it feels when more people have contributed. I’d like to see some ways to interact with other users, which may be forthcoming: Richard says he’ll be adding features regularly.
For Wordies in the New York City area, this could be fun: a naming party for a new company. I met these good folks on the NextNY list, where Jonah helps maintain the blogroll. Go for the free food and drink, stay for the company and to show off your mad, mad word skills. I’m going to try and make it, though I’m stuck out in the hinterlands of New Jersey all afternoon tomorrow, so we’ll see.
Naming companies, and web sites, can be amazingly difficult. Especially if you’re trying to find an available domain at the same time. Mein got, coming up with Squirl took frickin’ forever, and in the end we still made the moronic amateur-hour decision to get a .info domain (because we loved the name, but the squatter who owned .com wanted $35k for it). Wordie came more easily, perhaps because I had no intention of building it. Everything is easier when it’s a joke.