While the language of law can reach tremendous heights, legalese is more often painfully, agonizingly dull.

So kudos to WSJ Law Blogger Peter Lattman for taking such unabashed delight in a word found in the austere setting of a legal opinion. And kudos to Judge Rosenbaum for dropping the hammer on the bad guys and showing off his mad vocabulary skills at the same time. High fives all around.

Labels: Judge James Rosenbaum, Law Blog, pelf, Peter Lattman, wsj

The "Word of the Year" roundups just keep coming. Grant Barrett's guide to this year's award season starts with Webster's nomination of "grass station" on October 31st* and runs through the American Dialect Society's 18th annual WotY vote, to be held January 4. It includes a full 17 events, including The New York Time's Buzzwords 2007 piece, also by Grant, which came out today and is the best of the lot so far.

Grant makes no pretense at being complete or authoritative, though as a professional linguist, author of The Lexicographer's Rules, and host of the radio show "A Way With Words" he's more qualified than most to do so. This is a list of words and phrases that caught the eye of someone whose business it is to pay attention to such things, and it's a welcome change from the typical pseudo event.

Most importantly, Grant has a good eye, and ear. Earmarxist, crowdsource, and ninja loan are delightful, as are most of the others on this list.

* Amazingly Webster's New World doesn't seem to have a blog entry or even a press release about it. Here's a newspaper article.

The whole War on Christmas nonsense drives me crazy. I lived for years in a predominantly Islamic neighborhood, and currently live in a predominantly Jewish one. Just because I celebrate Christmas is no reason for me to assume my neighbors do, and a seasonal greeting like "Happy Holidays" is simply more polite. More Christian even, if you believe one should love thy neighbor. The only war here is the ongoing one by the religious right against everyone else, including the silent majority of open-minded and compassionate Christians.

Now you can strike a blow for freedom, and conveniently punt on this whole issue, with the Holiday-O-Matic! Its three Wheel of Fortune style wheels, each containing 20 or so holidayish phrases, mix and match to form a ridiculous and ecumenical holiday greeting. And for every spin of the wheels Worktank, the creator of the site, will make a donation to Rotary First Harvest. A lovely holiday sentiment indeed.

Cheers to SonofGroucho for the link, and for the friendly and civil discussion he got rolling on Merry Christmas.

Labels: Christmas, ecumenical, holiday-o-matic, war

A few more good Wordie gifts have come over the transom since last month's Wordinista gift roundup. If you order immediately, you just might be able to get something shipped in time for xmas. Though you have plenty of time to order a nice New Year's gift for yourself.

Anything from the Shorthand Press. Erin Healy makes beautiful things--cards, notebooks, clothes--with words on them, and those same words transliterated into shorthand. They're witty and delightful. Starting around $2.75.






Artificial Larynx. Wordie loves text, but let's not forget the oral tradition, of which an important part is the Darth Vader voice. "Luke, I am your father!" $529.96







Self-referential shrinky-dinks necklaces. Why have anything, when you can just explain it instead? Via Away With Words. $25.







Helvetica poster. "Meet the cast" poster from the blockbuster "Helvetica." $20.








Navajo Code Talker GI Joe, for the translator in your life. Says 7 different phrases in Navajo code and English. I stole this one lock, stock and barrel from Language Log.







Noa's Calendar. From Finland, where all the best calendars come from. More fun with text as graphics--words embedded in sentences. $35.

Labels: Finland, GI Joe, helvetica, larynx, shorthand press, shrinky-dinks

Peter Sokolowski over at Merriam-Webster graciously responded to my rant against their Word of the Year list and shed some light on their selection process, which I thought was pretty stand up of him. My favorite nugget: their online dictionary gets over one beeellion pageviews a year. All the more reason to appreciate his taking the time to respond to a gnat like Errata.

Now I just need to hear from Safire. Bill, it's Christmas time. Come in out of the cold.

Labels: Merriam-Webster, Mitt Romney, Peter Sokolowski, safire

Jeff Jarvis has a provocative piece on BuzzMachine, titled Post-text?, in which he speculates about the waning of text as it becomes easier for computers to handle audio and video. It reminded me of a comment made recently by my old friend and professor Andrew Lih, that he now listens to the web as much as he reads it.

I love movies. I love This American Life so much that I've considered stalking Ira Glass. Last winter we went on a bender and watched all seven seasons of Buffy in three months. But I'm re-reading Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century right now, and no other medium could possibly convey the depth and breadth of ideas Postman achieves in that slim volume. If books were to be relegated to the same Siberia as, say, epic poetry--a quaint form read in school and by a few eccentrics--it would be a great loss. Not just for nostalgic reasons (though I'm as susceptible to those as anyone), but because the richness of information in a book, and the particular flow state possible when in the thrall of a good one, can't be equaled by other media.

I think Jarvis and the sources he mentions may be on to something: a lot of the pithy nonsense text on the web is being replaced by pithy nonsense audio and video, which is tantamount to replacing twinkies with snowballs. But long-form narrative is still best conveyed textually.

And for that reason I'm not actually too worried about the fate of text, at least not in the form where it matters the most, in books. There, it still does what it does best. And I know too many kids who are as possessed by books as they are by the rest of the media constellation. But if, God forbid, a text-less dystopia does comes to pass, Wordie is going to be like Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck in On the Beach: the last holdouts, singing "Waltzing Matilda" while we wait for the world to end.

Labels: Andrew Lih, Ava Gardner, Ira Glass, Jeff Jarvis, Neil Postman, snowballs, text

Wordie now lets you create collaborative lists. Families, create a shared list for the Airing of Grievances! Friends, list your private slang. Classes, build vocabulary lists, or list and discuss words from a book you're reading. Create a collaborative dictionary for your profession or a project. Lots of uses here.

To start, create or edit a list. You'll see two new fields: a radio button which lets you choose whether it's an individual or group list, and a field where you can invite others, by Wordie name or email. People you list will be sent an invitation to contribute (and join, if they weren't already a member). Contributors see the same 'add word' box as the owner of the list, and the list shows who contributed what.

While I was messing with lists I took the opportunity to clean things up a bit. Everybody's list of lists now has its own page, instead of appearing as a heap of illegible text, as had been the case.

As per usual, I'm sure I broke tons of shit when launching this, so let me know if anything is amiss, or if you have any suggestions.

Labels: features, festivus, lists

I know it's not cool to be a prescriptivist, but can I just say that Merriam-Webster picked the dumbest fucking word in the universe as their Word of the Year 2007? I'm aware that M-W itself didn't make the choice, the eleven year olds who use their web site did, but isn't that why they have all those lexicographers lying around? To point out when the rest of us are being idiots, and shut us down?

A few people wrote this week about M-W's announcement, and I didn't say anything, because I didn't have anything nice to say. Actually I have one nice thing to say, which is that some of the comments on Wordie's page for it are pretty good, including the links to various etymologies, and, especially, the prior art from Chaucer. But I got a few more emails today and figured, fine, I'll uncork myself and spew some bile.

I'm not even sure I don't like the word, but I hate that they picked it, and I'm not alone. It's not just the winner that sucks, it's the whole list. Conundrum? Apathetic? What do these words have to do with anything interesting or topical? The only good word of the lot is Pecksniffian, though why it's on a list of words for 2007, and not 1857, is beyond me.

M-W is in the doghouse, along with William Safire. I'm now doubly glad M-W got voted off the island a month or so ago, when by unanimous consent they were replaced by OneLook as one of the sites Wordie links to.

Labels: Chaucer, Merriam-Webster, pecksniffian, safire, w00t

Human Brain Cloud shows you a random word and asks you to enter the first association that comes to mind. From this it is creating a ginormous web of word and phrase associations: 531,316 unique words and phrases connected through 5,704,465 associations, contributed by 357,762 people, all since mid July.

It's a fun diversion and as you can see the graphics are lovely--Kyle Gabler, the creator of the site, is a game designer. Shortly after launch Kyle reported a bunch of interesting statistics, but what most got my attention were his comments on the tenor of the contributions: "the number one thing that surprised me right off the bat with this experiment is that people are, in general, overwhelmingly funny, friendly, articulate, and willing to play along."

Sounds familiar. I think playing with words brings out the best in people.

Mil gracias to Steve for the link.

Labels: associations, human brain cloud, kyle gabler, steve, web of goo

It's been a while since we've had an installment of the Weird International Dictionary Series, so forthwith, I present MacBain's Dictionary, aka An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, which was apparently "keyed in" by one Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle. To be specific, this is an html edition of a 1982 photo reprint of the 1911 2nd edition of a Gaelic dictionary originally published in 1896.

Somehow along the way all the words beginning with H, J, K, Q, V, W, X, Y and Z seem to have gone missing. Or perhaps Gaelic doesn't have any such words.

Labels: dictionaries, Gaelic, Irish, MacBain's

For the frequent traveler: how to say kiss my ass in 36 different languages. Nice, though if they included a pronunciation guide, or audio, it would be nicer.

From a site about local motocross racing, naturally.

Update: This list is crap. My Spanish is good enough that I should have realized this, but I pretty much just snickered and posted. Apologies to anyone who used one of these in conversation and was made fun of.

I think some... motocross afficionado, I guess, just typed "kiss my ass" into babelfish a bunch of times, and posted the results. The correct Spanish is, I think, "besa mi culo", but babelfish gives you "besa mis asno", which means "kiss my donkey."

Labels: ass, motocross

Last week Errata posted 25 Gifts for Wordinistas. Today's On Language column is titled Bibliogifts, and contains a suspiciously similar list of dictionaries and the like.

Coincidence? I think not. Safire, I'm watching you.

Labels: gifts, safire