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.

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.

Labels: crappuccino, grammar, sharon nichols, theo, wsj

Just added a new batch of glossaries to Glossaralia. The new additions:

Beer (Foster's Group)
Business (Foley Hoag)
Footwear (ShoeGuide.org)
Hospital Healthcare (Montevideo Hospital)
Pest Management (University of California)
Real Estate (Gibbons Realty)
Sailing (SailingLinks)
Telecommunications (CHR Solutions)
Theater (CalPoly)
TV Advertising (Audience Analytics)
Wine (Foster's Group)

Free Rice is a word game where, for each word you correctly identify, free rice is distributed to those in need. Try it, and put your lexiphanic tendencies to good use for once.

Too bad they don't allow teams, the way seti@home does. A little competition might foster more participation. Team Wordie would pwn this.

Thanks to chained_bear and kad for the link.

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.

Labels: many eyes, masochism, tragedy of the commons, visualization

Here's a cautionary tale about how social sites can lose their way, and then their audience. The writer abandoned Digg for Reddit, then Reddit for Fark. Wordie is small and intended for a specific audience, but still, it's social software, and it's growing, so it's good to think about these things. Hopefully we as a community can avoid the kind of mistakes that Digg in particular made. Better to have a smaller community of, you know, brilliant, witty (and very good looking, I'm sure!) people, than appeal to a brazillion trolls. Thanks to npydyuan for the link.

Starting tomorrow, Wordie is going to runs ads. Standard Google text ads (no images), at the top of each page.

But ads will run only on Tuesdays. Kind of like casual Friday, but for ads. And on Tuesday.

I'm curious to see what the Google ad-matching algorithm does with Wordie's all-over-the-map content. Chained_bear's Journey of a 300-Year-Old House list is going to bring up ads for roofing and home depot--even I could write that algorithm. But what about lek and waxed paper? And I'm scared, but curious, to see what it does with this.

The decision to run ads is part joke, part curiosity, but mostly it's economic. I cover Wordie's costs, and it's adding up. And as traffic rises, so does the expense.

On other sites I've built, like Squirl, the fact that the site carried ads led some people to believe we were minting money. Let me disabuse you of that notion. Here are the numbers.

On a good day Wordie serves around 7,000 page views. You're doing pretty well to earn $1 per thousand page views from Google, so Wordie might make $7 per Tuesday†, or $28 a month. Wordie is served on a 512MB slice (from the inimitable Slicehost), which costs me $38 a month. So, I'm still in the hole $10 every month, much less paying myself anything (though socializing with you Wordies is, of course, reward enough--*smooch*). These limited ads will defray my costs, that's it.

I'm a little sad about ending Wordie's commercial-free phase, but hopefully this won't be too intrusive. Over time, I hope to refine the way ads are presented so that they're maybe even a bit amusing--like build a system where, say, Ikea could run furniture ads on all the furniture words. Credenza, brought to you by Ikea. I'd insist on writing all the copy, of course*. Sort of like a 1940s radio soap opera, or Sesame Street: Today's episode is brought to you by the letter N, and the number 3! Except that the number 3 was getting a free ride.

In any case, this is, as always, a work in progress. Let me know what you think.

† UPDATE: The results are in, and after one Tuesday of ads, I can say that my initial back of the envelope calculations were wildly optimistic. We did indeed get around 7,000 page views. Cut all the rest of the numbers in half. The final take: $3.45.
* Actually, if anyone wants to buy advertising space directly, and is willing to let me write the copy, you should have, you know, your people get in touch with my people**.
** Uh, I don't have any people. Not those kind of people, at least. Email me: john[at]wordie.org.

Labels: ads, credenza, lek, tuesday

The search box now automatically fetches the first 10 words that match what you've entered, and updates the list as you type.

I'm finding this more useful than I expected it to be, personally. I've been using it as a sort of spell-checker. A whoopee-cushion, hand-buzzer sort of spell checker: it shows you how people have spelled things in Wordie, not how they're actually spelled--and misspellings in Wordie are legion. But it's interesting to see even the mistakes.

This suggests a slew of possible future features: actual spellcheck, improved search (comments search, in particular), integration with a proper dictionary. Things to looks forward to, someday.

Labels: ajax, autocomplete, features

I've been coming across lots of online glossaries lately; here are some of the ones I've particularly enjoyed (possibly my fav: the cheese glossary. though maybe I'm just hungry). If you're creating a Wordie list on a specific topic (scissors and shears, anyone?), these are a goldmine.

Many of these were discovered through the web site of Frank Dietz, a man who clearly loves glossaries. Thanks Frank!

I'll be updating this list as more gems crop up. If there's a glossary you'd like to see included, let me know in the comments.

Acroynms, military
Advertising (University of Texas at Austin)
Agriculture (New Mexico State University)
Art (ArtLex)
Aviation (AeroFiles)
Beer (Chowbaby)
Beer (Foster's Group)
Building Terms (contractorslicense.com)
Business (Foley Hoag)
Business Dictionary (BusinessDictionary.com)
Business (Washington Post)
Cars (AutoSpeak)
Catholic Terms
Catholic Terms (US Conference of Catholic Bishops)
Cheese Terms (Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board)
Cigars (Chowbaby)
Coffee (Chowbaby)
Color (SAP Design Guild)
Computer & Internet (Sharpened.net)
Food (Chowbaby)
Footwear (ShoeGuide.org)
Furniture (TheFurniture.com)
Glossaries (glossarist.com)
Glossaries (Frank Dietz)
Hospital Healthcare (Montevideo Hospital)
Industrial Nuts (Industrial Nut Corp.)
Investing and Finance (investorwords.com)
Islamic Law (Mutma'inaa)
Islamic Terms (University of Southern California)
Jewish Terms (JewishEncyclopedia.com)
Lighting (Lithonia Lighting)
Lighting Design (Schorsch)
Law (NOLO)
Linguistics (SIL)
Nautical Terms (Answers.com)
Online News Terms (USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review)
Pest Management (University of California)
Philosophy (Stanford)
Plastics (American Chemistry Council)
Poetic Terms (University of Toronto)
Publishing (Rainwater Press)
Printmaking Terms (University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art)
Radio terms (University of Delaware)
Railroad Terms (San Diego Railroad Museum)
Real Estate (Gibbons Realty)
Roofing Terms (pmel.org)
Sailing (SailingLinks)
Scissors and Shears (Claussco)
Sex (sex-lexis.com)
Sikh Terms (Sandeep Singh Brar)
Solar Heating (Go Solar)
Spirits, as in liquor, not ghosts (Chowbaby)
Subtitler's and Translator's Tools (transedit.se)
Sushi (Chowbaby)
Tea (Chowbaby)
Telecommunications (CHR Solutions)
Telecommunications (National Telecommunications and Information Administration)
Theater (CalPoly)
TV Advertising (Audience Analytics)
Weather Terms (weather.com)
Wine (Chowbaby)
Wine (Foster's Group)

Labels: cheese, glossaralia, glossaries

Yesterday I added a little featurette to Wordie: a keyboard shortcut (ctl-b) that automatically launches a work-appropriate site. The idea was to help people enjoy Wordie at work, without it being quite so obvious that they weren't actually working. Silly, but whatever. I think it's funny.

A few people have asked how to do the same, so here it is: how to implement a Wordie-style boss button.

First, download this open-source javascript library: http://www.openjs.com/scripts/events/keyboard_shortcuts/shortcut.js

Put it in the docroot of your webserver wherever you keep your javascript files (mine are in /javascripts), and add this function to the top of the file:



Then add this line to your web pages, inside the <head> tags at the top of the page, ideally in a commonly called template so you only have to do it once for the whole site. Make sure to edit the path so it matches where you actually put shortcuts.js:



Then, at the bottom of every page (again, ideally in a template), add this:



Now you can hit 'ctl-b', and the page will automatically change to one of the 10 urls in the bossButton function. You can change the urls, of course. To use a different keyboard shortcut, change the text in the "shortcut.add(...)" line towards the bottom of the bossButton() function.

Have fun, and don't work too hard :-)

Labels: boss, button, javascript

The Boss Button isn't some really fine button. It's an insurance policy that helps you maximize the amount of time you spend on Wordie, and minimize the consequences of getting nothing else done. Or at least it minimizes your chances of getting caught fecking off. There'll probably still be consequences.

It works like this: You're in your cubicle, half alseep, trying to come up with an amusing outfit for your vergerhade character, and you hear your boss trudging toward you. Casually hit 'Ctl-b' on your keyboard, and the browser window displaying Wordie will instantly go to one of a random assortment of work-appropriate* pages. For further verisimilitude, you can configure the Boss Button to go to a page suitable for your industry or workplace (click 'edit personal preferences' on your profile**).

Work is for suckers. Spend more time on Wordie.

* For the most part. Depends where you work. ymmv.
** I added hcard support to the profiles while I was mucking about. fwiw.

Labels: boss, button, cubicle, fecking, vergerhade

That's the rather sensational headline on the cover of this week's Nature. Inside are two papers on word evolution, with the more staid titles "Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history"* and "Linguistics: an Invisible Hand".

The premise of the first is straightforward and rather commonsensical: words that are used a lot don't change much. In other words, the rate at which words tend to morph is in inverse proportion to how often they're used. For example, all Indo-European languages apparently use the same root form for the word "two." It's obviously a widely-used word, and it has evolved hardly at all. The authors do a statistical analysis of four large language corpora (language corpora: the subject of an upcoming post, btw) to back this up. Good stuff. This is apparently the process by which the once little-used "vergerhade" came to be defined as an animatronic groucho marx in a tutu and straitjacket.

Nature's sister site, Nature News, has a good overview of these papers, geared towards a more general audience.

* Nature is trying to charge $18 to download this single article, which is, if you'll pardon my French, fucking nuts, especially given that most of what they publish is publicly funded research--we've already paid for it! So I had one of my spies steal it. You can get the full PDF here.

Labels: evolution, groucho marx, linguistics, nature, vergerhade

Wordie was originally conceived as a joke: all tags, no content*. Well, the punchline has finally arrived. This weekend I added tagging**.

Tagging is a way to categorize things by adding descriptive metadata to them in the form of, well... words. On Wordie this may seem like gilding the lily, but tagging has been repeatedly requested since the site launched, and for good reason. Among other things, tags allow:

• Glossaries and topical dictionaries. Want to create a glossary of beer-related terms? Use tags: http://wordie.org/tags/beer
  
  
• Collaborative lists. Want to get a bunch of your pirate friends together and create the ultimate list of pirate words? Have everyone add a 'pirate' tag to their piratish words, and bob's your uncle: http://wordie.org/tags/pirate
  
  
• Lists for an event or organization. Create lists specific to a class or conference by having participants use a custom tag like MIT6001 or DefCon15.
  
  
• Related Words. Want to show all synonyms and antonyms of a word? Use tags.
  

Tagging is useful right off the bat. And once a critical mass of tags has been entered it gets more useful still, as it becomes possible to extract interesting information based on site-wide tagging patterns. For starters, at the bottom of each page there's a link to a site-wide tag cloud, showing the last 500 tags entered. Like the comments page, it's a good view into what's current and another way to watch Wordie happen.

It's also a good opportunity for me to pimp another site of mine, TagsAhoy.com, which lets you search your personal tags across variety of services. It now supports Wordie. Yes, I'm mildly obsessed with tagging.

Since this launched quietly a few days ago, over 1,000 tags have been added, and as the pace picks up and more viewing and sorting options become available it'll only get more interesting***. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback as this was developed, and to everyone who has added or plans to add tags to their words. Fun for you, fun for the whole family.

* It's a joke no longer; it's now the best site on the Internet, ever.
** If you've been on del.icio.us since 2004, if you think tagging is passé, well, it's as useful as ever, so shut up! I have yet to see a better ad-hoc organizational technique, and I still believe. Back to the future!
*** Check out Tim's great blog post on when tags work and when they don't. Since many of the benefits of tagging on Wordie accrue to the person doing it, I'm hoping we fall into the "when they do" column.

Labels: features, Tags

My pal and fellow LibraryThing alum, Altay, has launched a fantastic new site, QToro. That's right, the world first and best social network for lawnmower afficionados.

Actually it's a new trivia site, with all questions contributed by members. It's beautifully designed and executed, and horribly, amazingly addictive. Already Qtoro is without a doubt the best trivia site on the Interwebs, and it's getting better by the day as people fill it with a plethora of questions.

It's hard to say what's more fun, writing questions or playing the game. Please check it out and decide for yourself--but only if you have at least an hour to kill.

Labels: Altay, QToro, trivia

If you want to order bécasse or ortolan the next time you dine in Vilnius, you'll find this French - Lithuanian online dictionary useful.

Labels: dictionaries, French, Lithuanian

This weekend I stumbled across the Science Fiction Citations project for the OED, run by noted lexicographer and F Word author Jesse Sheidlower. It's an effort to enlist public help in finding antecedents for words commonly used in science fiction. Citations are added at a slightly slower rate than on Wordie (there's been one addition to SF Citations so far this year, and four in all of 2006), and the process is, relatively speaking, somewhat rigorous, as you might expect of the OED. But if you're a serious fan of either science fiction or the OED, it could be a lot of fun. And c'mon--getting a citation in the OED would give you mad, mad Wordie cred.

Labels: Jesse Sheidlower, OED, science fiction