That's the question posed by New York band Vampire Weekend in a song of the same name, and posed in turn to a bunch of wordie types by Michael Hogan of Vanity Fair.

The panel included Grant Barrett of Double-Tongued (answer: "a little bit"), V.F.'s own copy editor, Peter Devine ("a modest-size fuck"), and David Rose, a V.F. writer and actual Oxford grad. Perhaps not coincidentally, Rose was vociferous, ardent even, in the comma's defense, professing to also give "a damn and a bean."

Vampire Weekend's lead singer, Ezra Koenig, says "the song is more about not giving a fuck than about Oxford commas." But Ezra, it's just so rare that anyone outside of our tiny world even knows what an Oxford comma is. Yours is almost certainly the first song ever to mention it. Even if you are using it as a metaphor for small-minded failure to see the forest, please, let us have this little moment.

Vampire Weekend is having an extended moment, and their new record is great, laced with Afro-pop and ska beats, twinkling guitar and piano parts, and lyrics that are literate without being all Professor Von Schmartzenpanz about it. The band themselves claim to be "specialists in the following styles: 'Cape Code Kwassa Kwassa', 'Upper West Side Soweto', 'Campus', and 'Oxford Comma Riddim.'"

Fred Wilson, blogging about their record release show last night at the Bowery Ballroom (funny that they're just getting around to releasing a CD), has posted an MP3 of "Who Gives a Fuck About An Oxford Comma." I don't want to hotlink him, but it's worth heading over for a listen.

Labels: David Rose, Ezra Koenig, Grant Barrett, Michael Hogan, nextNY, oxford comma, Peter Devine, punctuation, Vampire Weekend, Vanity Fair

Bill Safire, my nemesis, writes about change in his most recent On Language column. He leads with an overview of politician's perpetual calls for it, from Dewey in '48 through Obama ("Change We Can Believe In") and Romney ("Change Begins With Us") seeming to almost quote each other.

He then heads for shakier ground with the term "global warming" and how it is being slowly supplanted by the phrase "climate change." He speculates it may be a desire to be "less judgmental," then decides it's part of the inexorable march (or ensorcelling, as he puts it) of "change."

In fact there is a scientific basis to the shift. According to Dr. Kristina A. Dahl, a scientist at Rutgers' Climate and Environmental Change Initiative (and my wife), on average global temperatures are indeed warming, and fast. But "on average" is the key, since conditions in a given place can change in a number of ways: changes in temperature (almost always upward), but also in precipitation, storm patterns, or conceivably, in some areas, cooling (though the emerging consensus, she says, is that there is so much CO2 in the atmosphere that Europe and the Northeastern U.S. won't cool much, if at all, even if thermohaline circulation shuts down. There will be no Day After Tomorrow). Safire finds citations for both "global warming" and "climate change" at least as far back as 1957. The recognition of other types of related climate change in addition to warming led to the related coinage global weirding in 2002.

So the use of "climate change" is preferred by scientists to "global warming" because it is more accurate. This is born out anecdotally by job searches for each phrase. A search for "global warming" generally returns activist and advocacy-type jobs, which often make scientists shudder. "Climate change" tends to return jobs of a more technical or scientific bent, fields where technical accuracy is more valued.

Labels: change, climate change, Dahl, ensorcell, global warming, global weirding, safire, thermohaline

UPDATE, 2/21/08: I was sent the audio of this speech, and Rumsfeld does not say "pods," he clearly says "blogs." My apology for the error. The point about lumping email and talk radio still stands.

After lying low for a while America's premier linguist is back. Here he is, as quoted by Sharon Weinberger of Wired's defense blog, Danger Room, speaking at a conference on network centric warfare:

"There are multiple channels for information . . . The Internet is there, pods are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there."

Yes, the pods! Seed pods, perhaps. Connected by a series of tubes, no doubt. Lumping talk radio together with email, all I can think of that unites these things is that they transmit words, and require electricity. By that measure we might as well throw in intercoms and bullhorns. All of this makes more sense when you remember it's coming from a 75 year old man who apparently doesn't have an email address.

The quote is part of a talk in which Rumsfeld proposes a successor to the U.S. Information Agency (now part of the State Department) and the ill-fated (and ominously named) Office of Strategic Influence. The full Wired post is worth reading.

This one is making the rounds; perhaps my favorite commentary so far is by Spencer Ackerman of the recently-launched Washington Independent.

Labels: Danger Room, Donald Rumsfeld, pipes, pods, Sharon Weinberger, Washington Independent, Wired

An item in today's NYTimes City Room blog, on a proposal to tax illegal drugs, makes parenthetical mention of an earlier story on the official New York State misspelling of pot. In New York you get busted for smoking marihuana, not marijuana.

In the earlier story, former High Times editor Steve Bloom speculates the odd spelling is because "someone just spelled it wrong, and it stuck." The 'h' spelling, though, appears to be common in American jurisprudence. An early anti-drug law is titled the "1937 Marihuana Tax Act," and to stay consistent with that law, it is often so-spelled in modern laws relating to marijuana, according to Wikipedia.

Perhaps it's a vestige of a time when Americans were even less aware of non-English spelling and pronunciation (in this instance, the Spanish pronunciation of 'j' as a breathy 'hw,' as in 'juanita') than they are now. If you can imagine that even being possible.

Labels: marihuana, marijuana, New York Times, Steve Bloom

Have you ever wondered what spoken Esperanto sounds like? Have you ever wondered what it sounds like spoken by Bill Shatner, in an expressionistic black and white fantasia of an arthouse horror movie?

Of course you have, so you need to see Incubus, made in 1965 by Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens and written entirely in Esperanto. The plot is heavy handed in a moralistic, Bergmanesque sort of way--it's plainly inspired by The Seventh Seal. But the cinematography was done by Conrad L. Hall, who later went on to win best cinematography Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, American Beauty, and Road to Perdition, and many of the shots are disarmingly beautiful.

The acting isn't too bad either. While his later tendency to overact is sometimes apparent, young pre-Star Trek Shatner is, dare I say, rather dashing.

Labels: Esperanto, Incubus, Leslie Stevens, Shatner

A small update: lists and comments on words now have more and better sorting options. Comments, previously unsortable, can now be viewed oldest to most recent, or vice versa. Lists had previously been sortable alphabetically, or chronologically by order added. That's still the case, but now both those sorts can also be reversed.

For both lists and word comments, your last choice is remembered on subsequent words and lists.

Labels: features, sorting

If you'd like random words to float around your screen when you're not using your computer, it's easy to set up Wordie's recent words feed as a screensaver.

If you're using a Mac, open System Preferences and in the "Desktop & Screen Saver" section select "Screen Saver," then choose "RSS Visualizer" (this is the effect Apple stores usually have going at their "Genius" bars). Under "options" enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/WordieLatestWords. When the screen saver fires up, you'll see the latest nonsense from Wordie floating dreamily across the screen.

If you're using Windows, NewsGator offers a screensaver add-on for their feed reader, and Lifehacker has a post outlining a similar download.

Labels: Apple, features, feeds, lifehacker, newsgator

At the risk of turning into a Times clipping service here's another good one from Paper Cuts: A vending machine that dispenses books, discovered by one of their Web producers in Barcelona.

Of course these will soon be obsoleted by the Kindle, right?

Book kiosks are cool, though not as cool as this Chef Boy'Ardee vending machine that I took a picture of some years ago at Bear Mountain, NY. Best vending machine ever.

Labels: chef boy'ardee, kindle, vending machines

Steve just sent in a post from apartment therapy explaining how to make a dictionary wall (they credit DIY magazine with the idea). I like the idea of living inside a dictionary, but one problem: what if you want to look up a word that's on the back side of one of the pages?

A less permanent way to achieve a modern version of the same: get a projector and bath your walls with an image of a word cloud. Put the projector on a lazy susan for a mirrorball effect.

Labels: Apartment Therapy, dictionaries, diy, steve

I missed it when it ran this summer, but in June Paper Cuts, the Times book blog, posted a slideshow of old book ads from what it called the "Golden Age" of book advertising.

Included are ads for a bunch of heavy hitters like Susan Sontag, Edna O'Brien, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Donald Barthelme. I'm not sure I'd call it a Golden Age--the books may be impressive, but the ads seem to have thrived then as now on hidebound cliché*. But there's some good stuff there, and more than a few signs of the time: overt sexism, boomer self-importance, and everybody's smoking.

Unfortunately a number of the images are poorly reproduced. Seems a shame, for a slideshow, especially one so otherwise intersting. Maybe we should all chip in a few bucks and get Paper Cuts a new scanner.

* A cliché, I know.

Labels: ads, books, New York Times, Paper Cuts

Nicholas Lemann had an interesting piece in last month's Columbia Journalism Review*, in which he uses Orwell's influential essay “Politics and the English Language” to discuss language, propaganda, and political writing.

Lehmann closes with the argument that corruption of information is now an even more frightening prospect than the corruption of language described by Orwell. He doesn't fully develop the idea (worth an essay in its own right), and it feels bolted on. That's a small quibble, though; the piece is well worth reading.

As a bonus the article conveniently comes with a numbing array of examples of both good and bad political argument. Mostly bad, to be honest. Just read the comments.

* Where I worked for a while in the 90s.

Labels: Columbia Journalism Review, George Orwell, Nicholas Lemann

Apple's Steve Jobs, talking to The New York Times about Amazon's Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Which means sixty percent of people in the U.S.--180 million people--are, to some degree, readers. More if you count newspapers, magazines, and the web.

It strikes me as odd that Jobs, the head of a company that is doing very well with a less than 9 percent market share*, doesn't appreciate that.

* UPDATE: Notice how I conflate the size of a market with market share? I think that's called lying with statistics. Still, I think the larger point stands.

Labels: Apple, kindle, reading, Steve Jobs

Wordie has displayed a definition for most words for the past few months, but it had been displaying only the most common one, in order to keep the focus on the fun stuff: citations and comments added by members.

You can now see all the definitions available for a word, in case you want to save a trip to a proper dictionary or just want to see what other strange tricks WeirdNet has up its sleeve. I tried to keep it subtle, so you still see only the top-ranked one, but now with a "more" link just below it. Click and the rest appear.

I decided to leave out example sentences, thinking it might get in the way of people providing their own, but I'm happy to revisit that if people would like. Let me know.

Labels: features, weirdnet, wordnet

The heroes at 826NYC, the Brooklyn-based children's writing workshop and local 826 affiliate, are hosting the Wordie event of the season:

"On Saturday, January 19, 826NYC will host SCRABBLE FOR CHEATERS, a tournament of verbal smarts and fraudulence. Teams of two compete in a tournament to determine the "World's Best Cheater at Scrabble" and raise money for charity. Cheating is allowed, and encouraged. The more money raised, the more a team can cheat. The more a team cheats, the closer they are to glory. Sign up to play. Pledge money to your favorite team. Cheating is the only way to be champion."

Scrabble is joyless, and I loathe it; there's no better way to cheapen words than to put them on a grid and assign them points. So subverting it pleases me to no end, almost as much as pirate supply stores.

If anyone out there wants to field a team, Wordie will sponsor you with the entirety of the site's advertising revenue for 2007: $71.48. Almost enough to buy a vowel and trade out a letter on the tournament cheats menu.

Labels: 826 valencia, 826NYC, cheating, pirates, scrabble

We used to pick up The New York Times at the corner store every Sunday. We moved last September, though, and no store within walking distance carries it. So we signed up for home delivery. That was almost five months ago, and they haven't yet figured out how to get us the paper.

We only subscribed to the Sunday edition, which presents a (very) slight challenge in that the Sunday paper is delivered over two days: the magazine and some other sections on Saturday, the remainder on Sunday. But still, it's been five months, and their track record sucks: Sometimes no paper at all. Sometimes nothing on Saturday, then half the paper on Sunday. For a while we got nothing on Saturday and two identical half-papers on Sunday. For a few happy months we actually got the paper as expected, half on each day. Then last week we got nothing at all, and this weekend we got nothing on Saturday followed by two Sunday halves.

Before we moved our Sunday ritual was to sink into the paper ("like slipping into a warm bath," as Tom Wolfe said) over a leisurely breakfast. Now our ritual is to call subscription services, wait forever, and then struggle with a sullen and uncooperative Times customer service person.

Though it isn't perfect, I love the Times, and would really like to have it delivered. But five months of effort was too much, and after yesterday's snafu we gave up and cancelled our subscription. Or tried anyway--I expect they'll screw that up too.

Driving your customers crazy isn't a good policy under any circumstances, but it seems particularly unwise when your industry is in a death spiral. I have no doubt that eventually the Times will figure out how to transition to a healthy online business model. But in the meanwhile you'd think they'd make it as easy as possible for people who want to give them money for the print edition to do so*, instead of shooting holes in the bottom of their sinking ship.

* The other possibility: this is all William Safire's doing.

Labels: New York Times, safire

From a New York Times Magazine story on torch singer Shelby Lynne:

“Do you know the difference between the words ‘bringing’ and ‘taking’?” she practically whispered into my sleeve, as if not to embarrass me. “Because you just used one of them incorrectly.” I do know the difference, and though I couldn’t remember what I said, I agreed with her anyway, dizzied by the sudden altitude of the conversation. Lynne then proceeded to conduct a sobering mini-symposium on grammar: subjective and objective cases; “begging” versus “raising” the question; parts of speech. “It’s all about using the proper pronouns,” she asserted with the calm authority of a linguistics maven promoting her latest book on NPR.

Labels: bringing, grammar, New York Times, Shelby Lynne, taking

Wordie's mole at the The Wall Street Journal has forwarded another worthwhile post, this one from the WSJ Health Blog. The WotY is a global phenomenon*, and Heather Won Tesoriero posts about some gems in the 'health' category of the Word of the Year contest sponsored by the Macquarie Dictionary in Australia.

My favorite by far is "salad dodger," defined as an overweight person. I envision an Artful Dodger focused solely on junk food, quietly pocketing moon pies while avoiding the soy police.

* And an exhausting one. I'm embarrassed to say I haven't even blogged about the American Dialect Society's recently annointed WotY. I very much like their choices and their attitude, both of which are better than most of the commercial WotY offerings. But I'm suffering a bit of WotY fatigue**. I'll try to get fired up, as Obama (and Hillary) would say, this weekend.

** Doubly embarrassing is that I have given short shrift to Wordie's own grassroots WotY movement, which has been great fun to watch from the sidelines. Though part of me thinks it might function best as a phantom WotY, forever discussed but never announced.

Labels: Macquarie Dictionary, Moon Pie, Salad Dodger, Wall Street Journal, WOTY

The latest in the seemingly endless line of upper-middle brow treatises on bad words to come to my attention (thanks sionnach!) is Depraved and Insulting English, by Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea.

I haven't read it yet, but judging from reviews and the tidbits sionnach has graced us with, many entries look almost medical--the authors seem to draw more on Latin and Greek than stalwart Anglo Saxon. Which probably makes it all the easier--and more fun!--to slip innocuous-sounding gems like lotium into conversation.

Labels: Ammon Shea, books, Depraved and Insulting English, lotium, Peter Novobatzky

Fred Wilson has a post on his family's media consumption in which he talks about his kids' attitudes towards movies, TV (watched as often as not on DVD), the web, video games, radio, magazines, newspapers, and books.

For the most part it's what I'd guess kids would be doing: watching video, playing games, spending time on Facebook. There are a few happy surprises, though. Magazines are holding their own. Hard to say how typical this is--I don't have any insight into the health of the magazine industry--but it surprised me. I had assumed magazines were in the same world of hurt as newspapers.

Most notable, though, is that reading books is apparently alive and well at the Wilson's: "They still read books the way we did as kids. That doesn’t seem to have changed a bit. They read them for school, they read them for entertainment, and they read them lying in bed waiting to be tired enough to turn off the lights."

I found that absolutely uplifting, and anecdotal confirmation of something I've previously blogged: there is no replacement for long-form narrative text. Eventually that text may be displayed on an improved Kindle, as soon as someone (Apple or Amazon, most likely) gets it right. The exact delivery method doesn't concern me much. But that kids still take pleasure in reading books? That concerns me greatly, and it's great to hear of books holding their own in a home full of other glittering distractions.

Labels: A VC, books, facebook, Fred Wilson, kindle, magazines, newspapers, video

Wordie now has a Facebook-style mini-feed of your recent activity, like adding words or lists, making comments, moving words, and adding tags. If you go to a profile, you'll see a link to this in the upper-right, available as either a web page or a feed.

By default this is turned on and visible to everyone. You can turn yours off by clicking the 'edit personal preferences' link on your profile. Activity is tracked (if you keep it turned on) from tonight forward; previous activity won't be available.

This is a first step towards enabling some sort of watchlist feature, so you can more easily keep track of what friends and people whose words you like are up to--think Flickr contacts. Since it's available as a feed, I'm hoping people will find their own good uses for it, as they've done with other Wordie feeds.

While I was mucking about on the server I also upgraded a bunch of other stuff (for the curious, I moved the whole shooting match to Rails 2.0), and probably broke something, or many things. As always, please let me know if I did, or if you have suggestions.

Labels: facebook, features, feeds, mini-feeds

Language Hat has a good post talking about Robin J. Sowards' essay in The Minnesota Review encouraging literary critics to study linguistics. The Hat applauds, of course, though with reservations. Best part: he calls Chomsky the Dark Lord of Linguistics.

As a bonus, he throws in an aside on Slovak cursing.

[via Language Hat via Language Log via The Minnesota Review]

Labels: cursing, Language Hat, Language Log, linguistics, Noam Chomsky, The Minnesota Review

This post actually has nothing to do with social media, its death, or the iPhone, I just thought a sensational title that was also a transparent lie would drive traffic*. What this is really about is pimping my own post in the Silicon Alley Insider. Which is not a transparent lie (neither the fact of the post, nor its contents), but it is, like the title above, a naked, grasping attempt to drive traffic to Wordie/Errata, and to get my name in a blog I like.

* This will be the title of all Errata posts from now on.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, lies, Silicon Alley Insider, social media

Maledicta, "The International Journal of Verbal Aggression," has been in print on and off since 1977. Published by Reinhold Aman (whose interest in abusive language is more than just academic: he spent a year in the federal pen for sending his ex-wife threatening postcards), it's a strange little artifact that might appeal to connoisseurs of foul language and/or wingnut ranters.

And Aman does seem like a true crank. He's an ex-con with a Ph.D. in medieval German literature who publishes a journal--by turns scholarly and juvenile--on cussing. He consistently refers to his former employer, the University of Wisconsin, as "Dungheap U." He put his time in the clink to use writing a book on prison argot in the form of a Herzog-style letter to Hillary Clinton.

He's hung up on the Clintons. He attacks them repeatedly, though he's not too particular about his sources. Or source, since most of his quotes come from one person, the thoroughly discredited Larry Patterson.

So, you've been forwarned: he's not the most savory character. But Maledicta has serious freak value, and there's some good linguistic bits sprinkled throughout.

Labels: cursing, Hillary Clinton, Maledicta, Rheinhold Aman, wingnut