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The Swearing Festival

This coming Saturday, November 10, is the second annual Swearing Festival, which is exactly what it sounds like: an exploration and celebration of expletives.

The afternoon program is relatively staid, with a panel of linguists, authors, and publishers talking about cursing. The evening program is pretty much just cursing: competitive cursing, cursing to music, cursing in different languages.

If you’re in the Bay Area (the one near San Francisco, not the Bay of Fundy or Bengal), you might want to check it out.

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The Cupertino Effect

Ben Zimmer* has an interesting and amusing post in today’s OUPblog about the Cupertino Effect: the tendency of spellcheckers, due to outdated dictionaries, bad algorithms, or a combintion thereof, to insert or suggest nonsensical words.

The recent addition of WordNet definitions to Wordie (which I’ll blog at greater length on Monday) was resulting in a version of this before I tweaked the algorithm. As someone famous once said (Barbie, I think), natural language processing is hard.

* update: I incorrectly called Ben “Bill Zimmer” when this was first posted. Not sure where that came from, sorry Ben!

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Wordie hearts vajayjay

Stephanie Rosenbloom of the The New York Times has an excellent piece about the word “vajayjay,” a euphemism for vagina coined on “Grey’s Anatomy” and popularized by Oprah Winfrey.

There was some gnashing of teeth on Wordie when vajayjay was first listed a few months ago, but the word fills a linguistic void, according to Rosenbloom: There are a slew of lighthearted euphemisms for male genitalia (enough to constitute a Monty Python song), but fewer for the female equivalent, and fewer still that aren’t vulgar or sexist.

Rosenbloom takes a silly word as an occasion to talk to some serious linguists and writers on some interesting topics. Well worth the read.

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Give That Woman a Crappaccino!*

My pal Theo pointed me to this WSJ Law Blog piece on Sharon Nichols, founder of the “I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar” Facebook group. The group’s stated mission is to document bad grammar, and to date almost 5,000 photos have been uploaded for that purpose. One example: a rather large tattoo claiming “You Bleed Just To Know Your Alive.”

Nichols, a student at Alabama Law, was also covered last week in The New York Times Fashion & Style section, which I found a bit odd–does good grammar ever go out of style?

* See crappuccino. And don’t forget your unlimited edition crappuccino mugs.

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The Comedy of the Commons

I’m a huge fan of online collaboration, and I particularly love (and try to build) tools that encourage people to create common good while having fun. It’s the exact opposite of the tragedy of the commons: rather than squabbling over limited resources, and destroying them, people improve a shared resource, or create entirely new ones, while having a good time and benefiting themselves.

Many Eyes, from IBM’s Visual Communications Lab, lets you visualize word relationships in literature. It’s tremendous eye candy, and the visualizations are in essence collaborations between the site’s developers (Fernanda and Martin, who I saw give a great talk at this year’s Foo Camp*) and its users, who contribute data for the visualizations.

Self-sacrifice is a beautiful thing, but not the most effective motivator; for getting things done, there’s nothing like aligning the interests of individuals and groups. It’s idealism without the masochism, something Wordie aspires to. Many Eyes is fun, beautiful, and a great example of this mechanism in action.

* Pathetic name dropper: guilty.