Dave Wilton of
wordorigins.org (
prev) has been compiling etymological snapshots for each year of the past 100 years, based on words that first appeared in English that year. As of now, he is up to
1941. The
1911 entry gives a good overview of his goals and parameters. (
via)
[more inside]
posted by kmz
on Nov 10, 2011 -
9 comments
Daniel Soar
on the militarisation of metaphor:
Spies aren’t known for their cultural sensitivity. So it was a surprise when news broke last month that IARPA, a US government agency that funds ‘high-risk/high-payoff research’ into areas of interest to the ‘intelligence community’, had put out a call for contributions to its Metaphor Program, a five-year project to discover what a foreign culture’s metaphors can reveal about its beliefs.
posted by jack_mo
on Jun 27, 2011 -
41 comments
The
"convowel" tag on
Wordnik tracks consonant-vowel patterns in words. "bleeding", "pheasant", "shoeless", "trousers" —
ccvvcvcc; "quiet", "naiad", "Sioux", "feuar" —
cvvvc; "anglophile", "attractive", "impressure", "ingressive" —
vcccvccvcv
posted by Rory Marinich
on May 26, 2011 -
41 comments
Halló humans on the Inter-net. My name is Iceland. I am an island, full of mountains and glaciers and hot water and sheep and many nice Icelandic people, who like to make music, and who are sometimes cold. (Maybe you have seen me on your tele-visions, or your Inter-net.) I have heard that many humans use the Inter-net to make friends, and to talk about themselves. I decided to do this, too.
Iceland wants to be your friend. [more inside]
posted by carsonb
on May 19, 2011 -
57 comments
PuzzGrid is a lightweight, fast game of forming associations, which is, ahem, "based on" the BBC's
Only Connect. Hundreds of grids to play and you can submit your own, too! (The BBC site has
a few dozen more, in a fancier, louder flash app.)
posted by Wolfdog
on Sep 20, 2010 -
40 comments
Climate change and the vuvuzela leave mark on Oxford Dictionary of English. Other words and phrases introduced for the latest edition include 'toxic debt', 'staycation', 'cheesebal' and 'national treasure'. To balance them out among the 2,000 or so new items there are a few more left-field choices.
Among them are 'cheeseball', which refers to someone or something lacking taste, style or originality, and the more disturbing phenomenon of 'hikikomori', the Japanese word for the acute social withdrawal that occurs in some teenage boys.
posted by Fizz
on Aug 19, 2010 -
18 comments
When Alan Cooper was in the second grade, his teacher introduced him to "homonyms," those words, like "caret" and "carrot" that are pronounced the same, but are spelled differently, and that have different meanings. The concept intrigued him, and over the years he has maintained an ever-growing list.
Alan Cooper's Homonyms.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Feb 20, 2010 -
54 comments
The New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year is.... UNFRIEND. That's right, the negation of the verbification of 'friend'. Well, it's not quite as cringe-worthy as some of the runners-up...
Teabagger?!? And previous winners of this honor were
Hypermiling (2008),
Locavore (2007),
Carbon-Neutral (2006) and
Podcast (2005) (links include each year's finalists, including frugalista, staycation, bacn, mumblecore, Islamofascism, funner, lifehack and squick). Best comment about the WotY (so far)?
"an unreliable yet fascinating barometer of tech". But, at risk of over-editorializing, these look more like candidates for the
Banished Words List. Clearly better is the recent list of
"A Word a Year, 1906-2006" from Oxford's website (if only for the invaluable perspective of time).
posted by oneswellfoop
on Nov 17, 2009 -
73 comments
Java Demo: "four-letter words have a special status in the english language and culture. counting in at over 1650 words,...this small project is an attempt to give a spacial overview of the entirety of this part of english language heritage, as well as to explore and visualize relations between all those words."
posted by hortense
on Jun 4, 2009 -
18 comments
Why would an evolutionary biologist study words? It turns out there is an
astonishing parallel between the evolution of words in a lexicon and the evolution of genes in an organism. The word
two, for example, has been around much longer than most, and will likely be with us for millennia, whereas the comparatively rare and recent word
dirty has undergone many mutations, and will probably be extinct in a few hundred years. Professor
Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK, tells us why on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's program
As It Happens. Pull slider to 16:00 to start the
seven minute interview.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium
on Mar 7, 2009 -
49 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
International House of Logorrhea, at
The Phrontistry, a free online dictionary of weird and unusual words to help enhance your vocabulary. Generous language resources,
2 and 3 letter Scrabble words l
The Compass DeRose Guide to Emotion Words l all kinds of glossaries for
color terms,
wisdom,
love and attraction,
scientific instruments,
manias and obsessions,
feeding and eating,
carriages and chariots,
dance styles and all kinds of fun word stuff.
[more inside]
posted by nickyskye
on Jan 11, 2009 -
12 comments
