Errata

Requiem for the print OED

2008-05-11T19:33:00.001-04:00

My overlord, the Times (actually, Virginia Heffernan, who I've never met), has a nice bit in this Sunday's Magazine about the end of the printed OED, her discomfort over that, and her chagrined realization that most of her dictionary use has been electronic for some time.

As has mine, but it doesn't make me love my 1934 Webster's Second any less. But it illustrates the fact that ginormous printed dictionaries are now fetish objects, as often as not. For practical day-to-day use, the Interblag wins.

Heffernan closes with a few suggested lexicographic resources. One too few, as she omits Wordie. Otherwise a great piece.

Limnology and Why I'm a Bad Blogger

2008-05-06T17:45:00.000-04:00

This story, about a family of limnologists keeping records of a Siberian lake over a period of 60 years, has nothing to do with words, other than that it allows me to drop limnologist. But it's a great story, if you enjoy science writing.

I'm sorry the posts have been so sporadic lately. I have two excuses. First, it turns out that if you constantly pester some companies, they hire you: last month I started working as developer at the New York Times. I've been obsessed with the Times since I learned to read, and I couldn't be more thrilled. Marc Andreessen notwithstanding I think the Times is going to weather the transition to digital and thrive, and I'm psyched to be a small part of that. It's been a great gig so far, the sole downside being that it cuts into my Wordie time.

But I'm burying the lede: my wife and I had a beautiful and healthy baby daughter last Tuesday, so my attentions have been elsewhere. I'll get back to blogging when things settle down. They do settle down, right?

Requiem for a Wordie

2008-04-27T01:53:00.004-04:00

My dad sent me this one (clipped from the paper, in an envelope, via post. John Sr. kicks it old school). It's the obituary of Eugene Ehrlich, a self-educated lexicographer and the author of 40 dictionaries.

Ehrlich wrote "The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate," "Veni, Vidi, Vici: Conquer Your Enemies, Impress Your Friends with Everyday Latin," and "Les Bons Mots, or How to Amaze Tout le Monde with Everyday French." Shortcuts to tarting up your vocabulary without having to read lots of books or learn other languages.

I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but Ehrlich sounds like a bit of a snob*. His aim seems to have been teaching people how to appear smart by showing them big words. I wonder what he would have thought of Wordie, which is full of people who know they're smart and enjoy words in all sizes. Erudite people snickering at poop.

He probably would have hated it, but still, hats off to a guy who wrote 40 dictionaries, and on his deathbed was correcting the use of "who" as a prepositional object.

* Of course I'm talking out of my ass again, seeing as I've never actually read any of Ehrlich's books. If anyone has, could you enlighten us in the comments?

They Tell "Stories"

2008-04-18T00:40:00.002-04:00

At least since HyperCard debuted in the late 80s people have been talking about how electronic media enable "new forms of storytelling." That phrase (along with "non-linear") has introduced so much plotless tech-wanking, so much storytelling that wasn't so much new as simply unbearable, that I tend to become hyper critical whenever I hear it.

That was my knives-out attitude when I visited "We Tell Stories," a Penguin UK-sponsored site that riffs on classic novels with "new forms of story." So I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be... not entirely awful. Some of it was OK.

The site presents six pieces (or will when it's done -- the sixth comes out next week), each in a different format. The first, 21 Steps, I quite enjoyed. It's nice and linear, like a story should be. So linear that it's told via the info bubbles on a Google Map. This worked much better than I expected, though by the middle I felt like I was watching from the Goodyear Blimp.

Slice is told through two fake intertwined blogs. I'm so up to my eyeballs in what I think are real blogs that this just seemed like more of the same; I couldn't really tell the difference between it and the tripe you come across on LiveJournal et. al. every day.

There wasn't much new about the rest of them. Your Place and Mine was written live, which struck me as coming from the Automatic Writing/Spontaneous Prose tradition. Though to be fair, writing with an audience is an interesting idea, the full effect of which I couldn't judge, since I missed the show, as it were. The writing itself is about as good as you might expect live, unedited writing to be.

Fairy Tales is a mad lib, plain and simple. And Hard Times is a Harper's Index ripoff, but not as smart, or funny.

The lead designer of We Tell Stories said in Boing Boing that the best is yet to come: Mohsin Hamid is the author of the April 22nd installment, which might be worth checking out. As is 21 Steps, at least for a chapter or two. The rest? Read a book. Advice Penguin probably doesn't mind.

Who owns quodpot?

2008-04-15T12:25:00.000-04:00

I've been following the court battle between J. K . Rowling/Warner Brothers and the owner of The Harry Potter Lexicon with mixed feelings. My first thought was that the idea that words can be owned by anyone is ridiculous.

But when the words in question are all original works, it changes the equation. And the fact that Rowling has hitherto been so open and supportive of Potter fans and some derivative works puts her in a different category than your typical litigious big media company. I'm inclined to think she should be the final arbiter of who presents Potter content, in any form.

The nearest analogy I can think of is the Star Wars universe, which contains books, movies, and many other derivative works, and which is tightly controlled by Lucas and his minions.

This raises the question of who owns all the content on Wordie. I never bothered to write terms of service, because they just seem dumb. No one reads them, and in the few instances of abuse that have arisen, I've used technical solutions, like blocking IP addresses, rather than legal ones. I did consider having a TOS which, in the small print, gave all rights to all content to Bill Shatner, or perhaps Abe Vigoda, and may do that retroactively. Thoughts?

Can't Stop Won't Stop

2008-04-08T17:50:00.002-04:00

Someday maybe I'll write another (or my first?) thoughtful post, full of original ideas explicated at length. But for now... more bookshelves! Presenting... the Elastico, by Arianna Vivenzio. Not suitable for the OED, but a shelf's worth of Aubrey/Maturin novels would probably look swell.

Sadly, this appears to be a design study (go here and click on 'projects,' then 'furniture'), and not for sale. Though you could probably make your own out of a truck's fan belt.

Many thanks to Nancy for the link.

"Bookshelf" does Bookshelves; Back to Dictionaries for Errata

2008-04-02T03:06:00.001-04:00

My idle threat to turn Errata into a blog about bookshelves has been shelved, since it was pointed out that there's already quite a good blog about bookshelves.

Most "Bookshelf" posts are about designy bookshelves, though some cover bookish art projects, like Richard Wentworth's delightful "False Ceiling," pictured at right.

Best niche blog since Literally, A Web Log. Thanks Robert!

Uroko House: Bookcase Bedroom

2008-04-01T15:56:00.001-04:00

Like an architectural version of a text within a text, it's the Bookcase Bedroom, aka the Uroko House. Appears to have been built inside a loft somewhere in Japan. I love that someone did this, but I think I'd want to build it against a wall with a window. Must be dark in there.

This photo-stealing site shows the building sequence nicely, but the original flickr set provides more photos. Thanks to pyeplant for the link.

Ok, Errata is now officially a blog about bookcases.

Library Carts As Bookcases

2008-03-31T08:09:00.000-04:00

Our new apartment, unlike our old, doesn't have built-in bookcases. We were trying to decide between making or buying a bunch of plain vanilla wooden bookcases when kad had a stroke of genius: library carts, aka book trucks. Librarians use them to reshelve books, but no reason they can't be the shelves.

We ordered a few standard-issue flat shelf carts from Vernon Library Supplies, though they're also available with slanted shelves and in various other configurations. In addition to Vernon, School Outfitters and Brodart also have a bunch of different models.

New Revision Schedule for the OED

2008-03-20T13:21:00.002-04:00

The OED has made a major change to the way it issues online updates and revisions.

Historically OED updates have been released in sequential alphabetical blocks. The December 2007 update, for instance, ran from purpress to quit shilling. The March 2008 update operates on a different model. Rather than a alphabetical block, it consists of words with "significant lexical productivity" and words which will "benefit from immediate review within the dictionary." In other words, it's based on relevance, rather than alphabetical order.

Future updates, according to the OED, will alternate between the old and the new model, with the June 2008 update continuing the alphabetical revision from quits, and the September 2008 update switching back to relevance.

This strikes me an eminently sensible. It allow the OED to be (somewhat) timely, while also continuing the systematic alphabetical review of the entire dictionary. Way to go, OED.

World's Best Exclamation Point

2008-03-15T22:10:00.001-04:00

As a morose little kid I loathed exclamation points, and as an insecure young adult I only used them ironically, when talking about things I hated or when feigning hysteria.

Used gratuitously or insincerely they're still nauseating, but in the right context a good exclamation point is a fine thing. So I was overjoyed to come across Sheep! magazine, "The Voice of the Independent Flockmaster," in this article on young farmers.

The people at Sheep! love sheep. Their enthusiasm is sincere and infectious, all the more so for being focused on something most of us probably don't give a shit about. If Money magazine changed its name to Money!, that would be stupid. But Sheep!? Sheep! is teh alesome.

The House That Wordie Built

2008-03-13T00:01:00.001-04:00

And by house I'm not talking about a metaphorical or metaphysical empire of words--I'm talking about an actual house. In which one climbs the bookcase staircase to take a seat under the rafters, surrounded by dictionary plastered walls.

A few of these touches by themselves might be just whimsical, but combine them all and the motif is full-bore OCD, where Martha Stewart gets her MLS and stops taking her meds, a house in which you can't not read.

And where you sleep under these bed linens, which tell their own bedtime story. Thanks to reesetee for the link, via Miss Cellania.

You'll be all the cozier knowing the place is insulated with newspaper. Finally a good argument for a physical newspaper instead of the online version: higher R value.

Graphis Magazine Covers

2008-03-12T13:19:00.001-04:00

While poking around on FFFFOUND! I recently came across this fantastic flickr collection of Graphis images.

Founded in 1944 by Walter Herdeg, Graphis (Greek for "writing implement") is a showcase for graphic design and typography.

One of Wordie's unofficial slogans is "pro-text, not anti-image," but it's always a pleasure to be reminded that the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Tag All Words in a List

2008-03-11T10:50:00.003-04:00

Per the request of Skipvia and others, you can now tag all words in a list in one fell swoop. Click on the 'add tags' link on any list page, on the left below the list name.

This tags every word in the list, not the list itself.

If you want to tag every word in a list except for a few, you can bulk-tag the list, then go in to the individual words and remove the tag where not appropriate. So you can tag 498 of the words in a 500 word list in 3 steps, rather than 498.

This is the heart of Wordie: helping you waste time more efficiently.

Onion Writer Infiltrates NYTimes

2008-03-10T12:43:00.002-04:00

Headline speaks for itself: "Cheney to Press for Mideast Peace."

Nigerian English: Yahoo-Yahoo boys, with cutlasses!

2008-03-09T01:45:00.002-05:00

Last week the International Herald Tribune ran an AP story on Nigerian English.

Nigeria, it says, has evolved a Dickensian patois, in which Victorian words and phrases inherited from the colonial era (urchin, gripe water, cutlass) combine with structural and syntactic elements from the hundreds of other national languages to create a unique melange. Good stuff.

[via AWADmail]

Breaker Breaker, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog

2008-03-06T00:21:00.002-05:00

I was talking with Peter Kafka of SAI yesterday, and he mentioned John Markoff's disdain for blogs. Sure enough today I was putzing around nytimes.com, as I compulsively do, and came across this:

"John Markoff covers Silicon Valley. He began writing about technology in 1976 and joined The Times in 1988. He gained some notoriety several years ago when he stated that he thought blogs might be the CB radio of the 21st century. He still believes that."

Not sure how I missed this the first time around but... John, are you on crack?* The innovations wrought by blogs are here to stay.**

CBs died because better technology came along, not because they were a bad idea. We now use cellphones to talk in our cars, and the web to chat with strangers in stilted lingo. With blogs as with CBs, the underlying technology and nomenclature may well change, but the needs they fulfill remain, and will be met.

Many of the characteristic traits of blogs--reader comments, frequent updates, a personal voice--are being incorporated into other forms of media. And as that happens, blogs per se may fade away. Maybe "blog" will be put out to pasture with "information superhighway,"***.

Though I suspect they will stick around and evolve, and we'll just keep calling them blogs. It's a succinct and useful word, where "information superhighway" was always an awkward eight syllables, dated on the day it was coined. But just because we don't call it the "information superhighway" anymore doesn't mean the Internet isn't all that and a bag of donuts. Likewise blogs, by that or any other name.

* John, I don't really think you're on crack. Hyperbole is a rhetorical device typical of blogs.

** Self-assured pronouncements by those totally unqualified to make them? Also typical.

*** Larding your "posts" with "links", either for informative purposes or in hopes of getting "link love"**** back from those you've linked to? Again, a typical blogging strategy.

**** Bloggers love cutesy phrases like this.

Wordy Birdie on Twitter

2008-03-05T12:35:00.003-05:00

From the Twitter Blog:

"Wordy Birdie is a game that works within Twitter. The creator, Dan Grigsby, describes it as 'part buzzword bingo, part drinking game.' You earn points by predicting what words people you follow will use in their updates."

I haven't played, but it looks fun. Another example of how Twitter is "the right kind of stupid," as Jacob Harris admiringly put it. Which is to say, it's simple and has a good API, so it lends itself to creative reuse.

Some Wordies have taken it upon themselves to create games, an effort I heartily applaud. And I'm all ears if anyone has any suggestions for "official" Wordie games. Ideally they'd be simple both to play and to code, and wouldn't require much in the way of moderation or refereeing. Suggestions in the comments, s'il vous plaît.

Takes All Types

2008-03-04T00:38:00.000-05:00

One more digression: Takes All Types is the best Facebook app I've ever seen. It takes our social networks and uses them as the basis for a national blood donation network. Sign up, let them know your blood type, and they'll notify you when blood is needed in your area. Such a simple idea, but so powerful.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Andreessen on Obama

2008-03-03T12:42:00.001-05:00

I try to avoid talking about politics on both Wordie and Errata, with mixed results. Likewise I try to stay on the topic of language and words, or at least in the ballpark.

But Marc Andreessen's latest post is just too interesting not to pass on. So to paraphrase Leslie Gore, it's my blog, and I'll repost Andreessen if I want to.

In early 2007 Andreessen spent 90 minutes talking privately with Obama, before the media frenzy made that impossible for normal people (not that Andreessen is all that normal). He writes eloquently about the very positive impression Obama made on him, and about how Obama comes across in an unguarded setting. It's an enlightening post, and will have a particularly strong impact on Andreessen's post-Boomer cohort.

Despite the fact that Andreessen apparently contributed to Mitt Romney's campaign (wtf?), I'm going to take a flier. You heard it here first: Obama/Andreessen '08.

Books in the Rafters

2008-02-27T12:08:00.004-05:00

More fun for book fetishists, again from Apartment Therapy: books in the rafters. Exceedingly simple, exceedingly lovely.

Combine this with the bookcase staircase, bookinist, and dictionary wallpaper, and you've pretty much encased yourself in books. The missing piece: readable flooring.

Staircase Bookcase

2008-02-25T03:03:00.002-05:00

This is the least practical staircase ever. Tabbed treads to throw off eye and foot. Stripped lines all over the place, and in every plane, to toy with your depth perception. Clearly an ankle breaker.

As for the books, they must get punted all the time. And a typical stair riser is not more than 7" high, which means nothing but smallish trade paperbacks under there.

Still, it's totally awesome, and I want one. Park a bookinist at the top, and you're in the catbird seat.

On OUPblog: Reading the OED, An Interview with Ammon Shea

2008-02-22T01:34:00.005-05:00

The good people at OUPblog asked me to pinch hit for Ben Zimmer yesterday. The very thought of living up to a real live lexicographer sent me into a paroxysm of fear, so I punted, to mix bad sports metaphors, and sent them an interview I did recently with author Ammon Shea.

I had planned to run it in Errata, but Ammon's most recent book is about reading the OED, all 21,730 pages of it, which he did last year. That heroic effort seemed ideally suited to an OUPblog post, so that's where it went. I got the book itself the other day, and will post specifically about it closer to its August publication date.

This is the first of what I hope will become a regular feature: the Errata "Legends of Lexicography" interview series.

Donald, I'm Sorry

2008-02-21T01:41:00.002-05:00

I just checked a rarely-used account of mine, and read for the first time an email from Keith M. Urbahn, an aide to Donald Rumsfeld. He sent an audio file of the speech I mocked Rumsfeld for last month.

I stand by some of my mockery--comparing email and talk radio is silly--but Rumsfeld does not say "pods," as quoted in Sharon Weinberger's original post, which I in turn quoted. He clearly says "blogs," which makes a lot more sense. I should have hunted down the original audio sooner. Weinberger, too, has updated her post with the correction.

Enough time has passed that I figured this merited a new post, in addition to updating the original. This is a blog about words, so I should try to get them right, and correct myself when I don't. I apologize for the error.

Wordie Action Alert: Dictionary of American Regional English

2008-02-20T23:15:00.002-05:00

The Dictionary of American Regional English is one of the great American scholarly achievements, all four volumes of the planned six volume work having earned endless praise.

I'm looking forward to writing at greater length about DARE one of these days. But poking around on their web site* this evening, I found something that might be of immediate interest, especially to the Americans in the house.

DARE is looking for citations. Anyone from North Carolina know what a "tally-lagger" is? Nantucketers familiar with the term "slatch," or New Englanders with "sleighty?" The wanted list has a slew of great words on it, all beginning with S or T, all orphans looking for citations. I can't provide a direct link, sadly, because their site uses frames, but you can find it by going to their main page and clicking on 'QUERIES' in the left-hand column.

This reminds me, Jesse Sheidlower still seems to be collecting sci-fi citations, judging from the latest entry on his Science Fiction Citation site, dated January 7, 2008.

If anyone knows of any other dictionaries with open calls for citations, please mention them in the comments.

* They've got a lot of interesting content on their site, but it would be wonderful if the dictionary itself was available online. If anyone from the Gates Foundation or the like is listening, this would be a wonderful way to spend some of your filthy lucre.