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Some Crap

I was poking around in the OED tonight — that’s right, the Online Etymology Dictionary — and came across an article on the etymology of the word “shit.” Apparently there’s a mistaken belief in some quarters that it’s an acronym. Which strikes me as transparently false: If ever there was a good, solid, Anglo-Saxon sounding word, it’s shit. The article is a bit shrill in makings its point, but nevertheless it’s an interesting read.

In a similar vein, you might want to check out Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-word, which is both fun and enlightening, or, drifting a bit farther, On Bullshit, by the tremendously named Harry G. Frankfurt, which I read over the holidays and loved. Would make an excellent gift for a Wordie, or for yourself, if you’re planning on exchanging that copy of The Redneck Dictionary you got for Christmas.

For some reason all this reminds me of a paper I read long ago, by one Quang Phúc Ðông of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (coincidentally my alma mater), titled “English sentences without overt grammatical subject.”

I’m not sure why it’s funny to take cuss words seriously, but it is.

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Comment feeds for words and lists

Just added a feed for the comments attached to every word and word list, so you can more easily keep track of discussions, or see if anyone has responded to a comment or citation you left. As always, please send me suggestions or bug reports for improving this feature.

Someday I hope to add email notifications for keeping track of various things, but feeds are easier to implement, so that’s what we have for now. Occam’s razor guiding me, as usual.

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Wall Street Journal: Wordie a "Time Waster"



Not Me

Aaron Rutkoff had a piece about Wordie on the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Online. He writes the “Time Wasters” column, naturally.

He nicely captures Wordie, I think, and points out that the site began as a bit of a joke. True enough, though I’d like to add that I do, at this point, take Wordie a little bit seriously.

The only bummer: they didn’t do one of those hedcut stipple drawings of me. If they had done that, it would make me take Wordie, and myself, very, very seriously.

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Word Clouds

A new way to view word lists: Word Clouds. Lets you see a list weighted visually, so that the more often the word has been listed, the larger it appears. Similar (ok, fine: identical) to the way Flickr does it.


To all you Christians out there, I’d like to wish you a very happy Christmas. And to everyone else, I hope you have the merriest of Mondays.

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Live Bookmarks, Vote Wordie

First, passing on a tip from Andrew Mager: the new “live bookmarks” feature in Firefox 2.0 is rad, and works nicely with Wordie feeds. Live bookmarks essentially let you bookmark a feed, and then see the contents of the feed as if the bookmark was a folder. It’s nice.

Second, Wordie has been nominated for a Mashable Social Networking Award in the “nice” (or maybe it was “niche”?) category. Vote for us with the big dumb button below, if you wanna. And rembember, a vote for Wordie is a vote for prosperity:

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Wordie Blog Widget

In response to many requests, I present to you the Wordie blog widget. It displays recent words from Wordie on your blog. You can configure how many words are shown, and choose to display recent words from all your lists, from a single list, or from the site as a whole. Due to space constraints it only displays definition links for Ninjawords and The Free Dictionary. And please note that it uses Javascript, so it doesn’t work on blogging platforms that prohibit Javascript, such as LiveJournal.

There’s a link to the widget generator at the bottom of every page. Per usual, please let me know if it’s broken, or if you’d like me to fancy it up somehow. This time around I actually tested in Safari, Firefox 2, and IE 6.

You can see it in action at the bottom of the sidebar in my erstwhile blog, Fryolator, now mostly defunct.