Read/WriteWeb has a good roundup of Top Sites for Logophiles, with Wordie topping the list. Other sites include Word Spy, which is great and which a bunch of Wordie commenters have linked to, and My Favorite Word, which claims that Joyce's favorite word was "cuspidor."

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Labels: Read/WriteWeb, WordSpy

LT Tim just sent me a TED talk by Erin McKean, lexicographer to the stars. That's her on stage, beneath a portrait of Einstein, standing next to what appears to be a giant wooden dodecahedron*. And it looks like there's some kind of psychedelic light show happening on stage right.

TED's self-conscious "we're smart" staging aside, the talk is great, and what she describes toward the end sounds a lot like Wordie, or what I hope Wordie will become. She makes the point that there are lots of good word collecting sites**, but they don't do enough to show the context of words, to provide sources, citations, and provenance. The comments and citations, the links, jokes, and usage notes on Wordie are my Favorite part of the site, and finding good citations and quotes to add to Wordie has made reading a lot more fun for me, something I hadn't thought possible. God forbid Wordie ever become too serious an endeavor, but it would be cool if, over time, our collective scavenging helped Wordie evolve into a useful language tool.

* UPDATE: see comments for what it really is
** I disagree. There's only one :-)

Labels: Erin McKean, lexicographers, TED

The Times ran another interesting piece on dying languages this weekend, this one full of examples from various near-dead languages. My favorite illustrated how the same construct can be used for different purposes in different languages. For example, in Rotokas, a language used in Papua New Guinea, doubling a word is used to indicate repetition:

tapa = to hit
tapatapa = to hit repeatedly

kopi = a dot
kopikopi = spotted

kavau = to bear a child
kavakavau = to bear many children

But in Eleme, a Nigerian language, a similar doubling pattern is used for negation:

moro = he saw you
momoro = he did not see you

rekaju = we are coming
rekakaju = we are not coming

You'll also learn a variety of useful words for describing castrated reindeer. Worth a read.

Labels: Eleme, language, New York Times, Rotokas

Yesterday The New York Times had a good piece on endangered languages, which describes a joint effort between the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages to record languages on the verge of extinction. My favorite factoid: a group of Andean natives called the Kallawaya, who speak Spanish and Quechua in daily life, have a secret language that's mostly used to describe medicinal plants.

Wordie is doing its small part to preserve language. Long after Wrigley has thrown in the towel on strappleberry, this important word will remain forever enshrined here.

Labels: language, National Geographic Society, New York Times, strappleberry

jennarenn

I almost cried for joy when I first saw Dave Egger's pirate shop, but that was the apex of the whole pirate thing for me, and it's been mostly downhill from there, pirate-wise.

That said, I still have an affection for Talk Like a Pirate Day. So happy TLaP Day, and remember to check out (and Digg) jennarenn's cheat sheet.

Labels: pirates

My pal Steve just launched Listphile.com, a site for making collaborative lists of all kinds. It's beautiful, super easy to use, and worth checking out. It just launched, but already has an enjoyable assortment of user-contributed lists spanning the gamut from lighthearted fun (The Dude Abides, Yoda Quotes with Video) to more serious collective information gathering (Open Surf Atlas). Stop by and vote for Wordie on my list of Language-related sites.

Labels: listphile

You can now be notified by email, if you choose, when someone comments on your profile or one of your word lists. If you go to your profile and click on the 'edit contact options' link, you can turn this feature on or off.

This is the default behavior for new wordies, but if you joined before this Saturday you'll have to go in and turn notifications on, if you want 'em--it seemed kind of spamish to turn them on retroactively.

Suggestions for ways to improve this, for other kinds of notifications, or other ways to make it easier to follow Wordie are appreciated.

Labels: email, features

This photo of the back of a photo was posted yesterday on Paper Cuts, the New York Times book blog. I love the juxtaposition of so many kinds of text--handwritten notes in pen and pencil, stamps in different colored inks, pasted on bits of newsprint.

Labels: New York Times, text

Tumbledown.com recently posted this video of Frank Zappa on a 1986 episode of Crossfire, defending words and the First Amendment. It's a relic from the culture wars of the '80s, back when Tipper Gore was fronting the PMRC campaign to censor music.

The first 10 points Zappa makes: "We're talking about words!", which he says over and over. Once he stops repeating himself, he goes on to smoke the competition, John Lofton of the Washington Times.

To my mind the money quote is when Zappa is asked if he's an anarchist, and replies "No, I'm a conservative."

Labels: first amendment, video, zappa

So as a few of you noticed, I screwed up the database transfer from the old hosting company to the new, and rendered all non-English characters unreadable. I just re-did the transfer of the old data, merged it with the stuff that's been added since the transfer, and, knock on wood, all the words with Chinese and German and Greek and Hebrew and Arabic (I think) characters, along with ones in a bunch of languages I didn't recognize, should be working again. I'm sorry if that startled anyone else. It scared the crap out of me, frankly, when I thought for a moment that we'd permanently lost all that good stuff.

This did provide an interesting data point. Of the 90,031 unique words in Wordie when I did the transfer, 1,973, or around 2.2%, contained unicode characters. A few of those are accented English words or words entered with ligatures, but the great majority are in other languages. Hopefully that number will grow, and hopefully someday Wordie can cater fully to other languages, with localized and translated versions.

Tomorrow I'll fix the comments and profile info that contain international characters, but for tonight I'm going to quit while I'm ahead. Let me know if you come across any words or lists that are still munged.

As some of you have noticed, the layouts of the front page and the word pages have been changed. Listing words is fun, but the meat of Wordie is in the comments and the repartee, so I thought the conversations should be raised in prominence. Feedback and suggestions for improvement are, as always, welcome.

A word about what's been going on with the site. Wordie finally outgrew the basic hosting it launched on, so this week I moved it to a new home, a VPS on Slicehost. I'd like to think that eventually Wordie will need a dedicated server, but this should do for a while, I hope.

While I was at it I ported Errata over to Blogger, as you may have deduced from the new look. I was hesitant to do this, since I didn't want to disturb the existing posts and comments, but I decided the benefits outweighed the minor headaches. My Wordie time is better spent working on the site itself, rather than futzing with blog software. I moved all the old posts over to Blogger, and sucked out the old comments as well, though I have yet to attach them to the new posts (I'll do that soon).

Lastly, I spent some time this afternoon optimizing the db, which sped some pages up 10x. May or may not be noticeable to you, dear reader, but at the least it should help the site better handle traffic spikes, like when William Safire did that "On Language" column about Wordie last week*.

Hopefully this puts site infrastructure in good stead for now, which will both let me get back to building features, and allow Errata to focus less on web development, and more on words and language.

*not true

Labels: blogger, errata, hosting

Apologies for Wordie going kind of bonkers while I sorted out DNS issues related to changing hosts. I just ironed out some config kinks on the new server, the transfer finally went through, and from reports in the field, they seems to have propagated throughout the pipes.

If this outage really has you hot and bothered, this might soothe you.

Labels: dns, pipes