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.

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.

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.

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.

Labels: clouds

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:

More ridiculous word play, again via YouTube, this time courtesy of Damon Wayans. Many thanks to Lampbane for the link.

Click the image to open in a new window:

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.

Ok, I know I'm a pathetic whore for doing this, but a blog I enjoy, Mashable, is hosting a series of Social Networking Awards. Please click the big dumb button below if you wouldn't mind nominating Wordie in the "Niche and Miscellaneous Networks" category (sorry, they don't have a gaytarded category).

Two updates today. First, Lampbane set up a Flickr group for Wordies, open to all. I'm thrilled about this -- there's something inately interesting about photos of signage and text, heightened by the slight irony of a group of people from a text-only logophile site sharing photographs. Maybe the slogan for the group should be "Like Wordie, but without all the words."

This joins the LibraryThing group for Wordies set up by angharad.

One good use for the Flickr group might be posting images related to a specific word list, and it will be easier to link the two now that word lists have proper description fields. Up until now it seems like most of us have been using comments to describe our lists, which was imperfect, since the description would get pushed to the bottom of the page as more comments were added. Well, no longer -- you can add a proper description, when either creating or editing a list, and it will stay up top where it belongs, below the list name.

Added two frequently requested features: the abilities to move words between lists and to see who it was who first listed a word. Both pretty self-explanatory: to move a word, go to the list it's currently on, click the 'move' link next to the word, select the target list, and click the little button. To see who first listed a word, go to any word page and look. Wordie at the top of the list got first blood, with the most recent person to add the word appearing at the bottom.

Please let me know if you see any weird behaviors; as usual, I cranked these out and didn't test a whole heck of a lot. Though they seem to be working fine so far.

Another excellent video clip, this one poking fun at word pedants (that would be us, people). Many thanks to pedalinfaith for sending it in.

I love all these videos about words. Errata goes all frickin' mixed-media.

Click the image to open in a new window:

Every year the Associated Press chooses a word of the year; it's sort of the Wordie equivalent of the Swimsuit Issue or the Playmate of the Year.

This year's winner, by a 5-1 margin over the runner-up, is "truthiness." In honor of that timely neologism, here is a list of Colbert Report Neologisms.

Swiss just sent me an absolutely fantastic YouTube clip from the Electric Company, circa the early 70s.

Click the image to open in a new window:

Labels: video

Ok, just retitled this post to be a bit less caustic, but with the recent bump in traffic I'm seeing an increase in junk words. Not fun junk (like strappleberry, which is fantastic), but putting in seven variations of the same word, in what looks like a lame attempt to get listed in the "wordiest wordies" section.

My new policy is to be an anarchist up until a point, after which I'll be a tyrant, and freeze accounts with impunity. This nascent community is a lot of fun, and I plan on being protective of it. So, please be sensible, and considerate.

You can help. If you see anything that looks fishy or abusive, please let me know.

Wordie was featured on TechCrunch tonight. A nice post, complimentary and polite while still pointing out that Wordie is basically absurd. And apparently the site amuses Flickr's Stewart Butterfield, which amuses me.

Some people got hot and bothered in the first few comments, upset that Techcrunch would have the effrontery to cover something not related to venture capital. But those comments were clearly penned by illiterates ("The quality of Techcrunch is getting bad day by day", etc.), so you can hardly blame them for not grokking Wordie. I did appreciate the guy who liked our error message, and the guy (I presume it's a guy), who took such pleasure in getting to use the acronym WTF. Language appreciators both.

Some people get a little crazed about getting covered by Techcrunch. And believe me, I'm psyched about it -- I read it every day. But I'm not sure it's a very wordie crowd. I'm curious to see if it leads to anything besides a momentary bump in traffic.

Stuff added since launch, but before this blog went up:

• Bookmarklet: Mad, mad props to angharad for contributing a Bookmarklet, which lets you select words on any web page and import them directly into Wordie. Works with Safari and Firefox (Mac or PC), does not work with IE 6. To install, bookmark the 'Add to Wordie' link below (on Safari and Firefox you can just drag it onto your bookmarks bar).
  
  
  bookmark this -> Add to Wordie
  
  
• Comment Search: You can now search comments from the recent comments page.
  
  
• Links in comments: When adding comments and citations wrapping words in [brackets] now links them to their Wordie page.
  
  
• Steal this Word: ability to import words directly into your lists.


• Favorites: ability to bookmark lists and words you like.

11/21: Idea pops into my head, gets dismissed as a joke.

11/22: Thanksgiving approaching, I decide it's a good time to build something strictly for fun. Register Wordie.org (and also wirdee.com, but opted against that).

11/23 - 11/24: Build and launch site. Three or four friends add a few hundred words. I figure, that's that.

11/28: LibraryThing Tim, my friend and neighbor, blogs about Wordie.

12/5: 1,000 people have registered. I spend week madly fixing bugs and adding features. Wordie makes front page of del.icio.us and lots of blogs. Blogosphere reaction spans the gamut from "pointless and lovely" to just "pointless".

12/8: Launch this blog as a place to announce new features, and perhaps highlight choice bits from within Wordie.