"Round here, we say 'mate' a lot. Do yourself a favour, and learn to figure out when a bloke is about to buy you a drink, and when he's ready to put the boot in. He'll say mate either way, but how will he say it? Use
our handy guide to MATE, know what your mates are on about!"
posted by vidur
on Feb 1, 2012 -
35 comments
The Corpus of American Historical English is a searchable index of word usage in American printed material from 1810 to 2009. Powerful complex searches allow you to trace the appearance and evolution of words and phrases and even specific grammatical constructions, see trends in frequency, and plenty more. Start with the
5-Minute Tour.
posted by Miko
on Jan 7, 2012 -
23 comments
Save the Words. Do lost words still have meaning? J
ust because society has neglected them doesn't make them any less of a word.
How do you get lost words back in the dictionary? With lexicogra
ph
ers scanning publications and other communication for words not curr
ently housed in the dictiona
ry, all y
ou need do is use your adopted words as often as possible.
Go,
Adop
t a Word.
Like gra
oc
rac
y.*
* - government by an old woman or women.
[more inside]
posted by Tufa
on Jan 29, 2009 -
37 comments
Sarah Elizabeth Witt struggles to convey a
word game [direct to quicktime] that caused her doctor to diagnose her as obsessive-compulsive.
"When I hear a word that starts with the letter U, I immediately gain access to the letter Y!"
posted by odinsdream
on Nov 24, 2005 -
16 comments
JoeMyGod implores his queer peers:
What's the Gayest Thing You've Ever Done? • ''
That is SO gay! I've been thinking about that expression a lot lately. What does it mean? Is it a playground epithet that is simply in vogue with the grown-ups? Or is it a sign that gay culture is so integrated into the pop culture that even the hets now see the evidence of homo-style in their everyday lives, and make jokes about it?" A
followup to the original post, Part II:
Flaming Son of "Gay, Gayer, Gayest"
posted by dhoyt
on Feb 4, 2005 -
94 comments
Word 97 Users Abandoned by Microsoft? "Microsoft's flagship word processor has for years had a security flaw that could allow a criminal to steal computer files by "bugging" a document with a hidden code." Microsoft will fix the problem for newer versions of Word, but those of us who use Word 97 are more or less out of luck. As it turns out,
the Microsoft Corporation page doesn't seem to have any easily accessible information on this issue.
posted by Joey Michaels
on Sep 13, 2002 -
40 comments
Paul Ford's Ftrain has a great piece on Micrsoft Word, writing, and the web. His stream-of-consciousness essay has hilarious nuggets like the "computer science axiom 'all software expands until it can send mail.'" There's a couple illustrations worth noting:
the first looks like Word with
all the tool bar icons enabled, and
the other is Word's paperclip assistant interfering with an especially private moment. Great stuff.
posted by mathowie
on Feb 8, 2000 -
1 comment
Finally! Microsoft released an add-on app for Word 2000 that allows cleaner HTML to be saved out. I've saved one line Word documents as HTML and had them turned into 10kb of bloated CSS markup. I generally avoid using Word at all costs, but most of the content I get for new sites are done in Word. Tools like this are indespensible.
posted by mathowie
on Nov 15, 1999 -
0 comments
Stop what you're doing and
go here now! It's an online anagram maker, put in your whole name, and set the word length as high as you can. At 3 letters per word the letters 'MatthewHaughey'
spell out hundreds of phrases, the best shown below (punctuation by me):
Why hate? hug mate!
Heat may wet Hugh?
Eat Wham, they hug.
They wag meat, huh?
posted by mathowie
on Sep 16, 1999 -
0 comments
