“I have, for some time, been referring to a particularly irritating brand of privileged semi-feminism as “Liz Lemonism.” I associate this brand of feminism with a certain variety of white, coastal-city dwelling, fairly well-to-do heterosexual cisgendered woman, a woman with a comfortable white-collar job that is so very comfortable and so very white-collar that she is free to spend her spare time yearning for, and semi-believing that she could attain, something with more “meaning.”
“The Web reports have been especially eye-opening for South Koreans, providing a rare glimpse of the aptly named Hermit Kingdom untainted by their own government’s biases, whether the anti-Communists who present the North in the worst light or liberals who gloss over bad news for fear of jeopardizing chances at détente. ”
“Although we’re not as bad as the San Franciscans, Sydneysiders (myself and Melissa) comprise a disproportionate slice of the Geek Feminist Hive Vagina.”
“This means ensuring that militants — or “miscreants,” as Pakistanis like to say — do not return to those areas that have been cleared in recent months.”
“Her goal was to reduce stress and fear in the animals, as some studies have suggested that they harm the quality of meat and are factors in producing so-called dark cutters, cattle whose meat appears brownish or blackish and may be sticky to the touch.”
“This coffee-table collection of industrial-therapeutic dishabille—70 abandoned asylums in 30 states, photographed over six years—is as gorgeous and meditative as it is harrowing.”
The Atlantic, Cover to Cover, by Lynne A. Isbell, April, 2010
Other improvements launched this weekend include autoexpanding comment boxes and a basic mobile site. Try http://m.wordnik.com for a version of the site optimized for phones and other small-screen devices. Right now it lets you search words with definitions, and add words to your lists.
Hi mollusque, yes, those are new, and a work in progress. But I thought they were interesting enough to push an early version out the door.
Our examples are in the process of being updated, and will be getting better over the next week or two. We don't always show everything we have--some examples are not displayed because of character encoding issues or bad punctuation parsing--which explains some of the discrepancies you see.
Upcoming versions of this will allow alphabetical sorting, among other improvements planned.
The Century Dictionary has some fantastic stuff in it, but it was published between 1889 and 1914, and as a result some of its material is archaic and offensive.
“At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.”
“Angry nuns have been calling Congressman Bart Stupak’s office to complain about his dismissive comments on their bravura decision to make a literal Hail Mary pass, break with Catholic bishops and endorse the health care bill.”
Ok, so that's not me, but I really did have one of those when I was 16, which I bought for $400. You could fold down the roof, flip down the windshield, take off the doors, and remove all the seats--it was like driving a bedframe with a lawnmower engine strapped on. I loved that car. Drove it until big chunks of the exhaust system started falling off and it wouldn't pass inspection.
hey junior, we normally encourage people to promote other word sites here, but to come in and splash your url all over the place, while contributing nothing else, is not cool.
Hi pro, sorry for the delayed response. Profile links seem to be working now. Tomorrow I'll look into what happened with your decapitalization—it was an accident. We changed a bunch of the plumbing a few weeks ago, which went smoothly overall (nobody seemed to notice, the ideal response), but it caused that regression. And lastly, trying to figure out why the links are broken in multi-word tweets, will hopefully have a fix soon.
Thanks again for the input--I've been behind on correspondence, but I really appreciate it.
“Although his posts are sometimes “harmonized” — a popular euphemism for censorship —his blog, published by one of China’s most popular Web portals, has so far been allowed to continue.”
Hi marky (and any other developers out there), we just added a new API method to get thesaurus data such as synonyms, antonyms, and other nyms. More info on the API methods page—scroll down to the 'Fetching Related Words' section.
Am corresponding separately with PU about this, but has anyone else experienced this since after the Wordie migration? I don't doubt that something is amiss, but I have tried and failed to find the source of the problem. If anything similar has happened to anyone else, any details you could provide (email john@wordnik.com) would be helpful.
Just my personal opinion, but I don't mind the odd poem here and there. It's been done before.
As yarb says, it's easier to not set off the self-promotion sensors (and censors) if you contribute in other ways. But it looks like you're doing that.
“Almost literally invisible even to observant Jews, the wire or string of an eruv, connected from pole to pole, allows the out-of-doors to be considered an extension of the home. Which means, under Judaic law, that one can carry things on the Sabbath, an act that is otherwise forbidden outside the house.”
And examples, too, are in the midst of being retooled--the weirdness you've noted lately should all be fixed when we release the next set of updates. Not exactly sure when that'll be, but hopefully by early next week.
Tweaked the stylesheets--see my comment over on dontcry's profile. If you're not seeing it you might want to shift-reload, or restart your browser--you may have the old stylesheet cached.
Yeah, was fiddling with the knobs earlier--links are now their default color for whatever browser you're using. Varies a bit, but it's generally blue, or purple if you've already been there. I thought it made the links seem linkier. It's also how things were back in Ye Olden Tymes. Let me know what you think--I like it, but I'm flexible.
“Before 60,000 spectators who donned brown moose antler hats and pixilated the stadium with lights, Canada had fun with its ice-hockey loving, wildlife-hugging cliches in a revue of 'Canadiana.'”
“Let’s face it: if baseball and football were in the winter, nobody would be watching,” said Robert P. Kelly, the chief executive of Bank of New York Mellon, who took up curling when he was growing up in Canada. He is a former “skip” — the player who usually directs the strategy during a game —and dispenses curling tips to employees. ”
“People at Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and even the Treasury Department have gone a bit curling crazy. Terms like “kizzle kazzle” — a curling stone that is wobbled to compensate for slush on the ice — have suddenly entered the Wall Street lexicon.”
Speaking of deletion, I'm wondering if folks think that option should always be available, or only for a certain window in time. I'm thinking comments and pronunciations should be deletable by the person who added them for at least a certain period, maybe 24 hours. Beyond that though, it might be disruptive to conversations if people could disrupt the space-time coninuum willy-nilly*. Thoughts?
* though of course you can already do that by editing things. let's ignore that for the moment.
Hi mmm, we're working on making both comments and pronunciations deletable by their creators, should be available in the coming few weeks. I always announce site updates over on feedback.
Fantastic, thanks. I was way in to the X-Men in the 80's, until my head got turned by a girl, and the comics were shelved in her favor. Not a bad choice at the time, but I missed Negasonic's appearance.
I'm planning on spending my dotage catching up on decades of comic books and popcorn movies. Makes me positively eager to get old.
Hi folks, just added a 'comments' section to profile pages, at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar, which lets you see your last first* two hundred comments. In the near future we'll make that pageable, so you can go back through them all. Also, the list counts and the bug with 'appears in these lists' should both be fixed now.
Also wanted to let you know that we're working on a major update to how examples are selected, and once that's done, we'll start working on anti-spam measures. It's as annoying to us as to anyone--thanks for your forbearance.
*update: the new comments page is sorting upside down--sorry about that, will fix shortly. though it's kind of funny to see your earliest comments.
Bilby, that's awesome*. I know, with the logo and whatnot there's a whiff of marketing about it. But having a mechanism to describe and connect words will allow for fun stuff. Like being able to connect words in ebooks to Wordnik** comments so that you can see comments on words while you read. Or being able to make your books aware of all the words you've ever listed, so you know whether or not to list things as you go. Open metadata formats have enabled lots of other good stuff, like blog feeds and podcasts. Creating one for words has potential too, I think.
Pro: forgot about that, and love it--thanks. Yes, maybe?
I can't find much on pithiatic, though this blog entry on 'Pythiatism' from 2004 has a quote from Sartre that includes what looks like a related word. A search on pythiatism turns up this image from 1918 of what looks like a medical journal or book on hysteria.
PU, would you mind sending me info about your recent list issues--names of the lists, anything else that might help me track them? The Wordie db was, ahem, a bit flaky, but anything created on this side of the fence should be in there. Give me someplace to start and I'll look in the db.
Hi all, we just added a 'recent lists' section on Zeitgeist, to accompany 'recent open lists'. The new section includes a link to all past lists, or at least all the ones that contain words.
Hi asarulislam. Non-commercial links are allowed on Wordnik, though perhaps the best place for one would be in the 'more about' section of your profile. To edit your profile click on your username at the top-right of the page, then click 'Edit profile' next to your name. Links in comments often tend to be spam, and set off alarm bells.
One small suggestion: you might consider adding comments that are about words to the word itself, rather than to the list the word is in. For example, you can comment on Quaranocracy on the comments page for that word.
Hi folks, just fixed a few small issues, and added back the comment feed for each word. There's no link for it on the word pages (yet), but if your browser supports feed autodiscovery (ie, you see a little feed icon in your location bar on some pages), you should see a feed in there for comments, with a url like this: http://www.wordnik.com/words/addax/comments.xml. I'll soon add back profile comment feeds as well.
Mollusque, I'd like to claim we're enabling Scrabble for cheaters, but I think that's a bug. On the list--thanks.
Hi kaitman, comments can be for pretty much whatever you like, as long as it's polite. People use them to chat about words and language, or to leave citations, quotes, or usage notes on particular words.
Hi folks, Tony just posted a fix for the 'listed in' bug pro found earlier, and I just nuked that round of 'just for fun' spammers. Sorry about the delay on that--most of Wordnik was out of the office today, entertaining our mothers-in-law.
“But belatedly, funerals and memorial services are taking place daily, and the traditional word-of-mouth network known as telediol has reawakened, delivering death notices.”
No idea. We're giving them the benefit of the doubt for the time being, but collecting the account names in case this is a trial run for a bout of spam. Jenifa oh jenny, are you for real?
Bad characters smoke, stay out late on schoolnights, and don't call their mom on her birthday. Pages should handle them though, instead of exploding, so I'll talk to Tony about what was going on and try to make sure we handle it better in the future.
Hi Doug, welcome to wordnik. If you email me (john@wordnik.com) what browser you're using and what comment on what page you're trying to edit, I'll look into why that link isn't working for you.
Hi folks, sorry about the comment links going on the fritz. This afternoon we added filters to try and contain the contagion of spam we've been seeing, and I overdid it a bit--they were removing all links, including safe internal ones. I've dialed it back and they should work now.
As part of the anti-spam effort links and images are now automatically removed from list descriptions. I know a lot of us put legit links in our descriptions, and we'll look into ways to filter spam links without interfering with everyone else. But for the moment, unfortunately, we're forced to be a bit draconian.
The other update of note is improved data on the 'related' sub pages. Many words, like good for instance, should show a lot more synonyms, antonyms, and other nyms.
Hi Pro, would you mind emailing me a link to that spam site? You're right, we have nothing to do with it, but we'll take every step we can to have it taken down.
We've been under increasing attack from spammers, as you know, and are taking steps to deal with it. It helps a lot when you alert us to things like this--thanks much for making us aware of it.
Comment count is better: you can view up to 500 previous comments on a word. Should let you see the full comment thread in all but a handful of cases. Tonight I'll do the same for lists. In the near future I'll make comments pageable, so that in 10 years, when there are 10,000 comments on 'bugs', you'll be able to scroll back through every one of them and see the full history of every mistake we've ever made :-)
Hi folks, we made a few changes tonight, one of which was supposed to eliminate the 50 comment limit that had been truncating longer threads. Instead we inadvertently lowered the limit, to 7 :-/
A fix should be in early tomorrow, sorry for the inconvenience.
“As snow began to accumulate on the White House grounds and the National Mall in the afternoon, much of Washington was hunkered down, bracing for what newspapers and bloggers have been calling the “snowpocalypse,” or “snowmageddon,” and the streets in the center of the city were unusually quiet.”
“22.41 Describe the circuitry and operation of a flutter meter.—Flutter bridges or meters are instruments used for the measurement of irregularities in constant-speed drive systems, such as are used in photographic and magnetic recorders, telemetering, disc recording and reproduction, ad other devices used for recording and reproducing.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 1,255
“18.182 What is a blimp?—A sound deadening cover placed over a motion picture camera on a motion picture set to prevent the noise of the camera movement from being picked up by the microphone.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 956
“17.160 What is Barkhausen noise in a magnetic recorder?—Barkhausen noise is modulation noise or behind-the-signal noise. It may be caused by tape whcih has become magnetized or has an uneven coating.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 818
“13.174 What is tangent error?—When a laterally recorded disc record is recorded, the cutting head is carried across the face of the recording disc at right angles to the direction of the disc motion. However, when reproduced, the pickup is never at right angles to the direction of motion, except at one point, because the pickup arm is pivoted in such a manner that it swings across the face of the disc in an arc.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg.677
“12.136 What is a negative-feedback or degenerative amplifier?—An amplifier in which a portion of the output signal voltage is fed back 180 degrees out of phase to the input.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 573
“6.3 What is a duller?—A form of equalizer used to reduce the high-frequency response of an electrical circuit. It is so named because the high-frequency response appears to be dull and lacking in presence.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 263
“3.48 What is a selsyn-interlock distributor system?—A synchronous distributor system used for interlocking sound recording equipment with motion picure cameras”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 107
“Some polios, as survivors call themselves, say that post-polio has refocused their minds on how the virus shaped their lives — and sharpened their bittersweet memories.”
hi mollusque, that's a bug, will be fixed soon. at the end of the week we'll also be tweaking the random rules a little, hopefully to make it a bit more satisfying.
The past comments link in Zeitgeist should be working now. Getting the history of spaghetti back will take a little more doing, but we're working on it.
“Over the past year and a half, a subculture has evolved, with Christian mixed martial arts clothing brands like Jesus Didn’t Tap (in the sport, “tap” means to give up) and Christian social networking Web sites like Anointedfighter.com. ”
We're updating some internals this coming friday and I will do my best to have full comment history restored by then. It's unconscionable that your spaghetti limerick isn't available.
“His greatest hope, Mr. Galbraith said, was Stein’s law, named for Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.
Stein’s law has been recited in many different versions. But all have a common theme: If a trend cannot continue, it will stop.”
Sionnach, I thought we fixed the list sorting bug and am looking into why it's still broken. The Zeitgeist one fell off my radar, I'll look into that too.
Along the lines of what c_b says, part of the reason for our apparent inactivity is that we're rewriting big swaths of the site's internals. Which is necessary for a bunch of reasons and in the long run good for us all, but in the short run unsatisfying because it doesn't add new features and it slows down bug fixing. It's a lot of effort and the rewards are deferred.
I hope you stick around too, or at least drop by every once in a while and see how we're doing.
“Years ago, enthusiasts predicted the coming of “smart dust” — tiny digital sensors, strewn around the globe, gathering all sorts of information and communicating with powerful computer networks to monitor, measure and understand the physical world in new ways.”
“Ms. Estrin and her colleagues at the university’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing have designed several projects that use cellphones and people in data-gathering and analysis. Cellphones, they say, are versatile data collectors and are becoming more powerful all the time — with cameras, GPS, accelerometers and Internet connectivity. Their work is at the forefront of an emerging field called participatory sensing.”
Wow, I had forgotten all about those books. Really loved them when I was a boy--thanks for the reminder. Adding them to the growing list of books and music I can't wait to introduce the tyke to, but which she'll probably roll her eyes at.
Taking your laptop into the john when you're doing your business is unseemly. Problem solved! Get a bit of reading done while you relax on the commode with the iCrapper®.
The case of the missing pronunciations will hopefully be solved this weekend--we have a fix on deck. And arby--I was wondering if anyone would notice that :-) Mostly I just wanted to make room for other options, like "post to facebook," but I thought it might be a little negative. Don't want to disrespect the words. Maybe we should add a "caress it gently" option?
“I grew up in a house 200 yards from the Atlantic just outside Monrovia, and we never went into the sea; we left that to the tourists. We were willing to venture into the many lagoons that collected near the country’s beaches, but there was no way we were going to brave the Atlantic, with its rough waves and fierce undertow. Not to mention the underwater neegees — or spirits — waiting to take you off to be eaten by sharks.”
“When I went to meet Bono at the bar of his hotel, I saw Richard Gere seated at a table with a gorgeous woman in a little fur jacket and a leather cap. Bono, on the other hand, had removed himself to a quiet back room, where he was keeping company with a plump, middle-aged white guy in a suit and tie... This was Randall Tobias, head of the Bush administration's AIDS program.”
That's from a 2005 NYTimes Magazine piece on Bono, and I remember being impressed when I read it at the time. He seems to dig into what he's doing, and actually have an effect. I get the impression it's more than just image polishing.
We're contractually obligated to say nice things about Bono*. He actually owns us**.
Duty aside, I'm ok with both Bono--guy does more good things than I do--and lot of U2, except when they drift into gospel and Americana. Then I want to shoot them. No opinion about the glasses, though I've always thought it must be annoying as hell to have the world tinged light blue.
And love lamé on anyone. I'm wearing a spangly jumpsuit at this very moment.
Pro, that's a good suggestion--that's actually how it's supposed to work :-) I'll fix soonish, though the rate of site updates is going to slow for the next few weeks--we're rebuilding some internal stuff to deal with increasing traffic and to grease the skids for features coming down the pike. I'll try and slip some small fixes in over the next few weeks, but by the end of February more new goodies should start showing up.
Hi marky, I can't say exactly when, but we'll be releasing a public API to get the words in lists in the coming weeks. You'll see it announced on 'feedback', and also @wordnikapi.
“Millions of Chinese have been uprooted to make way for high rises and government infrastructure projects. “Nail House” is a popular term given to homes of dwellers who refuse to leave though they are surrounded by demolished homes.”
“Security experts say the ideal approach is to carefully identify a corporation’s most valuable intellectual property and data, and place it on a separate computer network not linked to the Internet, leaving a so-called air gap.”
“Another approach, one used in the Google attacks, is a variation on so-called phishing schemes, in which an e-mail message purporting to be from the recipient’s bank or another institution tricks the person into giving up passwords. Scammers send such messages to thousands of people in hopes of ensnaring a few. But with so-called spear-phishing, the bogus e-mail is sent to a specific person and appears to come from a friend or colleague inside that person’s company, making it far more believable.”
“Munches are informal gatherings hosted by and for straight folks into BDSM; most are hosted by reputable BDSM or sex clubs—Orlando Power Exchange, Los Angeles’ Threshold Society, Seattle’s Center for Sex Positive Culture—and nothing happens at a munch. No sex, no play, just conversation and lunch.”
“Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had been the most senior U.S. official to talk of the seriousness of the breach, discussed it on Thursday with a Chinese diplomat in Washington, however, and a senior administration official said there would be a “démarche in coming days” — a diplomatic move.”
ruzuzu--that was due to a bug. actually a series of bugs--it was related to pronunciations having been busted. it should all be fixed now, sorry for the inconvenience.
“Astronomers still do not know, however, if they will find enough galaxies and stars in that epoch when the universe was only half a billion years old to have burned off the hydrogen fog. That process is technically known as reionization, in which electrons are stripped from the hydrogen nuclei, making intergalactic space transparent.”
hi frogapplause, sorry about the pronunciation issue, it's been fixed now. not sure what's up with lists--they're working for me. if you're still having problems saving to a list, could you email me the url?
Hi dc, sorry about your missing prons--could you try logging out and then back in? If you're still not seeing pronunciations or other stuff of yours, could you send me an email with URLs of where it should be appearing, so I can hunt for it?
“Everyone knows about the reporting assets and influence of Politico (Politico.com), but you know things have changed when Gawker (gawker.com), the attitudinous Manhattan media blog, is hiring the kind of reporters who pick up the phone.”
Drag the link above to your browser toolbar. Then when you want to view a word from Wordnik (or any other site) on OneLook, highlight it and click the link on your toolbar.
There's an equivalent bookmarklet for searching Wordnik on the Tools page.
• The Word of the Day page now has links to the previous 20 words of the day. We'll do another update soon and let you page back through all previous words of the day, and update the design of the WotD widget.
• The "take this word and..." dropdown for words now lets you post words to Facebook, and there's now a similar set of options for lists ("take this list and...").
• There's now a Tools section, linked to at the bottom of every page, with links to things like bookmarklets, and three new...
Hi Pro, I know I sound like a broken record when I say this, but merging and disambiguation for case and other kinds of variants (plurality, tense, abbreviations, etc.) is high on our priority list. We're in the midst of implementing it in fact, but it's a bit of a hairball and it will be a little while longer before we can release the first version.
“Brent White, a University of Arizona law professor, notes that a family who bought a three-bedroom home in Salinas, Calif., at the market top in 2006, with no down payment (then a common-enough occurrence), could theoretically have to wait 60 years to recover their equity. On the other hand, if they walked, they could rent a similar house for a pittance of their monthly mortgage.
There are two reasons why so-called strategic defaults have been considered antisocial and perhaps amoral.”
Yes, absolutely—that's high on my list of things to add back, I used it all the time too.
The old version worked well enough at Wordie scale, but I have to admit, it was a clusterfuck under the hood. So we want to redesign the guts of it before rebuilding. But it's definitely on the list.
Hi folks, Tony just rolled out a bunch of internal fixes that should speed things up a bit (and Zeitgeist more than a bit), and also fix some layout issues with IE. And if someone comments on one of your lists, you'll now receive an email about it, which can be turned off from your profile if you prefer.
On deck is an update to Word of the Day, and some more proactive ways of dealing with the spam infestation. In the meanwhile we really appreciate your vigilance, and we'll continue to squash spam accounts manually until we have it under control.
Pro, thanks in particular for spotting a lot of these. Obviously I never got around to deputizing anyone back in the Wordie days—it proved more complicated than I'd thought. Wordnik is more complicated still, and most of our effort is going towards building the corpus and adding features, so opening up the admin is a challenge. But hopefully we'll soon be blocking most of these in the first place, so there will be fewer to catch.
Lastly, we're going to start being more methodical about communicating updates. I'll comment here when we make changes, and you might also want to subscribe to the blog feed and Twitter account (@wordnik), channels we'll be using more regularly from now on.
“In Bangladesh, a largely flat, riverine nation where more than 140 million people live in one of the most densely populated countries in the world, past generations often moved to cities seasonally.”
I sometimes announce them here or on words I think are relevant, but I'm not consistent enough about it. We'll figure out a better system for it.
The blog makes sense to me. One possible shortcoming with that is, if we do, say, a weekly roundup, you may have to wait six days to know that the little thing that's been driving you nuts has been fixed. Maybe we should do blog + something else?
“He is tutored privately and takes vocal lessons, the costs underwritten by Island Def Jam records and the silky R & B superstar Usher. His new family includes hovercrafts like Mr. Braun and Ryan Good, a former assistant to Usher, whom the singer handpicked to be Justin’s road manager and “swagger coach” — sharpening his moves, his attitude and his wardrobe.”
“Mr. Oltzik’s life would end not with a bang, but with the drip, drip, drip of an IV drug that put him into a slumber from which he would never awaken. That drug, lorazepam, is a strong sedative. Mr. Oltzik was also receiving morphine, to kill pain. This combination can slow breathing and heart rate, and may make it impossible for the patient to eat or drink. In so doing, it can hasten death.
Mr. Oltzik received what some doctors call palliative sedation and others less euphemistically call terminal sedation.”
“Here’s my prediction for the Next Big Thing in health care: chronotherapy, or therapy by the clock. Yes, in the future, your medicines, your operations, your mealtimes and when you step onto the treadmill or the badminton court — all will be overseen by your personal chronoconsultant.”
Hi RT, yes, the option for contributors isn't available at the moment. Though now that we have an email notification system it's back in play. No specific timeframe, but will hopefully be available early next year.
The lesson is intended to teach a skill called subitizing. “The idea,” Dr. Sarama said, “is to get them to recognize quantity — to say, ‘I see three’ — not by counting, but by instantly recognizing how many are there by sight.”
Hi sionnach, the default sort for lists is 'order added', so seeing words from across the alphabet on any page is expected behavior. I just paged through allthreepages of the list you mentioned, sorted by alpha and order added, and they look ok to me. Email me if you're seeing something different.
Onelook and friends still there, but the location has changed. If you look at the summary page for any word, in the 'Definitions' area, underneath 'WordNet' there's a section called 'Elsewhere on the web.'
“Ms. Jones said the incident may have been “hacktivism,” an attack with a social or political motivation. “The point could purely be just to prove the site is insecure,” she said.”
Hi folks, we added some more profile features tonight. Wordnik now sends you an email when someone comments on your profile. You can toggle email notifications on and off by clicking 'Edit profile' on your profile page, then 'Edit preferences'. In the near future it'll also notify you when someone comments on one of your lists.
The 'Edit profile' section also lets you opt in or out of the general Wordnik email list and the upcoming Word of the Day email, and change your email address. As always, please let us know if anything is acting strangely, or if you have comments or suggestions on this or anything else.
Re: spammers, yeah, I used to need all the help I could get. I think it's no big deal to comment on spam accounts, though no longer really necessary. And you have to accept that no matter how brilliant your wit, spam gets nuked and comments along with it—like a sand mandala tossed back into the river, reminding us of the transitory nature of material existence. Or something.
“Or the appeal might be more primal, what the Pietmontese call geddu: Its studly curves and elegant grillwork were sculpted by designers at Pininfarina, stylists of the Ferrari, Maserati, and Alfa Romeo.”
Fast Company, Pop Artist, by Linda Tischler, September 2009
“Dark matter became a serious issue in the 1970s, when Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and her colleagues charted the rotation speeds of galaxies and found that they seemed to be enveloped in halos of dark matter, then called missing mass.”
“The recent survey results would probably stun someone who went to sleep during apartheid and awakened in the present. After all, blacks not only control the government, they mingle in the finest restaurants and swankiest malls. The so-called black diamonds include liberation struggle heroes who have been welcomed into the boardrooms of the nation’s largest corporations.”
“As recently as five years ago,” Dr. Lazowska said, “if you were a social scientist interested in how social groups form, evolve and dissipate, you would hire 30 college freshmen for $10 an hour and interview them in a focus group.”
“Today,” he added, “you have real-time access to the social structuring and restructuring of 100 million Facebook users.”
The shift is giving rise to a computer science perspective, referred to as “computational thinking” by Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.
“He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an “exaflood” of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood.”
“One of those making the trip, Grant Baker, a South African pro known as Twiggy, said after his first round that the surf was “a lot more powerful than it looked.”
“It looks beautiful from here,” Mr. Baker said. “But there’s a lot of reverb coming off the rocks and it makes it quite difficult.”
“Even before the official word came down, however, both event surfers and local “watermen” were kicking and paddling their way into the surf, and zipping down wave faces about 1,000 feet from shore.”
“Soon after Suskind’s book came out, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who then was at the University of Chicago, pointed out that Mr. Cheney seemed to be endorsing the same “precautionary principle” that also animated environmentalists. Sunstein wrote in his blog: “According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events — such as climate change.”
“Many sovereign funds invested in the early days of the crisis as banks scrambled to find investors willing to plow in money and exacted lucrative terms. (Swings through Asia and the Middle East were so common that bankers coined the phrase “Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, Goodbye” to describe their fund-raising tours.)”
Pollyanna or anyone experiencing the double entry bug, I'd appreciate if you could email me (john@wordnik.com) some details to help me recreate it, as I haven't been able to. The name and version of your browser would be especially helpful.
Hi all, launched some updates to tagging tonight. In the right-hand sidebar of your profile there's now a link to your tag page. It's pretty basic, and will improve over time, but we can see all our tags in one place again.
The center of the page shows aggregated tags in alphabetical order, with each appearing once. The sidebar shows recent instances of tag applications, so if you tag ten words with the same tag, they'll all show up there.
We're going to do another round of data cleanup soon that should address some remaining character encoding issues with tags, and tag pages will get some refinements, especially sorting. Let me know if you have any suggestions or requests.
I think the spamfection rate has been about about same on Wordnik as on Wordie, and I'm pretty sure we brought the spam with us--there was almost none here prior to our arrival :-)
I had a small but effective little anti-spam toolkit I'd built up over the years, so I often nuked stuff before many people saw it. We're slowly building up a similar kit for Wordnik--in fact some of it is getting deployed tonight.
I just zapped dickhead's penis links, and this account will disappear in a day or so. We very much appreciate spam alerts, either in situ, on feedback, or by email.
“Mr. Osman’s send-off was just the latest manifestation of what sociologists call “Ottomania,” a harking back to an era marked by conquest and cultural splendor during which sultans ruled an empire stretching from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean and claimed the spiritual leadership of the Muslim world.”
“An obvious attraction is the fin-free feeling of skimming across the water, which the ancient Hawaiians called “lala” — a controlled slide in and around the pocket of the wave.”
“My surfcraft that day was an alaia (pronounced ah-LIE-ah), a replica of the thin, round-nosed, square-tailed boards ridden in pre-20th-century Hawaii. The originals were 7 to 12 feet long, generally made of koa wood and could weigh up to 100 pounds. They resemble nothing so much as antique ironing boards, but their most distinctive feature compared with modern equipment is that they are finless.”
Yes, all contributed examples/usages/citations should go in comments. Down the road we hope to add a way to categorized comments, something I long wanted to do on YOW but never got around to.
Hi rolig and friends, thanks for the reports. Regarding private notes, we do have all the data on dry ice. I used them a lot too, but in general that was one of Wordie's least used features. We plan on adding them back (I think they might make more sense here), but it won't be for a while, unfortunately. If you need your notes please email me and I can bundle them up and send them to you.
“You’re going to go get boxed on a Friday or Saturday night,” he said. “You don’t want to say you lost your shield when you were out drinking, so you carry a dupe.”
“Years ago, Mr. Anemone said, officers referred to a fake badge as a Pottsy, after the Jay Irving comic strip about a New York City police officer. They later took on the name dupes, for duplicates.”
“But in New York, a city that has become almost synonymous with high security, where office employees wear picture IDs and surveillance cameras are on the rise, some officers don’t wear their badges on patrol.
Instead, they wear fakes.
Called “dupes,” these phony badges are often just a trifle smaller than real ones but otherwise completely authentic. Officers use them because losing a real badge can mean paperwork and a heavy penalty, as much as 10 days’ pay.”
“Dr. Tomasello believes children develop what he calls “shared intentionality,” a notion of what others expect to happen and hence a sense of a group “we.” It is from this shared intentionality that children derive their sense of norms and of expecting others to obey them.
Shared intentionality, in Dr. Tomasello’s view, is close to the essence of what distinguishes people from chimpanzees.”
Zeitgeist's 'Recently listed' now actually shows that, thanks to a fix Tony just put in place.
Fourthed, and added to the list.
Humphrey Lyttleton? A suspicious name on the face of it, but the first sentence of his Wikipedia entry makes me think Grant invented him. And probably authored this:
"Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton, also known as Humph, was an English jazz musician and broadcaster, and chairman of the BBC radio programme I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. He was a cousin of the 10th Viscount Cobham and a great-nephew of the politician and sportsman Alfred Lyttelton, who was the first man to represent England at both football and cricket."
Autocomplete has been rejiggered along the lines mollusque suggested—unless you choose an item off the list, it should behave like a regular search box.
VO, sorry that I got defensive, and kjola, sorry I missed your point.
Bilby, valid points, and you're right, 'rough transition' doesn't do it justice. I'm doing what I can to fix what's broken, listen, and make things easier to use and more fun--to be productive, so that you don't have to be. There's another batch of fixes for Monday evening, and they'll keep coming.
Hi kjola, could you try the password reset page, using the email with which you signed up for Wordie? If that doesn't work please email me--john@wordnik.com
The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.” (“Business up front, party in the back” is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) “User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,” Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.”
Guys, I know it was a rough transition, and that it's not finished. But a little perspective.
VanishedOne, you implied that Wordie had a clearly targeted purpose. It didn't for a long time—it evolved, as will Wordnik. Wordnik has an overarching goal, which I love: the collection of all English words and as much information about them as possible. But the culture and spirit of it are up to us. It won't be dictated by an amorphous "them." There's only five of us in the office anyways. When we get pizza we fit in a both.
The only material that changes on the site is the automatically collected stuff, like example sentences, and then because we're trying to dramatically improve their quality. As many have noted, they need it.
Things we contribute, like comments and pronunciations, don't get touched unless they're unequivocally abuse or spam. So yes, Wordnik is a dictionary, and yes, it's educational. But there's no such thing as "not meeting our purposes." And while some features exist or not because they just happened to get built one way (or not), nothing is cast in stone. We have a pretty long list of things we have to do, which we're slowly working through (the downside of fitting in a pizza both), but just keep bothering me. I feel like I have a pretty long record of building what people ask for. And I appreciate both the bug reports, and also the understanding that glitches will be fixed over time. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.
I don't think the idea of a serious dictionary with a not-serious community is so far fetched. I mean, it even has a name: the mullet strategy. Though for what it's worth, I totally disagree with Peretti that most user-generated content sucks. Or at least, this group is the exception that proves the rule.
hi pro, redirects for the numeric list urls were working until yesterday, when i broke them--they should be working again now.
i had been trying to get the styles working correctly for the small group of frozen-in-amber lists that are still visible on olde wordie. haven't yet, but will eventually. i too kind of like having a few semi-secret time capsules lying around :-)
Rolig, was finally able to get those holdout lists looking and working as they had been, I think.
Not sure if this has been mentioned here, but the words in 'Recently listed' aren't. That's been fixed and will show up on the site on Monday. And pro, I'll figure out why your pronunciations aren't showing up on the main word page—you're right, they should be.
We made some progress on character encoding issues tonight. Tony wrote a script that fixed the urls of 110 lists. Prolagus, this means all your lists starting with a • ("• Little pains in my butt") should work now, and Wordie links to them should redirect correctly.
I also went in and tweaked a few things manually. Rolig, I was able to get your two broken lists working, but unfortunately the URLs differ from what they were on Wordie, so redirects are broken. I'll try again later to fix this, but for now at least you can access them. As for words with the 'č' character, I hate to say this, but at this point your best bet may be to delete the fuglified versions and add back the correct ones. The unicode issues are beyond me, but something about that character defied the fixes that worked in most other cases. I'm sorry about that.
dhuber, might be related to new stuff we just added. Could you try logging out, then restarting your browser, and logging back in? If you're still having issues after that, please email me (john@wordnik.com), and let me know the list and word, and the browser you're using. Thanks.
PU, you are fast! We just added the new Zeitgeist additions minutes ago, and you found a Mothra-sized bug before I could even announce it :-) Just fixed those links though, thanks.
So Zeitgeist now shows the top 7 most-commented on words and lists of the past 7 days, and also recently listed words. List comments are now editable, and you can remove words you added to open lists. Lists themselves are now deletable, as long as they don't yet have comments on them (we're sorting out how to handle other cases). And a handful of smaller bugs were fixed.
Up next are some unicode issues, a bunch of smallish bug fixes, then we update the tagging system, and overhaul the bleeding carbuncle that is the current 'word of the day' page.
bilb, list deletion will soon return--tomorrow night, hopefully. though it will at first be limited to lists with no comments on them. but should be enough to clean up double submits like that.
Hi mollusque, I was was about to add back that link external link icon last night, but I realized some work has to be done first to exclude it some places (like the 'Elsewhere on the web' links in the definitions section of the word summary page). But I'd like to get that back in too.
Rolig, I'm sorry for the delay, I'll look into those inoperable lists.
This is actually the account of our new intern, Felix Edback. Hi Felix!
Purple does rock—spaced that in the makeover. You may have to hold down the 'shift' key and hit 'reload' to get your browser to pick up the change, but visited links should now be the right color.
A bunch of limboed lists have been returned home, including all those reported by Whichbe and Prolagus. The comments section on Zeitgeist now includes those made on lists and profiles, and has a 'past comments' link at the top, which will let you page backwards through every comment ever left on Wordnik or Wordie. If you go back far enough you may find some of the Wordie comments are out of order with respect to the Wordnik ones; that will be fixed soon.
The word pages now also show the comment count in parentheses next to the 'Comments' button. Arby, you can now shove words (though not in Safari, apparently--working on that). And about the Random button—what uselessness said :-)
Some other tweaks and refinements were sprinkled around, and probably a few new bugs too. On deck for the next release: get tags working correctly, add more zeitgeist data, and fix a slew of bugs.
Thanks for your patience with all this remodeling, and please let me know if you have any suggestions or questions, or just feel like ranting.
If someone, say for instance a bear, had accounts on both Wordie and Wordnik, their Wordnik settings took precedence. And since Wordnik accounts defaulted to private until recently, some née Wordie accounts got switched to private, unfortunately.
I'll ping the bear via other channels and let her know. Though I think she's got her hands full at the moment, literally and figuratively :-)
“Many of the big, multistage firms aren’t really venture firms in the classic sense anymore,” said Chris Douvos, co-head of private equity investing at the Investment Fund for Foundations. The deals they do “may be good risk-adjusted bets, but are a far cry from the de novo innovation that people look for in venture,” he said.
The case of the missing lists has been solved. Turns out they're all invite-only. The plan had been to temporarily convert those to creator-only until we got email notifications working, but we inadvertently made them invisible.
We have a fix for it on deck, but we're going to do some testing and consolidation and generally batten down the hatches a little before putting it into production. It should happen tomorrow night, barring anything unforeseen. Thanks very much for your patience on this everyone. Your lists will be back in your arms again soon.
whichbe, thanks, i'll look into that--i've been in fix-two-bugs, cause-one mode with moving and deleting from lists, hopefully that'll stabilize on the next pass.
vo, unfortunately you'll find machine generated crud like that semi-regularly right now. we ingest huge volumes of data, and we're still fine-tuning how it's all processed. that's not a part of the puzzle i'm directly involved in, but we talk all the time about how to improve the process, so you'll see less and less of that over time.
wow, that's a rather unattractive page. which i've neglected for 8 months. and curiously, the mile-high tag list is followed by a bunch of tweets in, i think, japanese.
officially back on the 'do something with this, someday' list.
But none of Wordie belonged to any of us anyways. Errata is on dry ice and I can't verify this until it's thawed, but I'm pretty sure we surrendered all our rights to J.K. Rowling. Or maybe that was on a word thread somewhere?
Whichbe: two-word phrases should now stay intact during moves, and the ones that got scrambled earlier should now be removable if you want to re-add. Please let me know if that's not your case.
Thanks very much for the sleuthing, though sorry it's necessary. Grant also compiled a list of lists to look into. I don't have access to the necessary db to dig into it right now, otherwise I would, but figuring out what happened and what to do about it is a high priority tomorrow.
Prolagus and PossibleUnderscore, you've been upcased. If anyone else is missing a majuscule, let me know—still a few kicking around the lost and found.
Active threads will return soon, but first comes getting list and profile comments into the comment stream, then a chronological past-comments section that we can page through, both early this week.
I like the idea of deputizing editors, there are some issues, the most obvious being that I'd have to build the tools. But maybe eventually. We have internal bug tracking, and I have my own mixed-up-files style tracking. But a user-editable bug wiki, separate from the site itself, might be a good idea.
Later today I'll be adding a shortcut for linking directly to comments pages from within comments.
“Ms. Lee’s small house near the high school was sometimes a hangout, where Mr. Prugo, Ms. Ames and others from Indian Hills could be found “having a kickback,” said the friend.”
Profile comments are editable now. List comments next, and they'll both start appearing on Zeitgeist soon.
A ways back I said it would be nice to be able to toggle Wordie between 'dictionary' and 'social' mode, depending on mood or purpose. And that's what I hope Wordie/nik evolves into. Wordie's chatter has been the best part, but when it started I was thinking dictionaries, and that still appeals. Maybe that's trying to square the circle, but I hope not. Guess we'll find out.
More specific controls will come, but it can be make more Wordie-like as-is. This may change, but I feel a simpler homepage is easier to absorb for new folks. But I have my homepage set to Zeitgeist and hardly look at the real one--and Zeitgeist is going to get much better fairly soon. And when poking through lists if you use the 'comment' links, you can bypass the lexicographic pages entirely.
Sionnach*, I'm glad your back :-). Be a grouch, it should have been handled better.
* fyi, your profile is set to private, so I can't comment on it. A vestige of you having had a previous Wordnik account, I think, back when all profiles were private.
Wordie tags are back. There are a few issues still, the main one being that tags show up on your profile, but not always on the tag page itself. I'm working on that, and also on a dedicated tags page to be linked off our profiles.
Thanks for the understanding everyone, I appreciate it. We stumbled on the Wordie integration, which I regret. That aside, these new surroundings feel weird for me too. But all the Wordie stuff will come back online, and I still have faith that Wordnik+Wordie will be a good thing. I hope that will become more apparent once everything is working and we're moving forward again.
ruzuzu and marky, i removed 'recent lookups' from profiles. i'll add it back when it can be made optional and we're sure it's accurate.
we're working on getting wordie tags back and at fixing commenting on lists with special characters in the url. pro, that will hopefully make it possible to comment on 'knuckle tattoos', which is important to me, since i missed that first time around and want to say how much i love it.
also trying to get editing on list and profile comments working today.
Just added a 'List it' option to the choices in the 'Take this word and...' drop-down on every word page. Initially it had issues with multi-word phrases, but I think it's working now. Let me know if you have any issues.
whichbe, i'm looking into it, but i'm almost certain your tags, despite not being available, were moved over, and that we'll find them and give them back to you.
while wordie was being migrated we were also switching parts of the site to use a different method of accessing data, which involved a different database. so there were three db's involved: old wordie, old wordnik, and new wordnik. stuff that appears missing is there, but in the wrong database. they can and will be merged with no losses.
we really needed to change our underlying db; wordnik is outgrowing the old one. but in retrospect it might not have been such a hot idea to do these two major migrations concurrently.
· You can now edit your comments on words. Comments on profiles and lists can't be edited yet, but that'll come soon.
· Tony (Wordnik's VP of Engineering--he and our colleague Kumanan are real engineers, while I just make train noises and pretend) fixed the issue with most international characters in comments. The remaining broken characters (a small percentage) will most likely remain broken, an unfortunate side effect of my having been sloppy with Wordie's db in the early days.
· Until we have a past comments section that lets us page through all the comments, I increased the number shown on Zeitgeist.
It may take a little while to get back to feature parity with Wordie, but that's the plan, and then we'll keep going. Thanks again for your patience and bug reports, which are always welcome anywhere here, or to john@wordnik.com
Depends who you talk to actually, and it's hotly debated, but Wordknik, unlike Wordie, is case sensitive.
Eventually we hope to find a middle ground, where it's possible to distinguish between, say, polish and Polish, and turkey and Turkey, without the annoyance of having all the comments and definitions disappear because you typed in an initial cap.
Would have made my life easier marky, but then we would have had to figure out what to do with the 1.7 meellion words we have lying around. The whole "dictionary" thing, which can also be fun.
Hi Jubjub, that's what makes random word so addictive. Sometimes you get on a hot streak, then you loose it all with a string of Goolges.
Wordnik is omnivorous, it collects the good, the bad, and the ugly without judgment. Random has some filters to weed out the pure drek, but not many--maybe we should dial that up?
I'll save my sincere apologies and a longer explanation for when the fires are out, but for now a status report:
· Adding words to lists is fixed
· Newlines in comments will be fixed soon
· Editing comments will be available soon--hopefully tonight, maybe tomorrow
· I'll make the display of 'recently looked up' optional as soon as possible, probably 1-3 days. That was an oversight from the profile merger: that originated on Wordnik, where it didn't matter because the site didn't used to have public profiles.
· I'll add 'list it' to the options in the 'Take this word and...' drop-down
· I'll go through everything here and hit as many other items as I can.
Hi pro, thank you. The character issue on existing comments is being fixed as I type, and should be up today. I'll try and fix the forwards from Wordie on lists with unicode characters soon--hopefully by tonight or tomorrow.
Hi rolig, this is a fine place to leave comments. The list of lists in the sidebar is being truncated, I'll fix that today. Thanks much for pointing that out.
A million apologies for the character encoding issues on imported comments. That's being fixed right now, as well as comment editing and some display issues. I think I may be saying this a lot in the next few days, but please be a little patient. We'll have everything back to normal as soon as possible.
Sionnach, your lists are back—there was a bug on the lists page.
I worked hard, and will keep working, to make things fit together sensibly, but some restructuring was necessary to combine the two sites.
I feel horribly that this transition has been bumpier than I'd hoped, but I'm working as quickly as possible to smooth rough edges, fix bugs, and add back all the Wordie functionality. I'm very sorry for the headaches, but please bear with this for just a little longer.
Hi rolig, wanted to apologize for the character encoding issues that have appeared on some of your lists. It's my doing--the Wordie database was kind of a mess after a few years not always careful noodling. We did the best we could moving things over, but some characters got a bit mangled.
“FOR nearly three decades, I’ve felt conflicted about presidential salutes. After all, my United States Marine Corps instructors drilled into me the idea that “you never salute without a cover�? which, in civilian, meant without a hat.�?
hi all. mollusque, as of now you'd have to drop the case you don't want and add another, and if you were moving from lower to uppercase, it would mean not seeing the comments on the lowercase version. which is clearly not the desired behavior in most cases. once wordie is in and we work out any kinks, dealing sensibly with case sensitivity is high on our to-do list.
speaking of integration, it's going to happen next week :-) there might be a brief period (an hour?) during which both sites will redirect to a maintenance page, after which requests to wordie will be redirected to the equivalent page on wordnik. all our accounts and lists and words will get moved over en masse. and when there are username conflicts (happily, there are fewer of those than i expected), we'll have a process in place for working them out.
the plan is that within a week or so of the migration all wordie features will be fully available on wordnik. but immediately after the migration, a few minor features will be temporarily unavailable. i'll post details soon, but they'll include collaborative lists (existing ones will work, but you won't be able to create new ones) and email notifications.
pretty much the entire wordie homepage is going to get stuffed into zeitgeist, though there are a few items on it that won't be available immediately. again, in a week or two anything that didn't make the first pass will get moved over.
we're trying hard to make this as seemless as possible. and once the transition is complete, i think you'll see fewer bugs, better performance, and we'll have all this dictionary shit to enjoy or crack wise about. as always, please post here or email me if you have any questions or suggestions.
Soldiers in the Civil War suffered from irritability, disturbed sleep, shortness of breath and depression, a syndrome Jacob Mendes Da Costa, an Army surgeon, described in 1871 as “irritable heart.”
The New York Times, When Soldiers Snap, by Erica Goode, November 7, 2009
“In those days, he called himself a “harmless little fuzzball.�? He’s a lot less harmless now. I went on to columny, as my pal Bill Safire called it, and Rush went on to calumny.�?
“I had a four-hour dinner once with Rush Limbaugh at the “21�? Club in Manhattan, back in the days when I was still writing profiles as a “reporterette,�? to use a Limbaugh coinage.�?
There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?�?
Hi folks, so sorry about the plugged up front page. I'll try to roto-route it tonight or tomorrow. I'm in a mad dash to build nuevo Wordie right now, which will be launched in a few weeks, so it's kind of hard to spend time on ancien Wordie. But a semi-refreshing front page is totally annoying to me too.
Speaking of Wordie++, it's coming along handsomely I think, and will feel very, very much like this one—but faster, and with less bugs :-)
“Like the bill that will probably emerge from Congress, the Massachusetts reform mainly relies on a combination of regulation and subsidies to chivy a mostly private system into providing near-universal coverage.�?
Been gone a while, eh _mark? As you can see over on advertising, Wordie has had ads for almost two years. They originally ran only on Tuesdays, but I got sick of subsidizing all the costs (at no point have the ads ever fully covered even the hosting costs). I mean, it's always been a labor of love, but throw me a bone.
Thanks gangerh, I agree—that page is more or less a stub right now. In the near future we'll add more data to it, and try to make it more easily scannable. Any suggestions? Are vertical lists better?
Thanks a million for those bug reports—I'll fix the line breaks, the word linking, and the use of html in comments.
Super glad people are checking out Wordnik, but of course it's totally kosher, and maybe for the best, to keep on using Wordie for things social until we move over. With a little time to rasp away the rough edges, things should Just Work when that happens.
Hi Pro, saw your comment on Wordnik. Wordie material hasn't yet moved over there, so for now I think it makes sense to just carry on wherever you want--for most of us here that means Wordie, I imagine. I don't think merging of comments and threads will cause much if any disruption at all when it happens.
So the Wordnik redesign is up. I think I love it, but honestly I've been staring at it so long I'm not sure. But I definitely tried hard to make it a suitable landing pad for when we move house—it should take only a little poking around to see I plagiarized Wordie more than a few times. And with this in place it'll be easier to make minor tweaks more or less on the fly, so we'll continue noodling with it up until the point Wordie is integrated, with the goal of making that seamless and pleasant.
Something else you may notice about nuevo Wordnik is that it's ripping fast, despite having hugely more data than it had even a few months ago (and ludicrously more than Wordie). There have been many pretty rad engineering changes under the hood with this update, thanks to my colleagues Tony and Kumanan.
As always, please let me know if anything is broken, or if you have suggestions, questions, or criticism.
“For centuries, allegations and disputes involving children, marriage and business have been decided by rabbinical courts called beth dins, which conduct their own inquiries and do not report their findings to the secular authorities, even when they judge someone guilty of a crime.�?
“Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who refer to themselves as the “haredim,�? meaning those who fear God, reject modern secular culture and for centuries have kept strict control over what they consider internal affairs.�?
“The issue has brought together younger folks who are more pro-environment and very older folks who remember a time before clotheslines became synonymous with being too poor to afford a dryer,�? said a Democratic lawmaker from Virginia, State Senator Linda T. Puller, who introduced a bill last session that would prohibit community associations in the state from restricting the use of “wind energy drying devices�? — i.e., clotheslines.
Hey sionnach, guess that makes you a digital native :-P When I worked at Woods Hole there were 10,000 ancient Hollerith cards lying around the computer department. If I had to program with those things I'd be a poet right now. Ok fine, a poetaster. But definitely not a programmer.
Harking back to my XO laptop comment from two years ago, a friend got one, and turns out they're totally useless. Cute as they are, they're just too underpowered to do anything useful.
“The clothing also pushed boundaries, in particular how soft fabrics like chiffon look molded on the torso. Prints and jacquards, evoking oceans and species like moths, were engineered for each garment.”
hernesheir, I like that! Whichbe has a great list called Underwaterritory, but that's more about diving than fishing. And she has a great one too, Fishful thinking, but again that's more general fishiness than fishing itself. Tally ho, I say!
In the spirit of RFCs, this is the place for Requests For Lists. Some people have an hankering to make lists. Other people really want a list on a certain topic, or contributions to their public lists. Here is where the twain shall meet.
I'll kick it off: I'd really appreciate contributions to Down on the Farm, my just-created list of farm and agriculture-related words.
“I don’t believe that public opinion is spontaneously supporting Mr. Polanski at all,�? she said. “I believe that there is a distinction between the mediagenic class of artists and ordinary citizens that have a vision that is more simple.�?
“It empties its perennially clogged streets of ojeks, the kamikaze-like motorcycle taxis that weave in and out of traffic, and find shortcuts on sidewalks.�?
Ah, mollusque, that is an idea near to the hearts of a few of us. It's a bit down the road and for performance and feasibility reasons will be something closer to facetted search than wide-open database access. But something along those lines is planned.
Seems like comments is in the lead, possibly categorizable. Thanks.
To Pro's question, and something I was going to mention today: it would be a good idea to register for Wordnik using the same email address and username you used when registering for Wordie--that will make things easier all around when the sites are merged. We'll have a system in place for handling conflicts, and will try to make it as equitable and simple as possible.
Telofy: we're working on a redesign for a combined Wordie/Wordnik site. The html/css will be more semantic, with few to no embedded styles. And fonts will be sized with em's or some other scalable unit, so people can more easily size them as they wish.
PU, can you email me (john@wordie.org) the names of the lists, and I'll look for them directly? Very sorry you're they've gone missing, but I feel pretty confident they still exist and haven't been permanently lost. Will look into it as soon as I have their names and verify they're still in the db.
Hey folks, question for you. Comments on Wordie were originally called 'citations,' because I thought that's what the feature would be used for. As we got more social the labeling slowing migrated towards 'comments.'
The Wordnik equivalent is 'Notes.' As it stands it's not clear if a note is public or is a communication between you and Wordnik (they're public), and the word itself has too many related but different meanings: endnotes, footnotes, private notes, etc. The whole feature is being overhauled to be more clear, including the labeling.
So the question is, when Wordie and Wordnik are merged, what do we call them? My inclination is 'comments,' but if anyone thinks otherwise, I'd love to hear it.
A quick status update on the whole shebang: kad, spawn (hat tip c_b :-) and I landed in CA last week. I'm in the midst of helping redesign Wordnik, which should hopefully be completed sometime in October. It'll be a big improvement over the current site, and will incorporate many of the ideas expressed here. That will pave the way for Wordie integration, which will happen some time not too long after the redesign launches (actual date TBD). As always, please email me comments, concerns, and suggestions.
“For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city. They collected the trash, sold the recyclables and fed the organic waste to their pigs — which they then slaughtered and ate.�?
Oh Waffle House, how I love thee! Best thing about the South. Here I am in front of one, in February 2002. That's from four cross-country road trips ago (I move too much).
The little white Honda, aka The Lemming, sure was a trooper.
Right on c_b, I agree on all accounts--I like the sound and feel of this word, and I love its association with direct democracy and Paine in particular.
A certain right-wing demagogue has tarnished the name of one of Paine's best-known pamphlets, Common Sense by appropriating it as the title of one of his own books, which is annoying, but also amusing. He must not have read The Age of Reason, a full-throated attack on organized religion and not the kind of thing most American conservatives want to be associated with.
Thomas Paine died in New York City, in the West Village, around the corner from where I used to live—there's a plaque on the building in which he died.
Still on the road (hellloooo Indianapolis!) and won't be regularly online for a few more days, but wanted to pipe in about the dashboard page ideas before sacking out.
I should have phrased it better, but there aren't any plans right now for anything in the way of 'daily me'-style customization. I was thinking of a 'zeitgeist' page that would be the same for everyone. Similar to the current Wordie homepage, but also including snapshots of what people are doing with the Wordnik data--words being looked up and favorited, pronunciations added, etc. It would be in the spirit of 'Wordie' tab, but it wouldn't be called that, and it would have more and more kinds of info on it. I think it would be a disservice to both sites if Wordie was just sort of glued onto the side of Wordnik. I think there will be sections that are very clearly derived from Wordie (list pages being the most obvious), but others where a careful integration makes more sense. A 'Zeitgeist'* page is one of those--if the idea is to be awash in recent activity, might as well dive into a deeper river that includes material from both current sites.
The reason I think this should be on its own page, and not the homepage, is that to someone new to the site, a wall of stats and comments is impenetrable and intimidating. With Wordie I didn't really care about that, despite the fact that the vast majority of visits weren't from regulars, because I built it strictly for our entertainment :-) But Wordnik is both entertainment and a utility. So rather than try to square that circle on one page, it seemed a better idea to have two pages tailored to different purposes and audiences. The homepage might have a subset of recent additions, but not the full firehose.
As telofy intimated, this could be done by changing the state of the homepage when you're logged in. But right now my inclination is to keep it simple and just separate them.
* totally stole that page title from Librarything**
** as i did these little sotto voce footnote asides. thanks tim!
Hi all, sorry I've been a bit absent, just packed up our house and sent it off in a truck. We're driving cross-country right now and taking a few extra days to visit family, who conveniently live in a straight line between Pittsburgh and Chicago.
I'm cataloging and trying to absorb all this good stuff, and enjoying, as always, the digressions. A little surprised no cupcakes have been flung.
One question: yarb & c_b, would you mind if the comments and perpetually moving snapshot did have its own page, but it wasn't necessarily the homepage? Think Librarything's 'zeitgeist,' or the way Twitter and Facebook don't really have homepages when you're logged in. When was the last time you looked at Wikipedia's homepage? I'm wondering if the 'official' homepage could be a basic intro to new folks and a jumping-off point for searches, and regulars could use a different page as their home base?
Ptero: thank you, and extremely involved! All suggestions will be listened to and seriously considered, and many implemented, I hope. Though since I'm no longer a one man band I have to retire my standard excuse for non-implementation (lack of time and competence) and start using a new one: Erin* won't let me :-)
Totally kidding. Actually when Erin (McKean, CEO of Wordnik and my new boss) saw that people were concerned that Wordnik was too serious for the likes of us, she laughed and laughed. Then paused, possibly horked a little, and laughed some more. Wordnik does some serious shit. The corpus is enormous, growing rapidly, and a feat of engineering. But it's not meant to be a mausoleum for words—more like a theme park.
* Until now I had totally forgotten about that Errata post from two years ago, but I clearly wanted Wordie to join Wordnik before Wordnik even existed. How weird.
Thanks everyone :-) I think things will work out Pro--in part because the Wordnik community is still nascent. Erin and co. are hoping we *become* the Wordnik community, schoolyard antics and all. Milosrdenstvi is right--14,000 people have signed up for Wordie, give or take a few bots, but it is what it is because of the spirit of a few score of us. I really hope and believe we can transplant that.
Moll, Wordnik is case sensitive--we'll finally be able to talk about turkey and Turkey without confusion. Wordnik has some heavy duty engineering talent, which is going to enable a growing number of very cool things. One existing example: Wordnik's autocomplete, which is awesome. As opposed to mine, which was so useless it verged on being another form of 'random word.'
I totally understand trepidation. I have it too--I very much hope that my favorite Wordies stick around, and that Wordie+Wordnik works for the people who've contributed so much. So I am going to plead with you all to hang in there at least until we see how it goes. And to tell me what would make it work for you--I'll reiterate my promise to listen to everything everyone says and take it to heart.
VO: A redesign of Wordnik is imminent and in my purview. One current thought is that there might not be as many, or any, sub-pages, except for a talk page--the Wordie page. Sort of like Wikipedia--one data page (better organized and easier to use than the current series of Wordnik data pages), and one discussion page (hopefully funnier and less contentious than Wikipedia's). Which would help the talk pages stay a little cleaner and more Wordie-esque than the data-intense pages (though I think data density can be a great thing when it's well-organized).
This is for word pages--I'm imagining lists will pretty much remain as-is functionally, though they'll wear Wordnik's upcoming new design. Though we (I have to admit, it's fun being more than just a royal we :-) are totally open to ideas.
Should have mentioned this in the blog post too: Wordnik is officially adding madeupical to the corpus. A sort of bring-the-new-neighbors-brownies kind of gesture :-)
“There aren't many individuals in history whose names are taken in vain more than Capt. C.C. Boycott, the notorious Irish landlord who cut the wages of his tenant farmers and got himself ostracized -- and the English language enriched -- in return.�?
The Los Angeles Times, , by Michael Hiltzik, August 31, 2009
“He’s a regular guy or as close to regular as any 35-year-old can possibly be who sleeps under a poster of his favorite football star while tucked under a coverlet imprinted with the names of N.F.L. teams.�?
Yeah, the script is beautiful. If and when you slow down on the list, would you mind tagging the whole thing 'georgian,' for the record? You can use the 'add tags' link below the title of any of your own lists to tag all the words in a given list in one fell swoop.
“Each team fields five players at a time. Out of those five players, four are blockers and one is the jammer (point scorer). The four blockers from each team line up together and form a pack, while the two jammers line up 30 feet behind.�?
“The skater wearing the star on her helmet is the jammer. The skater wearing the stripe on her helmet is called the PIVOT. The pivot is the pack leader and defensive play caller, similar to football's middle linebacker position.�?
“The objectives of roller derby are relatively simple. Each team fields a single point scoring skater ("Jammer") whose object is to lap as many opposing skaters as they can.�?
“Stress may be most readily associated with the attosecond pace of postindustrial society, but the body’s stress response is one of our oldest possessions.�?
“And though perseverance can be an admirable trait and is essential for all success in life, when taken too far it becomes perseveration — uncontrollable repetition — or simple perversity.�?
“Returning to his home state of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil, Otto quickly became a part of the mangue bit movement, which fused home-grown rhythms like the maracatu, frevo and ciranda with the latest in imported computer and studio technology.�?
Before it became a bad word, “boondoggle�? was an innocent, humble craft. It was the Boy Scouts of America who claimed credit for coining the word, to refer to the plaited leather lanyards that they made and wore around their necks.
That all changed on April 3, 1935, at a hearing in New York City on how New Deal relief money was being spent. A Brooklyn crafts teacher reluctantly testified that he was paid to show the jobless how to make “boon doggles.�? The outcry was swift. “$3,187,000 Relief is Spent to Teach Jobless to Play,�? trumpeted a front-page headline the next day in The New York Times. “ ‘Boon Doggles’ Made.�?
“Carlo Marioni, 65, a New York bartender with more than 40 years’ experience who now works at Pietro’s, agreed: “Those years, for lunch, they used to drink three martinis. Then they’d come back before dinner for rusty nails, white spiders.�?
In response to some of VanishedOne's comments on Ruby on Rails, the new browse links on the homepage now also let you see words and phrases that start with punctuation.
This is a work on progress, as tends to be the case with things I start on the train ride home and deploy the same night.
From now I'll put this New Jersey Transit logo on quick-and-dirty train work: .
This is not a commentary on NJTransit, which generally does a fine job, and which Wordie owes much.
“The "nillies" seems to lack the correct ring, while the "double-o"s is bound to be the intellectual property of Ian Fleming's estate.
Reggie Kray might favour the 'noughties' The "noughties" could be the one to head the - admittedly sorry - list of contenders.
And yet the "noughties" still sounds like a word East End villains might use to describe imprisonable activities - or even worse a polite, middle-class code for the reproductive organs.�?
Yeah, that would be me. I just added a 'browse' section to the right column of the home page, which presents every word and phrase on Wordie listed in alphabetical order. Briefly borked things when I moved it into production.
All better now. Let me know if there's anything I can do to improve that 'browse' business. It's partly for the machines amongst us, but I found it a lot of fun to poke through.
“Dalton is the editor of “Mythtym,�? a new anthology of essays, fiction and artwork -- both serious and campy -- about werewolves, unicorns and what she calls “mirror horror.�? As she explains: “If you watch enough of those movies, they’re all exactly the same. These splattercore movies have their own tropes -- like how the best way to show blood is to cut someone up in the shower so you see it on the tiles. But then you realize that these clichés are based on archetypes. The mirror as a symbol seems most powerful in a time of fear, when people step back and look at themselves.�?
“For instance, a lot of the things that high-minded left-wingers hate about contemporary Washington — the legal corruption, if you will, associated with lobbying and influence peddling and corporate money — are a direct result of having built a big, expensive government that every would-be macher in the world feels they need to influence.�?
I think so. This was in Portland, Maine, in the mid-nineties. The cool racer guys were often as not from other shops; we were more like the scrappy punk rock (the staff) and family (the customers) shop. We were the only proper bike shop in town selling tricycles, I think. I moved, sadly, but they're still there: Back Bay Bicycle. Stop in if you're in Portland, they're super nice.
In my misbegotten youth I was a bicycle mechanic, and the cool racer types who hung around the shop where I worked would dismissively refer to non-cool-racer types as "Freds." Freds are the kind of cyclists who don't ride much, but are over-geared. They have little rear-view mirrors glued onto their helmets, and a spare tire and a pump and two water bottles and a little toolkit and an altimeter strapped or bolted onto different parts of their bike frame. Freds have kickstands and fenders and a rack and a bell. They have a little basket on their handlebars. They both tuck their pant legs into their socks and wear a reflective strap on each ankle to prevent getting chain grease on their trousers. And most of all, Freds are squirrely: they have trouble riding in a straight line, possibly because of all the appurtenances affixed to their bike and their person. So you don't want to ride too close to a Fred, because they're unpredictable and despite their harmless appearance, inadvertently dangerous.
“Was Manson's dress rehearsal for homicide, known as "creepy crawling", some kind of humorous terrorism that might have been fun? Breaking silently into middle-class "pigs'" homes with your friends while you are tripping on LSD and gathering around the sleeping residents in their beds, not to harm them but to watch them sleep (the way Warhol did in that movie) and "experiencing the fear"? It does sound like it could have been a mind-bending adventure. When the Mansonites went further and moved the furniture around before they left, just to fuck with the waking homeowners' perception of reality, was this beautiful or evil? Could the Manson Family's actions also be some kind of freakish "art"?�?
Just rescued this from the orphanage, so someone besides myself originally entered it. Can't find much on it anywhere, except for this blog post, which defines it as "the essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity of a thing."
Fine word, somewhat mysterious. Anyone know any more about it?
Thanks much for the reports--I've been fiddling about again, if you hadn't guessed :-) It's for the best in the long run, but sorry for the recent collateral damage.
Profiles should be fixed (sorry for disappearing you skipvia), the duplicate derelict has been evicted, and the comment page profiles are properly possessive.
Treeseed, private notes were broken when you reported that, but they should be fixed now. If that's not the case for you would you mind emailing me, and letting me know what browser you're using?
Sionnach, I still have no idea what's causing your duplicates (I can't duplicate the bug). I may email you, if you don't mind, and ask for specifics to help me debug. I'm really sorry about that--I very much don't want a bug to drive away a favorite Wordie, but I can see how it would be maddening.
“She and the group of mothers she helps organize have become the only bulwark, it seems, against the irrepressible spread of paco, a highly addictive, smokable cocaine residue that has destroyed thousands of lives in Argentina and caused a cycle of drug-induced street violence never seen before in this country.�?
Oh bring it on—I love this line of attack. The longer the idiotocracy running the Republican party persists in this retrograde nonsense, the longer they'll stumble around in the wilderness losing elections. Morality aside, the demographics are just against them. America is a diverse place and getting more so, and tactics that intentionally alienate everyone but the ever-shrinking rump Republican base guarantee failure.
They'll figure this out eventually and try to start appealing to a wider audience. But if they get thrashed for a few more election cycles before that happens, I wouldn't mind. Palin in 2112!
Don't be vague like that, lg_nazi. Have the courage of your convictions. What, exactly, is Obama trying to sell? What groups is he disproportionately favoring?
The group that has most benefitted from his policies has certainly been the bankers he bailed out. So if you're talking about rich white people, I agree with you entirely.
Glenn Beck is a douche-cock. That said, there's a very popular web site dedicated to answering skipvia's very question. To me, it's embodied by the Volvo 240 station wagon.
“The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo�? type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.�?
Can't believe this hadn't been listed yet. It refers to the prime starting position in horse and car racing: at the front of the pack, on the inside. It's also the name of a great (for its time) arcade video game of the early 80s.
Anyone know of any good motor sports or automotive or racing lists?
“Frigor�? is one of the names given by 19th-century scientists to the realm of absolute zero, the bottom limit of cold. This is a place, the chemist and physicist James Dewar imagined, so cold that molecular motion ceases and the “death of matter�? ensues.
The New York Times, Less Than Zero, by Mary Roach, July 23, 2009
“McGinley and Colen met Snow when they were in art school (at Parsons and RISD, respectively) and Snow was 16 and living on 13th Street in Alphabet City and starting a graffiti crew called Irak (in graffiti slang, to “rak�? is to steal, which they did) with a guy named Ace Boon Kunle, “a big, black homosexual,�? as McGinley describes him, whose tag is Earsnot.�?
New York Magazine, Chasing Dash Snow, by Ariel Levy, January 7, 2007
“Being an astronomy buff used to be a lonely pursuit, just you and the telescope, staring up into the night sky. But in an age when anyone can make a planetary discovery through a $400 telescope then instantly share it with the world — hey, check out my cool Jupiter shots on Flickr! — amateur astronomers have capitalized on opportunities like the big thud on the Jovian gas giant to confirm that they are not alone.�?
“Fujifilm says its $280 FinePix F70EXR and $600 FinePix S200EXR use its advanced EXR sensor and multiframe technology to enable users to simulate the wide-aperture background blurs (or bokeh) of D.S.L.R. cameras.�?
“Have the 1990s vanished so quickly from memory? Has Hillary Clinton’s murder of Vince Foster, shooting him in the head with a lesbian bullet, been so completely forgotten?�?
Whiskey Fire, Regions of My Disease, by Marc Ambinder, July 22, 2009, as quoted in The New York Times, ‘Birther’ Boom, by Eric Etheridge, July 22, 2009
“The Baron clanked in on his pointy silver-capped cowboy boots and began poking around, asking questions about the Southern Mexican cuisine on the menu — What was the difference between a cemita and a torta? Do they ever cook with chumiles, a tiny, fragrant insect sometimes used in salsa? — while Ms. Mata got busy at the stove.�?
“The Japanese have a name for their problem: Galápagos syndrome.
Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins — explains Takeshi Natsuno, who teaches at Tokyo’s Keio University.�?
“Lena was farmed out fairly frequently and had to endure occasional racist slurs, beatings for minor infractions and schoolgirl mockery: she was called “little yellow bastard�? because of her supposedly “white daddy.�? At age 16, to the disapproval of some family members, she became a chorine at the celebrated Cotton Club, where Ethel Waters singing “Stormy Weather�? had a lasting effect on her.�?
“Assassination is a word that still haunts the C.I.A. The most lurid of the volumes produced by the Senate committee headed by Frank Church of Idaho in the mid-1970s detailed the C.I.A.’s plots to kill foreign political figures, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. Such intrigues were overseen by the agency’s so-called Health Alteration Committee, which once O.K.’d the dispatch of a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief to a left-leaning Iraqi colonel.�?
Hi briwref! Thanks for all the collective nouns--I love "A darth of cheneys" :-)
The ones you added as comments to a shrink of violets, would you mind adding them to the list itself? It's growing to be quite a fantastic open list, your additions would be most welcome there.
“In the lexicon of Santeria, “aché�? is the term applied to the life force, or to vital energy and good vibes. That word turns up in Caridad De La Luz’s new Off Broadway production, “Boogie Rican Blvd., the Musical,�? but in a larger sense Ms. De La Luz herself seems to embody and be guided by those qualities, both onstage and off.�?
“In 1952, the first presidential year in which television outshined radio, Mr. Cronkite was chosen to lead the coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. By Mr. Cronkite’s account, it was then that the term “anchor�? was first used — by Sig Mickelson, the first director of television news for CBS, who had likened the chief announcer’s job to an anchor that holds a boat in place. Paul Levitan, another CBS executive, and Don Hewitt, then a young producer, have also been credited with the phrase.�?
“Along with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Mr. Cronkite was among the first celebrity anchormen. In 1995, 14 years after he retired from the “CBS Evening News,�? a TV Guide poll ranked him No. 1 in seven of eight categories for measuring television journalists. (He professed incomprehension that Maria Shriver beat him out in the eighth category, attractiveness.) He was so widely known that in Sweden anchormen were once called Cronkiters.�?
“A highly contagious fungus that destroys tomato plants has quickly spread to nearly every state in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, and the weather over the next week may determine whether the outbreak abates or whether tomato crops are ruined, according to federal and state agriculture officials.
The spores of the fungus, called late blight, are often present in the soil, and small outbreaks are not uncommon in August and September. But the cool, wet weather in June and the aggressively infectious nature of the pathogen have combined to produce what Martin A. Draper, a senior plant pathologist at the United States Department of Agriculture, described as an “explosive” rate of infection.”
Hi EscapeMN, thanks for the words and the definition. A bit of guidance, if you don't mind: if you add those two words (epiplexis and epiplectic) to the list by putting them in the 'add word' form and hitting 'add', they'll be put into Wordie in a way that lets you see who else has listed those words, and it will let other people add them to their lists. That also creates a unique page for the word, and lets you add comments and definitions to the word page itself.
Ga, Sionnach, I somehow missed your bug report a few weeks ago about all the duplicates. I'll look into that ASAP, which unfortunately probably means this coming weekend. Last thing in the world I want is to diminish Wordie's appeal to you :-)
I was dubious that the anus could be considered a gland, but apparently in hyenas and dogs there is indeed an anal gland. Which sometimes requires grooming. Yuck.
“The club is “a place to see and be seen,” as its Web site says — that is, unless you are a visiting president who after a day and a half of blinis, beluga and bilats (the diplo term for “bilateral meetings”) just wants to hang out with the clan.”
“Outside the hall where the Naz Foundation news conference was held, dozens of young men and women gathered to celebrate, along with a group of hijras, men who dress and act like women who classify themselves as belonging to neither gender.”
Doesn't mentos have some meaning in Greek, in addition to being a breath mint? But this just struck me as a nice bit of freely-associated doggerel. And I love the phrase "copy-off." And I love that the list it's on is called "Jejuju"--I have no idea what that means, either, and Gooble isn't helping.
“Unlike his father, a volatile and uneven performer, Mr. Khan maintained an austere demeanor onstage while coaxing passages of extraordinary intensity from his sarod, an instrument with 25 strings, 10 plucked with a piece of coconut shell while the remainder resonate sympathetically.”
U, can't believe I missed this list first time around. I have a love-hate (ok, mostly hate) relationship with the words on it, but I love the list itself. And I really appreciate you putting into words, in the description, the inchoate discomfort this kind of language makes me feel, and your recognition that these are all of a piece. They're not just words, they epitomize a syndrome. I can live with rancor and bad spelling, but the cutesy superiority complex part is nauseating.
I'm very catholic in my appreciation of condiments. To paraphrase Will Rogers, I never met one I didn't like. There's a greasy burger place in the building where I work. I'm on the 2nd floor, and the kitchen is almost directly below my desk--I'm trying to convince them to install a dumbwaiter. When you order a cheeseburger, they always ask "ketchup, mustard, or mayo," to which I always answer, yes.
ps -- Can any further discussion about this take place over on advertising, please? Barbecue is a very nice word and I'd rather not pollute it with talk of base commerce.
I would give my left pinkie for a really good pulled pork sandwich right now. With pickles.
Arcadia, are you sure whatever pop-up you saw wasn't triggered by some other page? I use Google Adsense for ads, and the only kind of ads I have configured are the 250x250 jobbies you see in the upper right. I don't think Google even offers popups, and if they did I'd probably drop them all together. Which would really hit me where it hurts, since I average around $2.50 a day from them.
From dictionary.com: "A heavy rapier of the 17th century, having a swept guard with two perforated plates. Also called a Walloon sword. Named after Gottfried Heinrich, Graf zu Pappenheim (1594–1632), German leader in the Thirty Years' War"
Howdy, quick-draw mcgraw. I must say, this is one of the more unique off-label uses of Wordie. It's vaguely spammish, but after asking the ouija board, I'm gonna say it's not exactly spam, since you're not linking to anything promotional.
But... are you really going to send this to prospective employers?
“If we need to basically depend on the endowment, let’s increase the take rate,” Mr. Greenberg said, referring to the percentage of the endowment drawn down by the college every year.
“Still, Erin Fitzgerald, director of social and environmental consulting for Dairy Management, says the industry wants to avert the possibility that customers will equate dairies with, say, coal plants. It has started a “cow of the future” program, looking for ways to reduce total industry emissions by 25 percent by the end of the next decade.”
Funemployment. Paycation. The Unemploymentality. Every generation has an argot to describe the confusing terrain of joblessness — the dole, deadbeat dads, UB40, and so on — and the lexicon of younger casualties in the most severe American economic downturn since World War II speaks volumes.
Here's how the blog Recessionwire defines “funemployment”: “A period of joblessness that you actually enjoy — maybe you get to lay out, sleep in, work out, read up. It helps to have savings, severance, or an unemployment check to help pay the bills. We're hearing this word used more and more, especially as people realize they may not be able to find a new job right away, so they might as well try to enjoy the time off.”
“The Alexander merited a place of honor on Esquire’s list of “the pansies,” the worst drinks of the Prohibition era. These included long-forgotten abominations like the Sweetheart, the Fluffy Ruffles, the Pom Pom and the Cream Fizz.”
The New York Times, Bar? What Bar?, by William Grimes, June 2, 2009
Mr. Bigsby, the sympathetic biographer, does give a strong taste of Miller’s critics. More than a few saw his work as programmatic. Mary McCarthy, for one, wrote that “Death of a Salesman” was “enfeebled” by Miller’s “insistence on universality.”
“But some sociologists pointed out that African-American boys and men have been hugging as part of their greeting for decades, using the word “dap” to describe a ritual involving handshakes, slaps on the shoulders and, more recently, a hug, also sometimes called the gangsta hug among urban youth.”
“The prevalence of boys’ nonromantic hugging (especially of other boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that over the last generation, boys have become more comfortable expressing emotion, as embodied by the MTV show “Bromance,” which is now a widely used term for affection between straight male friends.”
Pro, I feel for you, and at the same time I'm envious. Having moved too many times, the very notion of being able to call anyone my people seems fantastic. It sounds like a gift you'll always have, wherever you live.
I spent 7 years in New York and know what an alienating place it can be, even if you love it. I hope you find some peace while you struggle with the tension between roots and opportunity.
The concept of ultrasmart computers — machines with “greater than human intelligence�? — was dubbed “The Singularity�? in a 1993 paper by the computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that the acceleration of technological progress had led to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.�?...
The science fiction author Ken MacLeod described the idea of the singularity as “the Rapture of the nerds.�?
Great Chomsky quote (something I don't think I've ever said before), also on the Wikipedia page sarra links to below:
"He asks why postmodernist intellectuals won't respond as "people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc? These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames.".
Alandriadenisewalker, I have no record of ever having received an email from the account you used to register for Wordie. If you have any questions or comments concerning Wordie that you'd rather send to me directly rather than through the site, please do, my contact info is on the about page.
Nice! From the link below: "A collection of award icons, banners, webrings and ads that clutter the bottom or top of a Web page. Like a race car covered in ads, they blur and become meaningless."
From an episode of Arrested Development: “Lucille always has trouble sleeping this time of year because she gets excited before Motherboy, a dinner dance aimed at promoting mother/son bonding.�?
“Grass-roots, antipirate militias are forming. Sheiks and government leaders are embarking on a campaign to excommunicate the pirates, telling them to get out of town and preaching at mosques for women not to marry these un-Islamic, thieving “burcad badeed,�? which in Somali translates as sea bandit.�?
“PARK(ing) Day is an annual, one-day, global event where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spots into “PARK(ing)�? spaces: temporary public parks.�?
“Gardnerella Vaginalis is an infection of the female genital tract by bacteria of the Gardnerella vaginalis strain, often in combination with various anaerobic bacteria. Also called bacterial vaginosis.�?
“One White House insider described Mr. LaHood as “a master of odd jobs,�? whose knowledge of Washington allows him to take on assignments as varied as lobbying lawmakers on the budget and helping political novices in the cabinet navigate Beltway social rituals (“cocktail situations,�? as Energy Secretary Steven Chu calls them).�?
Oh, I'm sorry, I don't mean to get my kickers in a twist--I hate to be a hater.
There's nothing wrong with the word per se. It's just that there was a period in the nineties when it was in heavy rotation with a certain type of person, pseudo intellectual kids from the Northeast U.S. who went to a certain set of schools, read (or pretended to have read) a certain set of books, who dressed disturbingly alike, and who repeated certain words and phrases with a knowing glance, like they were occult signifiers to be shared only between initiates. "Heteronormative" was one of those words, and it just left a bad taste in my mouth.
“The basis of this resistance lay in the village, and its distinct form of community: the jati. These groups, numbering in the thousands, were governed by strict rules of endogamy and by taboos about purity, and arranged a social hierarchy: varna. The precise ideological sources of this system are obscure, but elements may be traced to one of the very late hymns of the Rig Veda, which describes the dismemberment of the cosmic giant Purusha, the primeval male whose sacrifice created the world: 'When they divided the Man, into how many parts did they apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet?/ His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Warrior (kshatriya), his thighs the People (vaishiya), and from his feet the servants (shudra) were born.' The resulting intricate filigree of social interconnections and division -- a hierarchical order of peerless sophistication -- defies any simple account Perplexed Westerners came to describe it by the term 'caste', but a wide distance separates the deceptively well-defined doctrinal claims of the caste order and the actual operations of what is an essentially local, small-scale system.�?
“Many Paulistanos, as São Paulo residents are called, say the interminable stop-and-go traffic and the wide gap between haves and have-nots are recipes for assaults and carjackings, especially now that Brazil’s boom times have come to a halt.�?
I've heard too many pseudo-intellectual poseurs use this word to not dislike it--I buy the Valse hypothesis. All apologies to Rick Moody, but it has been ruined by semiotics majors from Brown, wearing clunky glasses and knit scarves and babbling about Derrida and reeking of smug.
So maybe it's not the word I dislike, but everyone I've ever met who has used it, up until now :-) Rolig, I very much appreciate your measured tone. You are Obama-like (Obamaesque? Obamian?) in your ability to speak dispassionately about topics that are sometimes combative or incendiary.
And knitandpurl, I agree it's useful to differentiate some of the trappings this word has acquired (pretention, smugness), from its original meaning, which certainly describes a real phenomenon.
“Ms. Lario’s latest criticism also comes in the context of speculation about a brewing power struggle between the children of Mr. Berlusconi’s first marriage, or “first bed,�? as the Italian phrase goes, and those of his second, with Ms. Lario, over his media and even political empire.�?
When I was in college in the late 80s and early 90s the term was LUG--Lesbian Until Graduation. I heard it from lesbian friends, talking about fears that they'd fall for someone who was only experimenting. I think it did say a lot about the people using it--it said they were scared of having their hearts broken. Like a lot of bitter words it was used to dispel or mask feelings of fear and vulnerability.
The norms in play, in my experience, were those of lesbians pissed off at breeders--a far nastier term in my book, though kind of funny in a perverse way.
“I’m going to turn over a new leaf, TROS, and make a conscious, conscientious effort to break myself of the bad habit of using the word “retard.�? But I don’t think the “retard jar�? is for me. Instead, I’m going to use a substitution for the word. From now on, instead of saying “retard�? or “that’s so retarded,�? I’m going to say “leotard�? and “that’s so leotarded.�? I won’t be mocking the mentally challenged, just the physically gifted. I will pick on the strong—and the limber—and not the weak.�?
“How many people does it take to change every light bulb in Grand Central Terminal?
Six, it turns out. And it’s a full-time job.
On Tuesday, those wiremen — their official title — unscrewed the last remaining incandescent bulbs in the building, replacing them with compact fluorescent bulbs and completing the greening of the lighting system at the bustling station.�?
“For the last two years, Bustelo has been a fixture at parties and giveaway suites from the Winter Music Conference to Sundance to the Oscars, and the company behind it has been sending truckloads of it to 50 Cent and Perez Hilton.
Whenever there is coolsploitation, however, there is potential trouble, and marketing experts say that Café Bustelo’s reboot will not be easy.�?
“The problem of refueling is so significant that fans of electric cars have a phrase for it: range anxiety, the nagging fear that you’ll run out of juice before you can find a charge spot and be stranded at the side of the road.�?
“In 2004, he coined the term “cosmetic neurology�? to describe the practice of using drugs developed for recognized medical conditions to strengthen ordinary cognition.�?
The New Yorker, Brain Gain, by Margaret Talbot, April 27, 2009
C_b, thanks for pointing that out, I dislike the disproportionate association of feminine and negative terms. Though anything associated with the privates has been pejoritized at some point or another.
I agree, the bread connotation is the best part. Revolting food connotations are great force multipliers. Like dick cheese.
Mike Skinner, aka "The Streets," who is awesome, mentions geezers in every third song. He uses the term in the yarbian sense, generally talking about un- or under-employed British guys in their 20s, whose major activities include smoking dope and playing Grand Theft Auto. From "Geezers Need Excitement:"
Best definition ever: “Twitter seems to be, first and foremost, an online haven where teenagers making drugs can telegraph secret code words to arrange gang fights and orgies. It also functions as a vehicle for teasing peers until they commit suicide.�?
Comments by john
Show previous 200 comments...
john commented on the word quiverings
I see the word quim, I always think of Eskimos, thanks to Bob Dylan.
March 31, 2010
john commented on the word cisgender
“I have, for some time, been referring to a particularly irritating brand of privileged semi-feminism as “Liz Lemonism.” I associate this brand of feminism with a certain variety of white, coastal-city dwelling, fairly well-to-do heterosexual cisgendered woman, a woman with a comfortable white-collar job that is so very comfortable and so very white-collar that she is free to spend her spare time yearning for, and semi-believing that she could attain, something with more “meaning.”
Tiger Beatdown, 13 Ways of Looking at Liz Lemon, by Sady, March 24, 2010
March 31, 2010
john commented on the word catatonic expressionism
From Thomas Pynchon's V. Involves cheese danish.
March 30, 2010
john commented on the word hysterical realism
I've always thought this should be related to catatonic expressionism.
I do like a lot of the authors pigionholed as hysterical realists (hystericists?), though.
March 29, 2010
john commented on the word hermit kingdom
“The Web reports have been especially eye-opening for South Koreans, providing a rare glimpse of the aptly named Hermit Kingdom untainted by their own government’s biases, whether the anti-Communists who present the North in the worst light or liberals who gloss over bad news for fear of jeopardizing chances at détente. ”
The New York Times, North Koreans Use Cellphones to Bare Secrets, by Choe Sang-Hun, March 28, 2010
March 29, 2010
john commented on the word hive vagina
“Although we’re not as bad as the San Franciscans, Sydneysiders (myself and Melissa) comprise a disproportionate slice of the Geek Feminist Hive Vagina.”
Geek Feminism, Meetup in Sydney, Australia, by Mary, March 25, 2010
March 27, 2010
john commented on the word fritiniency
The act of, or very efficient, fritinancing?
March 26, 2010
john commented on the user brtom
brtom, how nice to see you here again. Been a while :-)
March 25, 2010
john commented on the word miscreant
“This means ensuring that militants — or “miscreants,” as Pakistanis like to say — do not return to those areas that have been cleared in recent months.”
The New York Times, Pakistan’s War of Choice , by Michael O'Hanlon, March 23, 2010
March 25, 2010
john commented on the word dark cutter
“Her goal was to reduce stress and fear in the animals, as some studies have suggested that they harm the quality of meat and are factors in producing so-called dark cutters, cattle whose meat appears brownish or blackish and may be sticky to the touch.”
The New York Times, Beef From Creekstone Farms Impresses New York Chefs, by Glenn Collins, March 23, 2010
March 25, 2010
john commented on the word homosexuality
And is there dancing?
March 24, 2010
john commented on the word dishabille
“This coffee-table collection of industrial-therapeutic dishabille—70 abandoned asylums in 30 states, photographed over six years—is as gorgeous and meditative as it is harrowing.”
The Atlantic, Cover to Cover, by Lynne A. Isbell, April, 2010
March 24, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Other improvements launched this weekend include autoexpanding comment boxes and a basic mobile site. Try http://m.wordnik.com for a version of the site optimized for phones and other small-screen devices. Right now it lets you search words with definitions, and add words to your lists.
March 23, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi mollusque, yes, those are new, and a work in progress. But I thought they were interesting enough to push an early version out the door.
Our examples are in the process of being updated, and will be getting better over the next week or two. We don't always show everything we have--some examples are not displayed because of character encoding issues or bad punctuation parsing--which explains some of the discrepancies you see.
Upcoming versions of this will allow alphabetical sorting, among other improvements planned.
March 23, 2010
john commented on the word stanzo
Only when they're masculine.
March 23, 2010
john commented on the word flying robot sprayer
For crop dusting hard-to-reach houseplants, right?
March 23, 2010
john commented on the word homosexuality
Ha!
March 23, 2010
john commented on the word homosexuality
The Century Dictionary has some fantastic stuff in it, but it was published between 1889 and 1914, and as a result some of its material is archaic and offensive.
March 23, 2010
john commented on the word denialist
“At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.”
The New York Times, Texts Without Context, by Michiko Kakutani, March 17, 2010
March 21, 2010
john commented on the word bravura
“Angry nuns have been calling Congressman Bart Stupak’s office to complain about his dismissive comments on their bravura decision to make a literal Hail Mary pass, break with Catholic bishops and endorse the health care bill.”
The New York Times, Eraser Duty for Bart?, by Maureen Dowd, March 20, 2010
March 21, 2010
john commented on the word eigenclass
“I recalled seeing the discussion in which eigenclass was first proposed.
Here's the post by csaba on April 21, 2005:
<quote>
"Own class" is the best I've heard 'till now in terms of correctness,
it's just a bit "pale". I mean, when you say "I go there by my own
car", then the "own" doesn't refer to a special type of car, it just
refers to some relation of the car with other things. It refers to a
non-intrinsic thing. But if you say
"I go there by my batcar", that makes a difference. Such a thing is
what we need for ruby.
What about "eigenclass", like in eigenvalue?
</quote>>”
Ruby-Talk, Tom Werner, August 11, 2006
March 20, 2010
john commented on the word ʙ˟
Also: my ass, to the power of x.
I think pd is in the lead here :-)
March 20, 2010
john commented on the word jerkinhead
Love this word. And love that there's a single solitary Flickr image for it.
March 20, 2010
john commented on the user PossibleUnderscore
Hi pu, profile comments will go back to there full length soon, possibly tonight.
March 19, 2010
john commented on the word ɷ
I feel like I'm being mooned by a smurf.
March 19, 2010
john commented on the user agatehinge
Hi lcmt, re: the comments on reel, I thought you'd enjoy this story on the comment-box poets of the New York Times.
March 19, 2010
john commented on the word acri
Are you sure you don't mean acrid?
March 19, 2010
john commented on the word first cars
Excellent! Though I thought that as vehicles, lawn chairs were more traditionally tied to bunches of balloons.
March 18, 2010
john commented on the word first cars
Ok, so that's not me, but I really did have one of those when I was 16, which I bought for $400. You could fold down the roof, flip down the windshield, take off the doors, and remove all the seats--it was like driving a bedframe with a lawnmower engine strapped on. I loved that car. Drove it until big chunks of the exhaust system started falling off and it wouldn't pass inspection.
March 17, 2010
john commented on the word first cars
1970 VW Thing. The perfect car for a young jackass like myself, because it couldn't go over 50 mph. Here I am driving it.
March 17, 2010
john commented on the word first cars
I think I like this game. Should it be a list?
March 17, 2010
john commented on the list the-pogues
Forgot all about this list—I love it.
In '91 I saw them in Spain, with Joe Strummer singing. Pretty sure it was a great show.
March 16, 2010
john commented on the user seniorscribe
hey junior, we normally encourage people to promote other word sites here, but to come in and splash your url all over the place, while contributing nothing else, is not cool.
March 16, 2010
john commented on the user Prolagus
Hi pro, sorry for the delayed response. Profile links seem to be working now. Tomorrow I'll look into what happened with your decapitalization—it was an accident. We changed a bunch of the plumbing a few weeks ago, which went smoothly overall (nobody seemed to notice, the ideal response), but it caused that regression. And lastly, trying to figure out why the links are broken in multi-word tweets, will hopefully have a fix soon.
Thanks again for the input--I've been behind on correspondence, but I really appreciate it.
March 15, 2010
john commented on the word cloche
Right on ah. The cloche deserves its day, and it would be a better world if frat boys wore them.
I'm still trying to figure out who "they" are.
March 15, 2010
john commented on the word situacion
No—we're friends to all words.
March 14, 2010
john commented on the word harmonized
“Although his posts are sometimes “harmonized” — a popular euphemism for censorship —his blog, published by one of China’s most popular Web portals, has so far been allowed to continue.”
The New York Times, Heartthrob’s Blog Challenges China’s Leaders, by Andrew Jacobs, March 12, 2010
March 14, 2010
john commented on the word cutscene
Non-playable interstitial scenes in video games, used to break up the gameplay or advance the plot.
March 13, 2010
john commented on the user Telofy
Hi t, I believe there's a stats blog post in the works. Once I've read it I'll put a condensed explanation on the stats page itself.
Your en dash is on order—it should arrive from the foundry sometime tomorrow.
March 12, 2010
john commented on the word grammatication
Also, a vacation from the subjunctive.
March 11, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi marky (and any other developers out there), we just added a new API method to get thesaurus data such as synonyms, antonyms, and other nyms. More info on the API methods page—scroll down to the 'Fetching Related Words' section.
March 10, 2010
john commented on the word shrimpoluminescence
Ruzuzu, thanks for my new favorite word!
Looks like it's real. And there's video!
March 10, 2010
john commented on the user dontcry
Oh dontcry, I'm so very sorry.
Glad you got a brief respite. You're in my thoughts.
March 10, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Am corresponding separately with PU about this, but has anyone else experienced this since after the Wordie migration? I don't doubt that something is amiss, but I have tried and failed to find the source of the problem. If anything similar has happened to anyone else, any details you could provide (email john@wordnik.com) would be helpful.
March 9, 2010
john commented on the user PossibleUnderscore
pu, I'll email you again about the lists issue--it's very upsetting to me as well, I apologize and will try again to get to the bottom of it.
March 9, 2010
john commented on the word never put your banana in the refrigerator
Yes, we often freeze about-to-go bananas for later bread baking. Works a charm.
Though the best way to preserve bananas is to peel them, dip them in melted chocolate, pop them on a popsicle stick, and then freeze them.
March 9, 2010
john commented on the word reel
Just my personal opinion, but I don't mind the odd poem here and there. It's been done before.
As yarb says, it's easier to not set off the self-promotion sensors (and censors) if you contribute in other ways. But it looks like you're doing that.
Welcome to Wordnik!
March 9, 2010
john commented on the word cacography
Shitty handwriting
March 8, 2010
john commented on the word tractate
“An entire tractate, or volume, of the Talmud deals with the eruv.”
The New York Times, A Jewish Ritual Collides With Mother Nature, by Samuel G. Freedman, March 5, 2010
March 6, 2010
john commented on the word eruv
“Almost literally invisible even to observant Jews, the wire or string of an eruv, connected from pole to pole, allows the out-of-doors to be considered an extension of the home. Which means, under Judaic law, that one can carry things on the Sabbath, an act that is otherwise forbidden outside the house.”
The New York Times, A Jewish Ritual Collides With Mother Nature, by Samuel G. Freedman, March 5, 2010
March 6, 2010
john commented on the word Muffin top
See comments on muffin top.
March 5, 2010
john commented on the word prehab
“Charlie Sheen enters rehab as "preventative measure." Or as I call it, prehab.”
Gawker, GlasgowRose, February 23, 2010
March 5, 2010
john commented on the list oh--google--youre-so-droll
Oh my. Fun game, verging on nsfw. I just typed in "Why" and got completions including "can't I own a Canadian" and "do men have nipples."
Fair questions.
March 5, 2010
john commented on the user themeliscuiper
dude, you were *just* on the right side of the law, despite your username and profile, until you put a spam url in a comment. goodbye.
March 4, 2010
john commented on the user marrymemckean
And examples, too, are in the midst of being retooled--the weirdness you've noted lately should all be fixed when we release the next set of updates. Not exactly sure when that'll be, but hopefully by early next week.
March 3, 2010
john commented on the user marky
Tweaked the stylesheets--see my comment over on dontcry's profile. If you're not seeing it you might want to shift-reload, or restart your browser--you may have the old stylesheet cached.
March 2, 2010
john commented on the user dontcry
Yeah, was fiddling with the knobs earlier--links are now their default color for whatever browser you're using. Varies a bit, but it's generally blue, or purple if you've already been there. I thought it made the links seem linkier. It's also how things were back in Ye Olden Tymes. Let me know what you think--I like it, but I'm flexible.
March 2, 2010
john commented on the word circumscribe
Yep, the examples engine is in the shop for repairs. When it comes out, it'll drive like the General Lee.
Which makes Tony Cooter, I think.
March 2, 2010
john commented on the list if-christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned
Really great list. Wonder what those nutty Puritans called their kid for short--Ifchrist? Hadstbeen?
March 1, 2010
john commented on the word Canadiana
“Before 60,000 spectators who donned brown moose antler hats and pixilated the stadium with lights, Canada had fun with its ice-hockey loving, wildlife-hugging cliches in a revue of 'Canadiana.'”
The New York Times, Joking Canada Closes Games With Stadium Moose Stampede, from Reuters, March 1, 2010
March 1, 2010
john commented on the word butterfly
“Luongo employs the butterfly goaltending style, more fluid and nimble in the net.”
The New York Times, Live Analysis: Canada Beats the U.S. for Gold Medal, February 28, 2010
March 1, 2010
john commented on the list laguna-manialtepec
All that, this morning? What a fantastic way to start a day :-)
February 27, 2010
john commented on the word skip
“Let’s face it: if baseball and football were in the winter, nobody would be watching,” said Robert P. Kelly, the chief executive of Bank of New York Mellon, who took up curling when he was growing up in Canada. He is a former “skip” — the player who usually directs the strategy during a game —and dispenses curling tips to employees. ”
The New York Times, On Wall Street, a Romance With the Curling Stone, by Eric Dash, February 25, 2010
February 26, 2010
john commented on the word kizzle kazzle
“People at Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and even the Treasury Department have gone a bit curling crazy. Terms like “kizzle kazzle” — a curling stone that is wobbled to compensate for slush on the ice — have suddenly entered the Wall Street lexicon.”
The New York Times, On Wall Street, a Romance With the Curling Stone, by Eric Dash, February 25, 2010
February 26, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Speaking of deletion, I'm wondering if folks think that option should always be available, or only for a certain window in time. I'm thinking comments and pronunciations should be deletable by the person who added them for at least a certain period, maybe 24 hours. Beyond that though, it might be disruptive to conversations if people could disrupt the space-time coninuum willy-nilly*. Thoughts?
* though of course you can already do that by editing things. let's ignore that for the moment.
February 26, 2010
john commented on the user marrymemckean
Hi mmm, we're working on making both comments and pronunciations deletable by their creators, should be available in the coming few weeks. I always announce site updates over on feedback.
February 26, 2010
john commented on the word lief
I be lief this word is not used much anymore.
February 25, 2010
john commented on the list negasonic-teenage-warhead
Fantastic, thanks. I was way in to the X-Men in the 80's, until my head got turned by a girl, and the comics were shelved in her favor. Not a bad choice at the time, but I missed Negasonic's appearance.
I'm planning on spending my dotage catching up on decades of comic books and popcorn movies. Makes me positively eager to get old.
February 25, 2010
john commented on the list negasonic-teenage-warhead
Is the title of this list a reference, or three? I love it.
February 25, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Yeah, I had the same thought :-) How about when we add paging, we'll also add sorting? Will be fun to go through in both directions.
February 25, 2010
john commented on the word pageable
I wasn't sure, but Gooble's first result for it is this fugly thing, so I guess it must be.
February 25, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Move my response over to pageable.
February 25, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi folks, just added a 'comments' section to profile pages, at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar, which lets you see your last first* two hundred comments. In the near future we'll make that pageable, so you can go back through them all. Also, the list counts and the bug with 'appears in these lists' should both be fixed now.
Also wanted to let you know that we're working on a major update to how examples are selected, and once that's done, we'll start working on anti-spam measures. It's as annoying to us as to anyone--thanks for your forbearance.
*update: the new comments page is sorting upside down--sorry about that, will fix shortly. though it's kind of funny to see your earliest comments.
February 25, 2010
john commented on the word smartwords
Bilby, that's awesome*. I know, with the logo and whatnot there's a whiff of marketing about it. But having a mechanism to describe and connect words will allow for fun stuff. Like being able to connect words in ebooks to Wordnik** comments so that you can see comments on words while you read. Or being able to make your books aware of all the words you've ever listed, so you know whether or not to list things as you go. Open metadata formats have enabled lots of other good stuff, like blog feeds and podcasts. Creating one for words has potential too, I think.
Pro: forgot about that, and love it--thanks. Yes, maybe?
* Though snuffing moths isn't nice
** Or competing social logophile networks
February 25, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi p&m, looking into that bug tonight, will report back.
February 24, 2010
john commented on the word delio
Do you mean dealio? Urban Dictionary has that as a contraction of "deal" and "yo," as in "What's the deal, yo?"
Also a good song by Missy Elliot.
February 24, 2010
john commented on the user johnwoot
Hi jw, I like the citation on fulcrum. Any way you could provide a source?
Welcome to Wordnik!
February 23, 2010
john commented on the word pithiatic
What appears to be a related word, pythiatism, turns up in this image from 1918 of what looks like a medical journal or book on hysteria.
February 22, 2010
john commented on the user dorak
Hi dorak, welcome to Wordnik!
I can't find much on pithiatic, though this blog entry on 'Pythiatism' from 2004 has a quote from Sartre that includes what looks like a related word. A search on pythiatism turns up this image from 1918 of what looks like a medical journal or book on hysteria.
February 22, 2010
john commented on the user PossibleUnderscore
PU, would you mind sending me info about your recent list issues--names of the lists, anything else that might help me track them? The Wordie db was, ahem, a bit flaky, but anything created on this side of the fence should be in there. Give me someplace to start and I'll look in the db.
February 21, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi all, we just added a 'recent lists' section on Zeitgeist, to accompany 'recent open lists'. The new section includes a link to all past lists, or at least all the ones that contain words.
February 20, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
ga, sorry, some test data just snuck into the wrong database.
February 20, 2010
john commented on the user asarulislam
Hi asarulislam. Non-commercial links are allowed on Wordnik, though perhaps the best place for one would be in the 'more about' section of your profile. To edit your profile click on your username at the top-right of the page, then click 'Edit profile' next to your name. Links in comments often tend to be spam, and set off alarm bells.
One small suggestion: you might consider adding comments that are about words to the word itself, rather than to the list the word is in. For example, you can comment on Quaranocracy on the comments page for that word.
Welcome to Wordnik!
February 20, 2010
john commented on the word edutainment
What's the word for something that's totally boring, yet teaches you nothing?
February 19, 2010
john commented on the list reading-noam-chomsky-while-listening-to-the-ramones
The only word on this list I've ever seen before is mynah, but I love the title. Whither art thou, peacoat?
February 19, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi folks, just fixed a few small issues, and added back the comment feed for each word. There's no link for it on the word pages (yet), but if your browser supports feed autodiscovery (ie, you see a little feed icon in your location bar on some pages), you should see a feed in there for comments, with a url like this: http://www.wordnik.com/words/addax/comments.xml. I'll soon add back profile comment feeds as well.
Mollusque, I'd like to claim we're enabling Scrabble for cheaters, but I think that's a bug. On the list--thanks.
February 18, 2010
john commented on the user kaitman
Hi kaitman, comments can be for pretty much whatever you like, as long as it's polite. People use them to chat about words and language, or to leave citations, quotes, or usage notes on particular words.
Welcome to Wordnik :-)
February 18, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
thanks much rz, fixed the wikipedia link
February 17, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Sorry for the duplicate emails as well. That's fixed now too, I just confirmed with the previous comment :-)
February 16, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi folks, Tony just posted a fix for the 'listed in' bug pro found earlier, and I just nuked that round of 'just for fun' spammers. Sorry about the delay on that--most of Wordnik was out of the office today, entertaining our mothers-in-law.
February 16, 2010
john commented on the word telediol
“But belatedly, funerals and memorial services are taking place daily, and the traditional word-of-mouth network known as telediol has reawakened, delivering death notices.”
The New York Times, Haiti Emerges From Its Shock, and Tears Roll, by Deborah Sontag, February 14, 2010
February 15, 2010
john commented on the user jeniffer32xg
No idea. We're giving them the benefit of the doubt for the time being, but collecting the account names in case this is a trial run for a bout of spam. Jenifa oh jenny, are you for real?
February 15, 2010
john commented on the word does miley cyrus have a tattoo
This must be a sensitive topic—mollusque seems to have clammed up.
February 14, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Just fixed the login issue--you should stay logged in between visits now.
February 14, 2010
john commented on the user johntest
phi
February 14, 2010
john commented on the user tonytam
Is 'tenacious' really an onomatopoeia? Maybe depends how you pronounce it.
February 14, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Oops--I'll put that back later today. Last night we pushed a slew of rewritten code, and that fell off the cart.
February 14, 2010
john commented on the user mollusque
Kosher html is working again on comments, thanks for the nudge.
February 13, 2010
john commented on the user mollusque
Jaysus--fugly bug. Your edit confused me until I saw my response show up over here. That should be fixed now.
February 13, 2010
john commented on the user johntest
phu
February 13, 2010
john commented on the user john
et tu?
February 13, 2010
john commented on the user john
Hm, yes. We are always trying to strike a balance between, well, freedom and vigilance. Not always easy; the pendulum will swing back.
February 13, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
I'll see if I can put in an exception for youtube--when we clamped down on spam links I think those got caught in the crossfire.
February 11, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Bad characters smoke, stay out late on schoolnights, and don't call their mom on her birthday. Pages should handle them though, instead of exploding, so I'll talk to Tony about what was going on and try to make sure we handle it better in the future.
February 11, 2010
john commented on the user doug_sedrick
Hi Doug, welcome to wordnik. If you email me (john@wordnik.com) what browser you're using and what comment on what page you're trying to edit, I'll look into why that link isn't working for you.
February 9, 2010
john commented on the list everyones-a-critic
I love this list. I used to have a daydream about being the editor of The Norton Anthology of Bad Reviews. This cuts right to the chase.
February 9, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi folks, sorry about the comment links going on the fritz. This afternoon we added filters to try and contain the contagion of spam we've been seeing, and I overdid it a bit--they were removing all links, including safe internal ones. I've dialed it back and they should work now.
As part of the anti-spam effort links and images are now automatically removed from list descriptions. I know a lot of us put legit links in our descriptions, and we'll look into ways to filter spam links without interfering with everyone else. But for the moment, unfortunately, we're forced to be a bit draconian.
The other update of note is improved data on the 'related' sub pages. Many words, like good for instance, should show a lot more synonyms, antonyms, and other nyms.
February 9, 2010
john commented on the user Prolagus
Hi Pro, would you mind emailing me a link to that spam site? You're right, we have nothing to do with it, but we'll take every step we can to have it taken down.
We've been under increasing attack from spammers, as you know, and are taking steps to deal with it. It helps a lot when you alert us to things like this--thanks much for making us aware of it.
February 9, 2010
john commented on the list palinisms
I'm sure I have something to say here. Let me just check my hand quickly...
February 9, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Comment count is better: you can view up to 500 previous comments on a word. Should let you see the full comment thread in all but a handful of cases. Tonight I'll do the same for lists. In the near future I'll make comments pageable, so that in 10 years, when there are 10,000 comments on 'bugs', you'll be able to scroll back through every one of them and see the full history of every mistake we've ever made :-)
February 8, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi folks, we made a few changes tonight, one of which was supposed to eliminate the 50 comment limit that had been truncating longer threads. Instead we inadvertently lowered the limit, to 7 :-/
A fix should be in early tomorrow, sorry for the inconvenience.
February 7, 2010
john commented on the word goyrl
“Maybe it was a presentiment, maybe it was the sort of destiny that Yiddish calls “goyrl.” Whatever the word for it, something stirred into motion.”
The New York Times, A Rare Blend, Pro Football and Hasidic Judaism, by Samuel G. Freedman, February 5, 2010
February 6, 2010
john commented on the word snowmageddon
See snowpocalypse.
February 6, 2010
john commented on the word snowpocalypse
“As snow began to accumulate on the White House grounds and the National Mall in the afternoon, much of Washington was hunkered down, bracing for what newspapers and bloggers have been calling the “snowpocalypse,” or “snowmageddon,” and the streets in the center of the city were unusually quiet.”
The New York Times, East Coast Is Hit by ‘Potentially Epic Snowstorm’ , by John M. Broder and Jack Healy, February 5, 2010
February 6, 2010
john commented on the user sionnach
Hi Sionnach, the fix is in, again. This time it was balking at phrases containing periods--should be ok now.
February 6, 2010
john commented on the user sionnach
hi sionnach, looks like you've already discovered this, but we fixed the issue with your 'critics' list (which i love--comments are delightful).
February 5, 2010
john commented on the word lemma
Plural of lemming.
February 5, 2010
john commented on the word almost Solveig
Who's going to conduct? I'll insulate.
February 5, 2010
john commented on the word flutter meter
“22.41 Describe the circuitry and operation of a flutter meter.—Flutter bridges or meters are instruments used for the measurement of irregularities in constant-speed drive systems, such as are used in photographic and magnetic recorders, telemetering, disc recording and reproduction, ad other devices used for recording and reproducing.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 1,255
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word blimp
“18.182 What is a blimp?—A sound deadening cover placed over a motion picture camera on a motion picture set to prevent the noise of the camera movement from being picked up by the microphone.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 956
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word Barkhausen noise
“17.160 What is Barkhausen noise in a magnetic recorder?—Barkhausen noise is modulation noise or behind-the-signal noise. It may be caused by tape whcih has become magnetized or has an uneven coating.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 818
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word tangent error
“13.174 What is tangent error?—When a laterally recorded disc record is recorded, the cutting head is carried across the face of the recording disc at right angles to the direction of the disc motion. However, when reproduced, the pickup is never at right angles to the direction of motion, except at one point, because the pickup arm is pivoted in such a manner that it swings across the face of the disc in an arc.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg.677
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word negative feedback
“12.136 What is a negative-feedback or degenerative amplifier?—An amplifier in which a portion of the output signal voltage is fed back 180 degrees out of phase to the input.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 573
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word mutual conductance
“11.33 What is the meaning of the term mutual conductance?—It is a term originated by Hazeltine in 1919 to express the conductance of a vacuum tube.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 464
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word duller
“6.3 What is a duller?—A form of equalizer used to reduce the high-frequency response of an electrical circuit. It is so named because the high-frequency response appears to be dull and lacking in presence.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 263
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word lavalier
“4.81 What is a lavalier microphone?—A small dynamic microphone worn around the neck as a lavalier.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 191
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word selsyn-interlock distributor system
“3.48 What is a selsyn-interlock distributor system?—A synchronous distributor system used for interlocking sound recording equipment with motion picure cameras”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 107
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word anechoic
“2.84 Describe the construction of an anechoic chamber.—Anechoic chambers are enclosures that are echo-free, withing a specified frequency range.”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 66
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word scoring stage
“2.60 What is a scoring stage?—A music-recording stage. This term originated in the motion picture industry”
Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine, Howard W. Sams & Co., 1969, pg. 56
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word earlash
What my daughter calls her earlobes.
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word ned
“The drink is favored by young, rowdy men with a taste for making trouble — “neds,” they are called in Scotland.”
The New York Times, For Scots, a Scourge Unleashed by a Bottle, by Sarah Lyall, February 2, 2010
February 4, 2010
john commented on the word polios
“Some polios, as survivors call themselves, say that post-polio has refocused their minds on how the virus shaped their lives — and sharpened their bittersweet memories.”
The New York Times, For Some Survivors, Polio Won’t Fade Into the Past, by Kirk Johnson, February 2, 2010
February 4, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
hi mollusque, that's a bug, will be fixed soon. at the end of the week we'll also be tweaking the random rules a little, hopefully to make it a bit more satisfying.
February 3, 2010
john commented on the word Stromboli
Thanks to Woody Guthrie as channeled by Billy Bragg and Wilco, this word will always remind me of Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman,
let's go make a picture.
On the island of Stromboli,
Ingrid Bergman.
February 3, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
The past comments link in Zeitgeist should be working now. Getting the history of spaghetti back will take a little more doing, but we're working on it.
February 3, 2010
john commented on the word tap
“Over the past year and a half, a subculture has evolved, with Christian mixed martial arts clothing brands like Jesus Didn’t Tap (in the sport, “tap” means to give up) and Christian social networking Web sites like Anointedfighter.com. ”
The New York Times, Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries , by R.M. Schneiderman, February 2, 2010
February 3, 2010
john commented on the user Prolagus
We're updating some internals this coming friday and I will do my best to have full comment history restored by then. It's unconscionable that your spaghetti limerick isn't available.
February 2, 2010
john commented on the word Stein's law
“His greatest hope, Mr. Galbraith said, was Stein’s law, named for Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.
Stein’s law has been recited in many different versions. But all have a common theme: If a trend cannot continue, it will stop.”
The New York Times, Huge Deficits May Alter U.S. Politics and Global Power, by David E. Sanger, February 1, 2010
February 2, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Sionnach, I thought we fixed the list sorting bug and am looking into why it's still broken. The Zeitgeist one fell off my radar, I'll look into that too.
Along the lines of what c_b says, part of the reason for our apparent inactivity is that we're rewriting big swaths of the site's internals. Which is necessary for a bunch of reasons and in the long run good for us all, but in the short run unsatisfying because it doesn't add new features and it slows down bug fixing. It's a lot of effort and the rewards are deferred.
I hope you stick around too, or at least drop by every once in a while and see how we're doing.
February 2, 2010
john commented on the word smart dust
“Years ago, enthusiasts predicted the coming of “smart dust” — tiny digital sensors, strewn around the globe, gathering all sorts of information and communicating with powerful computer networks to monitor, measure and understand the physical world in new ways.”
The New York Times, Smart Dust? Not Quite, but We’re Getting There, by Steve Lohr, January 30, 2010
January 31, 2010
john commented on the word participatory sensing
“Ms. Estrin and her colleagues at the university’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing have designed several projects that use cellphones and people in data-gathering and analysis. Cellphones, they say, are versatile data collectors and are becoming more powerful all the time — with cameras, GPS, accelerometers and Internet connectivity. Their work is at the forefront of an emerging field called participatory sensing.”
The New York Times, Smart Dust? Not Quite, but We’re Getting There, by Steve Lohr, January 30, 2010
January 31, 2010
john commented on the word weird nebraska
Sorry r&r—there was a quirk in that link, caused the template to choke on it. Fixed now, link should work.
January 31, 2010
john commented on the word Llyan
Wow, I had forgotten all about those books. Really loved them when I was a boy--thanks for the reminder. Adding them to the growing list of books and music I can't wait to introduce the tyke to, but which she'll probably roll her eyes at.
January 31, 2010
john commented on the word iCrapper
Taking your laptop into the john when you're doing your business is unseemly. Problem solved! Get a bit of reading done while you relax on the commode with the iCrapper®.
January 28, 2010
john commented on the word jazzy snazzy pizzazzy whizzbang gizmo
The new iThingy looks like a giant iPhone. Which makes Steve Jobs look like a wee leprechaun when he's holding it.
January 28, 2010
john commented on the list words-of-the-times
No umbrage taken—I was more like "uh huh. and?"
It's mutual :-)
January 28, 2010
john commented on the list words-of-the-times
thanks pro! for a second there i thought you were talking about this list or it's author.
January 28, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
The case of the missing pronunciations will hopefully be solved this weekend--we have a fix on deck. And arby--I was wondering if anyone would notice that :-) Mostly I just wanted to make room for other options, like "post to facebook," but I thought it might be a little negative. Don't want to disrespect the words. Maybe we should add a "caress it gently" option?
January 27, 2010
john commented on the word U2 in the air
*snorts milk through nose*
January 27, 2010
john commented on the word neegee
“I grew up in a house 200 yards from the Atlantic just outside Monrovia, and we never went into the sea; we left that to the tourists. We were willing to venture into the many lagoons that collected near the country’s beaches, but there was no way we were going to brave the Atlantic, with its rough waves and fierce undertow. Not to mention the underwater neegees — or spirits — waiting to take you off to be eaten by sharks.”
The New York Times, On Liberia’s Shore, Catching a New Wave , by Helene Cooper, January 24, 2010
January 27, 2010
john commented on the word U2 in the air
“When I went to meet Bono at the bar of his hotel, I saw Richard Gere seated at a table with a gorgeous woman in a little fur jacket and a leather cap. Bono, on the other hand, had removed himself to a quiet back room, where he was keeping company with a plump, middle-aged white guy in a suit and tie... This was Randall Tobias, head of the Bush administration's AIDS program.”
That's from a 2005 NYTimes Magazine piece on Bono, and I remember being impressed when I read it at the time. He seems to dig into what he's doing, and actually have an effect. I get the impression it's more than just image polishing.
January 27, 2010
john commented on the word U2 in the air
We're contractually obligated to say nice things about Bono*. He actually owns us**.
Duty aside, I'm ok with both Bono--guy does more good things than I do--and lot of U2, except when they drift into gospel and Americana. Then I want to shoot them. No opinion about the glasses, though I've always thought it must be annoying as hell to have the world tinged light blue.
And love lamé on anyone. I'm wearing a spangly jumpsuit at this very moment.
* lie
** ditto
January 27, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Pro, that's a good suggestion--that's actually how it's supposed to work :-) I'll fix soonish, though the rate of site updates is going to slow for the next few weeks--we're rebuilding some internal stuff to deal with increasing traffic and to grease the skids for features coming down the pike. I'll try and slip some small fixes in over the next few weeks, but by the end of February more new goodies should start showing up.
January 27, 2010
john commented on the list sweet-tooth-fairy
Gangerh, you're famous!
January 24, 2010
john commented on the user marky
Hi marky, I can't say exactly when, but we'll be releasing a public API to get the words in lists in the coming weeks. You'll see it announced on 'feedback', and also @wordnikapi.
January 20, 2010
john commented on the word WisCon
“For those who have never attended WisCon before, it is a Feminist Science Fiction Convention held each May in Madison, Wisconsin.”
Geek Feminism, Wiscon panel brainstorming post, by Skud, January 18, 2010
January 19, 2010
john commented on the word nail house
“Millions of Chinese have been uprooted to make way for high rises and government infrastructure projects. “Nail House” is a popular term given to homes of dwellers who refuse to leave though they are surrounded by demolished homes.”
The Los Angeles Times, 'Avatar' pulled from 2-D screens by Chinese government, by Ben Fritz and David Pierson, January 18, 2010
January 19, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
thanks hernesheir--i just fixed that, as it happens, and it'll get released later this week.
January 19, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Moll, dc, I just upped the allowed description length 10x. Let me know if you're still having trouble updating them.
January 18, 2010
john commented on the user mollusque
Hi mollusque, there had been a 2,000 character limit on list descriptions. I just upped it to 20,000, let me know if that doesn't do the trick.
January 18, 2010
john commented on the word air gap
“Security experts say the ideal approach is to carefully identify a corporation’s most valuable intellectual property and data, and place it on a separate computer network not linked to the Internet, leaving a so-called air gap.”
The New York Times, The Lock That Says ‘Pick Me’ , by Steve Lohr, January 17, 2010
January 18, 2010
john commented on the word spear phishing
“Another approach, one used in the Google attacks, is a variation on so-called phishing schemes, in which an e-mail message purporting to be from the recipient’s bank or another institution tricks the person into giving up passwords. Scammers send such messages to thousands of people in hopes of ensnaring a few. But with so-called spear-phishing, the bogus e-mail is sent to a specific person and appears to come from a friend or colleague inside that person’s company, making it far more believable.”
The New York Times, The Lock That Says ‘Pick Me’ , by Steve Lohr, January 17, 2010
January 18, 2010
john commented on the user sionnach
Hi Sionnach, sorry about the long delay, but we finally dug up the list sorting bug. We'll hopefully have a fix out for it mid-week.
January 18, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi folks, looking into the list description thing right now.
January 18, 2010
john commented on the word munch
“Munches are informal gatherings hosted by and for straight folks into BDSM; most are hosted by reputable BDSM or sex clubs—Orlando Power Exchange, Los Angeles’ Threshold Society, Seattle’s Center for Sex Positive Culture—and nothing happens at a munch. No sex, no play, just conversation and lunch.”
Savage Love, by Dan Savage, January 13, 2010
January 17, 2010
john commented on the word démarche
“Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had been the most senior U.S. official to talk of the seriousness of the breach, discussed it on Thursday with a Chinese diplomat in Washington, however, and a senior administration official said there would be a “démarche in coming days” — a diplomatic move.”
The New York Times, After Google’s Loud Stance on China, U.S. Treads Lightly, by David E. Sanger and John Markoff, January 14, 2010
January 15, 2010
john commented on the word lip dub
“A type of video that combines lip synching and audio dubbing to make a music video.” —Wikipedia
January 14, 2010
john commented on the user ruzuzu
hi rzz, note for you over on feedback. profiles and pronunciations should be fixed.
January 14, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
ruzuzu--that was due to a bug. actually a series of bugs--it was related to pronunciations having been busted. it should all be fixed now, sorry for the inconvenience.
January 14, 2010
john commented on the word reionization
“Astronomers still do not know, however, if they will find enough galaxies and stars in that epoch when the universe was only half a billion years old to have burned off the hydrogen fog. That process is technically known as reionization, in which electrons are stripped from the hydrogen nuclei, making intergalactic space transparent.”
The New York Times, With Updated Hubble Telescope, Reaching Farther Back in Time, by Dennis Overbye, January 11, 2010
January 13, 2010
john commented on the user dontcry
hi dc, the pronunciation issue should be fixed now.
January 13, 2010
john commented on the user frogapplause
hi frogapplause, sorry about the pronunciation issue, it's been fixed now. not sure what's up with lists--they're working for me. if you're still having problems saving to a list, could you email me the url?
January 13, 2010
john commented on the user dontcry
Hi dc, sorry about your missing prons--could you try logging out and then back in? If you're still not seeing pronunciations or other stuff of yours, could you send me an email with URLs of where it should be appearing, so I can hunt for it?
January 12, 2010
john commented on the word attitudinous
“Everyone knows about the reporting assets and influence of Politico (Politico.com), but you know things have changed when Gawker (gawker.com), the attitudinous Manhattan media blog, is hiring the kind of reporters who pick up the phone.”
The New York Times, After a Year of Ruin, Some Hope, by David Carr, December 20, 2009
January 11, 2010
john commented on the word I miss wordie
Yes, agreed, OneLook is great. Courtesy of Milly's Bookmarklets, here's a OneLook bookmarklet:
OneLook Search
Drag the link above to your browser toolbar. Then when you want to view a word from Wordnik (or any other site) on OneLook, highlight it and click the link on your toolbar.
There's an equivalent bookmarklet for searching Wordnik on the Tools page.
January 11, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Released a few updates last night.
• The Word of the Day page now has links to the previous 20 words of the day. We'll do another update soon and let you page back through all previous words of the day, and update the design of the WotD widget.
• The "take this word and..." dropdown for words now lets you post words to Facebook, and there's now a similar set of options for lists ("take this list and...").
• There's now a Tools section, linked to at the bottom of every page, with links to things like bookmarklets, and three new...
• Google Gadgets, so you can Search Wordnik, View Recent Activity, and see the Word of the Day from your iGoogle page (all those links are to the install pages for the gadgets).
Please let me know if anything is busted, or if you have comments or questions.
January 11, 2010
john commented on the user Prolagus
Hi Pro, I know I sound like a broken record when I say this, but merging and disambiguation for case and other kinds of variants (plurality, tense, abbreviations, etc.) is high on our priority list. We're in the midst of implementing it in fact, but it's a bit of a hairball and it will be a little while longer before we can release the first version.
January 11, 2010
john commented on the word catalogue raisonné
“In 2006 Ms. Angell completed the first volume of the catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s films, a book that includes many of Mr. Name’s pictures.”
The New York Times, In Search of an Archive of Warhol’s Era, by Randy Kennedy, January 8, 2010
January 9, 2010
john commented on the word strategic default
“Brent White, a University of Arizona law professor, notes that a family who bought a three-bedroom home in Salinas, Calif., at the market top in 2006, with no down payment (then a common-enough occurrence), could theoretically have to wait 60 years to recover their equity. On the other hand, if they walked, they could rent a similar house for a pittance of their monthly mortgage.
There are two reasons why so-called strategic defaults have been considered antisocial and perhaps amoral.”
The New York Times, Walk Away From Your Mortgage!, by Roger Lowenstein, January 3, 2010
January 8, 2010
john commented on the word features
Yes, absolutely—that's high on my list of things to add back, I used it all the time too.
The old version worked well enough at Wordie scale, but I have to admit, it was a clusterfuck under the hood. So we want to redesign the guts of it before rebuilding. But it's definitely on the list.
January 7, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
Hi folks, Tony just rolled out a bunch of internal fixes that should speed things up a bit (and Zeitgeist more than a bit), and also fix some layout issues with IE. And if someone comments on one of your lists, you'll now receive an email about it, which can be turned off from your profile if you prefer.
On deck is an update to Word of the Day, and some more proactive ways of dealing with the spam infestation. In the meanwhile we really appreciate your vigilance, and we'll continue to squash spam accounts manually until we have it under control.
Pro, thanks in particular for spotting a lot of these. Obviously I never got around to deputizing anyone back in the Wordie days—it proved more complicated than I'd thought. Wordnik is more complicated still, and most of our effort is going towards building the corpus and adding features, so opening up the admin is a challenge. But hopefully we'll soon be blocking most of these in the first place, so there will be fewer to catch.
Lastly, we're going to start being more methodical about communicating updates. I'll comment here when we make changes, and you might also want to subscribe to the blog feed and Twitter account (@wordnik), channels we'll be using more regularly from now on.
January 6, 2010
john commented on the word derstand
Yarb, I thought a derstand is where you keep your derwear.
January 6, 2010
john commented on the word twitterversosphere
closely related to the yadasphere
January 5, 2010
john commented on the word riverine
“In Bangladesh, a largely flat, riverine nation where more than 140 million people live in one of the most densely populated countries in the world, past generations often moved to cities seasonally.”
The New York Times, Environmental Refugees Unable to Return Home, by Joanna Kakissis, January 3, 2010
January 4, 2010
john commented on the word agita
“Tanned and sinewy with sunglasses nesting in his hair, Mr. Joseph looks and sounds like the comedian Ray Romano, minus the agita.”
The New York Times, Real Estate in Cape Coral, Fla., Is Far From a Recovery, by Peter S. Goodman, January 2, 2010
January 4, 2010
john commented on the user feedback
I sometimes announce them here or on words I think are relevant, but I'm not consistent enough about it. We'll figure out a better system for it.
The blog makes sense to me. One possible shortcoming with that is, if we do, say, a weekly roundup, you may have to wait six days to know that the little thing that's been driving you nuts has been fixed. Maybe we should do blog + something else?
January 4, 2010
john commented on the word hovercraft
“He is tutored privately and takes vocal lessons, the costs underwritten by Island Def Jam records and the silky R & B superstar Usher. His new family includes hovercrafts like Mr. Braun and Ryan Good, a former assistant to Usher, whom the singer handpicked to be Justin’s road manager and “swagger coach” — sharpening his moves, his attitude and his wardrobe.”
The New York Times, Justin Bieber Is Living the Dream, by Jan Hoffman, December 31, 2009
January 3, 2010
john commented on the word twitterversosphere
kad pwns this. and also this.
January 2, 2010
john commented on the word twittervesophere
kad just claimed that she's now a part of this.
edit: she actually claimed to be part of the twitterversosphere. oops.
January 2, 2010
john commented on the word 2010
Ga, thanks a lot telofy, I've been stuck in that loop for three hours. But finally... Happy New Year!
January 1, 2010
john commented on the word clowndigger
Digger of clown graves? Clown who digs graves for the people murdered to death by fellow scary clowns?
December 29, 2009
john commented on the word terminal sedation
“Mr. Oltzik’s life would end not with a bang, but with the drip, drip, drip of an IV drug that put him into a slumber from which he would never awaken. That drug, lorazepam, is a strong sedative. Mr. Oltzik was also receiving morphine, to kill pain. This combination can slow breathing and heart rate, and may make it impossible for the patient to eat or drink. In so doing, it can hasten death.
Mr. Oltzik received what some doctors call palliative sedation and others less euphemistically call terminal sedation.”
The New York Times, Hard Choice for a Comfortable Death: Sedation, by Anemona Hartocollis, December 26, 2009
December 27, 2009
john commented on the word assonant
I misread this as assonaut at first.
December 25, 2009
john commented on the word chronotherapy
“Here’s my prediction for the Next Big Thing in health care: chronotherapy, or therapy by the clock. Yes, in the future, your medicines, your operations, your mealtimes and when you step onto the treadmill or the badminton court — all will be overseen by your personal chronoconsultant.”
The New York Times, Enter the Chronotherapists, by Olivia Judson, December 22, 2009
December 24, 2009
john commented on the word ice-cream
High-funs? Yarb, I love you, but I might have to kill you.
December 23, 2009
john commented on the user knitandpurl
Hey k&p! Good to see you around again :-)
December 23, 2009
john commented on the user reesetee
Hi RT, yes, the option for contributors isn't available at the moment. Though now that we have an email notification system it's back in play. No specific timeframe, but will hopefully be available early next year.
December 22, 2009
john commented on the word subitizing
The lesson is intended to teach a skill called subitizing. “The idea,” Dr. Sarama said, “is to get them to recognize quantity — to say, ‘I see three’ — not by counting, but by instantly recognizing how many are there by sight.”
The New York Times, Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them, by Benedict Carey, December 20, 2009
December 21, 2009
john commented on the user sionnach
Hi sionnach, the default sort for lists is 'order added', so seeing words from across the alphabet on any page is expected behavior. I just paged through all three pages of the list you mentioned, sorted by alpha and order added, and they look ok to me. Email me if you're seeing something different.
Onelook and friends still there, but the location has changed. If you look at the summary page for any word, in the 'Definitions' area, underneath 'WordNet' there's a section called 'Elsewhere on the web.'
December 21, 2009
john commented on the word hacktivism
“Ms. Jones said the incident may have been “hacktivism,” an attack with a social or political motivation. “The point could purely be just to prove the site is insecure,” she said.”
The New York Times, Web Attack on Twitter Is Third Assault This Year, by Jenna Wortham and Nick Bilton, December 18, 2009
December 20, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
Hi folks, we added some more profile features tonight. Wordnik now sends you an email when someone comments on your profile. You can toggle email notifications on and off by clicking 'Edit profile' on your profile page, then 'Edit preferences'. In the near future it'll also notify you when someone comments on one of your lists.
The 'Edit profile' section also lets you opt in or out of the general Wordnik email list and the upcoming Word of the Day email, and change your email address. As always, please let us know if anything is acting strangely, or if you have comments or suggestions on this or anything else.
Re: spammers, yeah, I used to need all the help I could get. I think it's no big deal to comment on spam accounts, though no longer really necessary. And you have to accept that no matter how brilliant your wit, spam gets nuked and comments along with it—like a sand mandala tossed back into the river, reminding us of the transitory nature of material existence. Or something.
December 19, 2009
john commented on the word geddu
“Or the appeal might be more primal, what the Pietmontese call geddu: Its studly curves and elegant grillwork were sculpted by designers at Pininfarina, stylists of the Ferrari, Maserati, and Alfa Romeo.”
Fast Company, Pop Artist, by Linda Tischler, September 2009
December 19, 2009
john commented on the word missing mass
“Dark matter became a serious issue in the 1970s, when Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and her colleagues charted the rotation speeds of galaxies and found that they seemed to be enveloped in halos of dark matter, then called missing mass.”
The New York Times, At a Mine’s Bottom, Hints of Dark Matter, by Dennis Overbye, December 17, 2009
December 18, 2009
john commented on the word black diamonds
“The recent survey results would probably stun someone who went to sleep during apartheid and awakened in the present. After all, blacks not only control the government, they mingle in the finest restaurants and swankiest malls. The so-called black diamonds include liberation struggle heroes who have been welcomed into the boardrooms of the nation’s largest corporations.”
The New York Times, Holiday of White Conquest Persists in South Africa, by Barry Bearak, December 16, 2009
December 17, 2009
john commented on the word wha happen
Indeed.
December 16, 2009
john commented on the word computational thinking
“As recently as five years ago,” Dr. Lazowska said, “if you were a social scientist interested in how social groups form, evolve and dissipate, you would hire 30 college freshmen for $10 an hour and interview them in a focus group.”
“Today,” he added, “you have real-time access to the social structuring and restructuring of 100 million Facebook users.”
The shift is giving rise to a computer science perspective, referred to as “computational thinking” by Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.
The New York Times, A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing, by John Markoff, December 14, 2009
December 15, 2009
john commented on the word exaflood
“He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an “exaflood” of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood.”
The New York Times, A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing, by John Markoff, December 14, 2009
December 15, 2009
john commented on the list words-banned-in-the-irish-parliament
My new favorite list. Makes me want to go to Ireland and scream "corner boy" at parliamentarians.
December 15, 2009
john commented on the word reverb
“One of those making the trip, Grant Baker, a South African pro known as Twiggy, said after his first round that the surf was “a lot more powerful than it looked.”
“It looks beautiful from here,” Mr. Baker said. “But there’s a lot of reverb coming off the rocks and it makes it quite difficult.”
The New York Times, Bruising Surf at a Rare Big-Wave Event in Hawaii, by Jesse McKinley, December 8, 2009
December 13, 2009
john commented on the word watermen
“Even before the official word came down, however, both event surfers and local “watermen” were kicking and paddling their way into the surf, and zipping down wave faces about 1,000 feet from shore.”
The New York Times, Bruising Surf at a Rare Big-Wave Event in Hawaii, by Jesse McKinley, December 8, 2009
December 13, 2009
john commented on the word dumbassery
Is this related to a caravansary?
December 13, 2009
john commented on the word Mr. Pronunciation
I wonder if Mrs. Pronunciation is the Scottish woman who is the voice of many ATMs.
December 12, 2009
john commented on the word precautionary principle
“Soon after Suskind’s book came out, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who then was at the University of Chicago, pointed out that Mr. Cheney seemed to be endorsing the same “precautionary principle” that also animated environmentalists. Sunstein wrote in his blog: “According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events — such as climate change.”
The New York Times, Going Cheney on Climate, by Thomas L. Friedman, December 8, 2009
December 9, 2009
john commented on the user whichbe
Hi Whichbe, just fixed your 'Postscripture ✞' list, and it should now survive future edits. But let me know otherwise.
December 7, 2009
john commented on the word Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, Goodbye
“Many sovereign funds invested in the early days of the crisis as banks scrambled to find investors willing to plow in money and exacted lucrative terms. (Swings through Asia and the Middle East were so common that bankers coined the phrase “Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, Goodbye” to describe their fund-raising tours.)”
The New York Times, Big Paydays for Rescuers in the Crisis, by Eric Dash, December 6, 2009
December 7, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
Pollyanna or anyone experiencing the double entry bug, I'd appreciate if you could email me (john@wordnik.com) some details to help me recreate it, as I haven't been able to. The name and version of your browser would be especially helpful.
December 7, 2009
john commented on the user stenoknight
Hi Mirabai, welcome!
I love what you do--my grandmother was deaf. I have a deep appreciation for people who help make the world more accessible.
December 6, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
Hi all, launched some updates to tagging tonight. In the right-hand sidebar of your profile there's now a link to your tag page. It's pretty basic, and will improve over time, but we can see all our tags in one place again.
The center of the page shows aggregated tags in alphabetical order, with each appearing once. The sidebar shows recent instances of tag applications, so if you tag ten words with the same tag, they'll all show up there.
We're going to do another round of data cleanup soon that should address some remaining character encoding issues with tags, and tag pages will get some refinements, especially sorting. Let me know if you have any suggestions or requests.
December 5, 2009
john commented on the list it-hurts-when-i-do-this
I love this list. œsophagalgia? Hurts so good.
December 5, 2009
john commented on the word spaghetti
And if you become the captain of a ship, your crew can say "aye aye Myth Pasta."
December 5, 2009
john commented on the word spaghetti
frogapplause, seize that crown! So you can begin every sentence "I, Myth Pasta..."
December 5, 2009
john commented on the user siriusdorr
I think the spamfection rate has been about about same on Wordnik as on Wordie, and I'm pretty sure we brought the spam with us--there was almost none here prior to our arrival :-)
I had a small but effective little anti-spam toolkit I'd built up over the years, so I often nuked stuff before many people saw it. We're slowly building up a similar kit for Wordnik--in fact some of it is getting deployed tonight.
I just zapped dickhead's penis links, and this account will disappear in a day or so. We very much appreciate spam alerts, either in situ, on feedback, or by email.
December 5, 2009
john commented on the word Ottomania
“Mr. Osman’s send-off was just the latest manifestation of what sociologists call “Ottomania,” a harking back to an era marked by conquest and cultural splendor during which sultans ruled an empire stretching from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean and claimed the spiritual leadership of the Muslim world.”
The New York Times, Frustrated With West, Turks Revel in Empire Lost, by Dan Bilefsky, December 4, 2009
December 5, 2009
john commented on the word lala
“An obvious attraction is the fin-free feeling of skimming across the water, which the ancient Hawaiians called “lala” — a controlled slide in and around the pocket of the wave.”
The New York Times, Ancient Surfboard Style Is Finding New Devotees, by Jamie Brisick, December 4, 2009
December 4, 2009
john commented on the word alaia
“My surfcraft that day was an alaia (pronounced ah-LIE-ah), a replica of the thin, round-nosed, square-tailed boards ridden in pre-20th-century Hawaii. The originals were 7 to 12 feet long, generally made of koa wood and could weigh up to 100 pounds. They resemble nothing so much as antique ironing boards, but their most distinctive feature compared with modern equipment is that they are finless.”
The New York Times, Ancient Surfboard Style Is Finding New Devotees, by Jamie Brisick, December 4, 2009
December 4, 2009
john commented on the word the
The first definition from Webster's 1913 is excellent.
December 3, 2009
john commented on the word features
Hi c_b!
Yes, all contributed examples/usages/citations should go in comments. Down the road we hope to add a way to categorized comments, something I long wanted to do on YOW but never got around to.
December 2, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
Hi rolig and friends, thanks for the reports. Regarding private notes, we do have all the data on dry ice. I used them a lot too, but in general that was one of Wordie's least used features. We plan on adding them back (I think they might make more sense here), but it won't be for a while, unfortunately. If you need your notes please email me and I can bundle them up and send them to you.
December 2, 2009
john commented on the word boxed
“You’re going to go get boxed on a Friday or Saturday night,” he said. “You don’t want to say you lost your shield when you were out drinking, so you carry a dupe.”
The New York Times, The Officer Is Real; The Badge May Be an Impostor, by Ray Rivera, November 30, 2009
December 1, 2009
john commented on the word pottsy
“Years ago, Mr. Anemone said, officers referred to a fake badge as a Pottsy, after the Jay Irving comic strip about a New York City police officer. They later took on the name dupes, for duplicates.”
The New York Times, The Officer Is Real; The Badge May Be an Impostor, by Ray Rivera, November 30, 2009
December 1, 2009
john commented on the word dupe
“But in New York, a city that has become almost synonymous with high security, where office employees wear picture IDs and surveillance cameras are on the rise, some officers don’t wear their badges on patrol.
Instead, they wear fakes.
Called “dupes,” these phony badges are often just a trifle smaller than real ones but otherwise completely authentic. Officers use them because losing a real badge can mean paperwork and a heavy penalty, as much as 10 days’ pay.”
The New York Times, The Officer Is Real; The Badge May Be an Impostor, by Ray Rivera, November 30, 2009
December 1, 2009
john commented on the word shared intentionality
“Dr. Tomasello believes children develop what he calls “shared intentionality,” a notion of what others expect to happen and hence a sense of a group “we.” It is from this shared intentionality that children derive their sense of norms and of expecting others to obey them.
Shared intentionality, in Dr. Tomasello’s view, is close to the essence of what distinguishes people from chimpanzees.”
The New York Times, We May Be Born With an Urge to Help, by Nicholas Wade, November 30, 2009
December 1, 2009
john commented on the word vexamples
The comments on opensourcefood liken vexamples to weirdnet, and like weirdnet, I don't think vexamples are entirely bad. Sometimes they're awesome.
December 1, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
Zeitgeist's 'Recently listed' now actually shows that, thanks to a fix Tony just put in place.
Fourthed, and added to the list.
Humphrey Lyttleton? A suspicious name on the face of it, but the first sentence of his Wikipedia entry makes me think Grant invented him. And probably authored this:
"Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton, also known as Humph, was an English jazz musician and broadcaster, and chairman of the BBC radio programme I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. He was a cousin of the 10th Viscount Cobham and a great-nephew of the politician and sportsman Alfred Lyttelton, who was the first man to represent England at both football and cricket."
Uh-huh.
December 1, 2009
john commented on the word automatic cutification
That's Wordnik's upcoming redesign. Guess the cat's out of the bag.
December 1, 2009
john commented on the user reesetee
holy robin batman, that's a fantastic idea!
November 30, 2009
john commented on the word autocomplete
Autocomplete has been rejiggered along the lines mollusque suggested—unless you choose an item off the list, it should behave like a regular search box.
November 30, 2009
john commented on the user abraxaszugzwang
Hey, how delightful to see you again!
Ran across Pahdon me; I fahted. the other day and laughed out loud—made me miss New England.
November 29, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
VO, sorry that I got defensive, and kjola, sorry I missed your point.
Bilby, valid points, and you're right, 'rough transition' doesn't do it justice. I'm doing what I can to fix what's broken, listen, and make things easier to use and more fun--to be productive, so that you don't have to be. There's another batch of fixes for Monday evening, and they'll keep coming.
November 29, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
hi whichbe, recently listed is busted. we have an update rolling out hopefully monday that will fix that, among other things.
November 29, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
Hi kjola, could you try the password reset page, using the email with which you signed up for Wordie? If that doesn't work please email me--john@wordnik.com
November 29, 2009
john commented on the word mullet strategy
The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.” (“Business up front, party in the back” is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) “User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,” Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.”
The New Yorker, Out of Print: The death and life of the American Newspaper, by Eric Alterman, March 31, 2008
November 29, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
Guys, I know it was a rough transition, and that it's not finished. But a little perspective.
VanishedOne, you implied that Wordie had a clearly targeted purpose. It didn't for a long time—it evolved, as will Wordnik. Wordnik has an overarching goal, which I love: the collection of all English words and as much information about them as possible. But the culture and spirit of it are up to us. It won't be dictated by an amorphous "them." There's only five of us in the office anyways. When we get pizza we fit in a both.
The only material that changes on the site is the automatically collected stuff, like example sentences, and then because we're trying to dramatically improve their quality. As many have noted, they need it.
Things we contribute, like comments and pronunciations, don't get touched unless they're unequivocally abuse or spam. So yes, Wordnik is a dictionary, and yes, it's educational. But there's no such thing as "not meeting our purposes." And while some features exist or not because they just happened to get built one way (or not), nothing is cast in stone. We have a pretty long list of things we have to do, which we're slowly working through (the downside of fitting in a pizza both), but just keep bothering me. I feel like I have a pretty long record of building what people ask for. And I appreciate both the bug reports, and also the understanding that glitches will be fixed over time. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.
I don't think the idea of a serious dictionary with a not-serious community is so far fetched. I mean, it even has a name: the mullet strategy. Though for what it's worth, I totally disagree with Peretti that most user-generated content sucks. Or at least, this group is the exception that proves the rule.
November 29, 2009
john commented on the user PossibleUnderscore
continued on wordnik, per pro's suggestion...
November 29, 2009
john commented on the word mullett strategy
oops--see mullet strategy.
November 29, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
hi pro, redirects for the numeric list urls were working until yesterday, when i broke them--they should be working again now.
i had been trying to get the styles working correctly for the small group of frozen-in-amber lists that are still visible on olde wordie. haven't yet, but will eventually. i too kind of like having a few semi-secret time capsules lying around :-)
November 28, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
whichbe, just fixed 'Postscripture.' let me know if any more are having trouble. mollusque, i'll look into 'first listed by.'
November 26, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
Rolig, was finally able to get those holdout lists looking and working as they had been, I think.
Not sure if this has been mentioned here, but the words in 'Recently listed' aren't. That's been fixed and will show up on the site on Monday. And pro, I'll figure out why your pronunciations aren't showing up on the main word page—you're right, they should be.
November 26, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
pro, reesetee, i think i finally fixed that bug--please let me know, and thanks for your patience.
November 26, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
thanks pro, will work on it today. think we're getting closer.
November 26, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
We made some progress on character encoding issues tonight. Tony wrote a script that fixed the urls of 110 lists. Prolagus, this means all your lists starting with a • ("• Little pains in my butt") should work now, and Wordie links to them should redirect correctly.
I also went in and tweaked a few things manually. Rolig, I was able to get your two broken lists working, but unfortunately the URLs differ from what they were on Wordie, so redirects are broken. I'll try again later to fix this, but for now at least you can access them. As for words with the 'č' character, I hate to say this, but at this point your best bet may be to delete the fuglified versions and add back the correct ones. The unicode issues are beyond me, but something about that character defied the fixes that worked in most other cases. I'm sorry about that.
November 25, 2009
john commented on the word chuckle
The part of the pig between the tail and anus, according to Kenneth.
November 25, 2009
john commented on the word Sexcriminalboat
Kenneth's ancestral homeland, somewhere in Georgia.
November 25, 2009
john commented on the word People's Gay Republic of Drugifornia
Jack Donaghy's sobriquet for San Francisco.
November 25, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
dhuber, sorry for the delay, I just unlinked your account from facebook. Could you give it a try and let me know how it goes (john@wordnik.com)?
In in the not too distant future we'll make account management stuff like this easier, and more self-serve.
November 25, 2009
john commented on the word apple pie
I first read 'carton' as 'cartoon,' and was wondering what good that would do you, and why you'd want to freeze it :-)
November 25, 2009
john commented on the word aliquid in aere erat ea nocte, stellae illustres erant, fernande
Hysterical! But that aside, Pro, you have a nice voice!
How about a pronunciations-to-ringtones feature?
November 24, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
Thanks vo, fixed /comments and will look into updating list info first thing tomorrow. edit: editing list names and descriptions should be working now
November 23, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
dhuber, might be related to new stuff we just added. Could you try logging out, then restarting your browser, and logging back in? If you're still having issues after that, please email me (john@wordnik.com), and let me know the list and word, and the browser you're using. Thanks.
November 23, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
PU, you are fast! We just added the new Zeitgeist additions minutes ago, and you found a Mothra-sized bug before I could even announce it :-) Just fixed those links though, thanks.
So Zeitgeist now shows the top 7 most-commented on words and lists of the past 7 days, and also recently listed words. List comments are now editable, and you can remove words you added to open lists. Lists themselves are now deletable, as long as they don't yet have comments on them (we're sorting out how to handle other cases). And a handful of smaller bugs were fixed.
Up next are some unicode issues, a bunch of smallish bug fixes, then we update the tagging system, and overhaul the bleeding carbuncle that is the current 'word of the day' page.
November 23, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
bilb, list deletion will soon return--tomorrow night, hopefully. though it will at first be limited to lists with no comments on them. but should be enough to clean up double submits like that.
November 22, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
Hi mollusque, I was was about to add back that link external link icon last night, but I realized some work has to be done first to exclude it some places (like the 'Elsewhere on the web' links in the definitions section of the word summary page). But I'd like to get that back in too.
Rolig, I'm sorry for the delay, I'll look into those inoperable lists.
November 22, 2009
john commented on the word comments
telofy, done: #description
November 21, 2009
john commented on the word sachet d'epices
Bilby, thanks for the debugging. I'll work on the bracketting.
I need to go to remedial regex school.
November 20, 2009
john commented on the user feedback
This is actually the account of our new intern, Felix Edback. Hi Felix!
Purple does rock—spaced that in the makeover. You may have to hold down the 'shift' key and hit 'reload' to get your browser to pick up the change, but visited links should now be the right color.
November 20, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Thanks DC—just tweaked Zeitgeist to try and differentiate the thing commented on from the other links. Let me know if it needs fine-tuning.
November 20, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Darn, I was hoping nobody noticed the eternal favorites. Scheduled to be fixed soonish.
November 19, 2009
john commented on the word update
A bunch of limboed lists have been returned home, including all those reported by Whichbe and Prolagus. The comments section on Zeitgeist now includes those made on lists and profiles, and has a 'past comments' link at the top, which will let you page backwards through every comment ever left on Wordnik or Wordie. If you go back far enough you may find some of the Wordie comments are out of order with respect to the Wordnik ones; that will be fixed soon.
The word pages now also show the comment count in parentheses next to the 'Comments' button. Arby, you can now shove words (though not in Safari, apparently--working on that). And about the Random button—what uselessness said :-)
Some other tweaks and refinements were sprinkled around, and probably a few new bugs too. On deck for the next release: get tags working correctly, add more zeitgeist data, and fix a slew of bugs.
Thanks for your patience with all this remodeling, and please let me know if you have any suggestions or questions, or just feel like ranting.
xo
November 19, 2009
john commented on the word earworm
No promises, but that might be reversible.
November 19, 2009
john commented on the word chained_bear
If someone, say for instance a bear, had accounts on both Wordie and Wordnik, their Wordnik settings took precedence. And since Wordnik accounts defaulted to private until recently, some née Wordie accounts got switched to private, unfortunately.
I'll ping the bear via other channels and let her know. Though I think she's got her hands full at the moment, literally and figuratively :-)
November 19, 2009
john commented on the word de novo
“Many of the big, multistage firms aren’t really venture firms in the classic sense anymore,” said Chris Douvos, co-head of private equity investing at the Investment Fund for Foundations. The deals they do “may be good risk-adjusted bets, but are a far cry from the de novo innovation that people look for in venture,” he said.
The New York Times, Silicon Valley Firm Raises Big Fund for Mix of Deals, by Claire Cain Miller, November 18, 2009
November 19, 2009
john commented on the word ☂
Does this have anything to do with cloud computing?
November 18, 2009
john commented on the word lists
The case of the missing lists has been solved. Turns out they're all invite-only. The plan had been to temporarily convert those to creator-only until we got email notifications working, but we inadvertently made them invisible.
We have a fix for it on deck, but we're going to do some testing and consolidation and generally batten down the hatches a little before putting it into production. It should happen tomorrow night, barring anything unforeseen. Thanks very much for your patience on this everyone. Your lists will be back in your arms again soon.
November 18, 2009
john commented on the word SHAZAM!
Tremendous! The first time I've ever heard a Wordie! (um, other than those I know in "real life").
We've been following pee wee around recording her take on things, I'm now inspired to add a few choice nuggets of hers, too :-)
November 17, 2009
john commented on the word bugs
whichbe, thanks, i'll look into that--i've been in fix-two-bugs, cause-one mode with moving and deleting from lists, hopefully that'll stabilize on the next pass.
vo, unfortunately you'll find machine generated crud like that semi-regularly right now. we ingest huge volumes of data, and we're still fine-tuning how it's all processed. that's not a part of the puzzle i'm directly involved in, but we talk all the time about how to improve the process, so you'll see less and less of that over time.
November 17, 2009
john commented on the word adobeair
wow, that's a rather unattractive page. which i've neglected for 8 months. and curiously, the mile-high tag list is followed by a bunch of tweets in, i think, japanese.
officially back on the 'do something with this, someday' list.
November 17, 2009
john commented on the word tos
I'm actively working on making our tos weirder.
But none of Wordie belonged to any of us anyways. Errata is on dry ice and I can't verify this until it's thawed, but I'm pretty sure we surrendered all our rights to J.K. Rowling. Or maybe that was on a word thread somewhere?
November 17, 2009
john commented on the word unable to complete request
Please do. You guys are grandfathered :-)
November 17, 2009
john commented on the word feeds
Hi folks, just added back list word feeds, the feed for new words added to each list. Working on list comment feeds now, those should be up soon.
November 17, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Whichbe: two-word phrases should now stay intact during moves, and the ones that got scrambled earlier should now be removable if you want to re-add. Please let me know if that's not your case.
November 16, 2009
john commented on the user whichbe
Hi whichbe—I like your hack, but please let me know if you'd like your uppercaseness back.
I see there are character issues with your tags. I'm going to be working on tags again over the next few days and will see if we can fix that.
November 16, 2009
john commented on the word bugs
Thanks very much for the sleuthing, though sorry it's necessary. Grant also compiled a list of lists to look into. I don't have access to the necessary db to dig into it right now, otherwise I would, but figuring out what happened and what to do about it is a high priority tomorrow.
November 16, 2009
john commented on the word comments
That's new and for you mollusque. The idea had been kicked around before, but you kicked me into action.
November 16, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Prolagus and PossibleUnderscore, you've been upcased. If anyone else is missing a majuscule, let me know—still a few kicking around the lost and found.
November 16, 2009
john commented on the list organizations-and-associations
Wonder what sense of goat is being associated about.
November 16, 2009
john commented on the word suggestions
pterodactyl, hello!
Active threads will return soon, but first comes getting list and profile comments into the comment stream, then a chronological past-comments section that we can page through, both early this week.
I like the idea of deputizing editors, there are some issues, the most obvious being that I'd have to build the tools. But maybe eventually. We have internal bug tracking, and I have my own mixed-up-files style tracking. But a user-editable bug wiki, separate from the site itself, might be a good idea.
Later today I'll be adding a shortcut for linking directly to comments pages from within comments.
Edit: done. see text above comment box.
November 16, 2009
john commented on the word having a kickback
“Ms. Lee’s small house near the high school was sometimes a hangout, where Mr. Prugo, Ms. Ames and others from Indian Hills could be found “having a kickback,” said the friend.”
The New York Times, Going for the Bling, by Allen Salkin, November 13, 2009
November 15, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Hash tags on Wordnik! That's funny.
That's a bug Pro, you should be able to remove words you added, I think. Will look into it.
November 14, 2009
john commented on the word list of the day
Mentioning it here would work too.
Tech schmeck. Make a list* :-)
edit: ok, this isn't a list. Comments are kind of list-like, though
November 14, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Profile comments are editable now. List comments next, and they'll both start appearing on Zeitgeist soon.
A ways back I said it would be nice to be able to toggle Wordie between 'dictionary' and 'social' mode, depending on mood or purpose. And that's what I hope Wordie/nik evolves into. Wordie's chatter has been the best part, but when it started I was thinking dictionaries, and that still appeals. Maybe that's trying to square the circle, but I hope not. Guess we'll find out.
More specific controls will come, but it can be make more Wordie-like as-is. This may change, but I feel a simpler homepage is easier to absorb for new folks. But I have my homepage set to Zeitgeist and hardly look at the real one--and Zeitgeist is going to get much better fairly soon. And when poking through lists if you use the 'comment' links, you can bypass the lexicographic pages entirely.
Sionnach*, I'm glad your back :-). Be a grouch, it should have been handled better.
* fyi, your profile is set to private, so I can't comment on it. A vestige of you having had a previous Wordnik account, I think, back when all profiles were private.
November 14, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Two quick things: tags are and will remain lowercase only. And frogapplause, I love the comic, thanks. You can see the future!
November 14, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Wordie tags are back. There are a few issues still, the main one being that tags show up on your profile, but not always on the tag page itself. I'm working on that, and also on a dedicated tags page to be linked off our profiles.
Thanks for the understanding everyone, I appreciate it. We stumbled on the Wordie integration, which I regret. That aside, these new surroundings feel weird for me too. But all the Wordie stuff will come back online, and I still have faith that Wordnik+Wordie will be a good thing. I hope that will become more apparent once everything is working and we're moving forward again.
November 14, 2009
john commented on the word comments
ruzuzu and marky, i removed 'recent lookups' from profiles. i'll add it back when it can be made optional and we're sure it's accurate.
we're working on getting wordie tags back and at fixing commenting on lists with special characters in the url. pro, that will hopefully make it possible to comment on 'knuckle tattoos', which is important to me, since i missed that first time around and want to say how much i love it.
also trying to get editing on list and profile comments working today.
November 14, 2009
john commented on the list •-knuckle-tattoos
Don't know how I missed this earlier--love this list.
November 14, 2009
john commented on the word lists
Just added a 'List it' option to the choices in the 'Take this word and...' drop-down on every word page. Initially it had issues with multi-word phrases, but I think it's working now. Let me know if you have any issues.
November 13, 2009
john commented on the word comments
whichbe, i'm looking into it, but i'm almost certain your tags, despite not being available, were moved over, and that we'll find them and give them back to you.
while wordie was being migrated we were also switching parts of the site to use a different method of accessing data, which involved a different database. so there were three db's involved: old wordie, old wordnik, and new wordnik. stuff that appears missing is there, but in the wrong database. they can and will be merged with no losses.
we really needed to change our underlying db; wordnik is outgrowing the old one. but in retrospect it might not have been such a hot idea to do these two major migrations concurrently.
frogapplause, hello!
November 13, 2009
john commented on the word bugs
Broken comment pages should display now, though some aren't correctly showing the lists the word is in. Working on that.
November 13, 2009
john commented on the word kicker
Also, the final line in a news story. Often a quote, and ideally something that wraps up the story nicely and has a bit of unexpected punch.
November 13, 2009
john commented on the word exhausted
I love the Webster 1913 definition on this: "same as burned-out." Feels about right.
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word incremental
Hi folks, some fixes:
· You can now edit your comments on words. Comments on profiles and lists can't be edited yet, but that'll come soon.
· Tony (Wordnik's VP of Engineering--he and our colleague Kumanan are real engineers, while I just make train noises and pretend) fixed the issue with most international characters in comments. The remaining broken characters (a small percentage) will most likely remain broken, an unfortunate side effect of my having been sloppy with Wordie's db in the early days.
· Until we have a past comments section that lets us page through all the comments, I increased the number shown on Zeitgeist.
It may take a little while to get back to feature parity with Wordie, but that's the plan, and then we'll keep going. Thanks again for your patience and bug reports, which are always welcome anywhere here, or to john@wordnik.com
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word comments
marky, that's a feature, not a bug :-)
Depends who you talk to actually, and it's hotly debated, but Wordknik, unlike Wordie, is case sensitive.
Eventually we hope to find a middle ground, where it's possible to distinguish between, say, polish and Polish, and turkey and Turkey, without the annoyance of having all the comments and definitions disappear because you typed in an initial cap.
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Would have made my life easier marky, but then we would have had to figure out what to do with the 1.7 meellion words we have lying around. The whole "dictionary" thing, which can also be fun.
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Hi Jubjub, that's what makes random word so addictive. Sometimes you get on a hot streak, then you loose it all with a string of Goolges.
Wordnik is omnivorous, it collects the good, the bad, and the ugly without judgment. Random has some filters to weed out the pure drek, but not many--maybe we should dial that up?
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Yeah Pro (pro?) no worries, it's helpful.
In another hour or so you'll be able edit your comments to change the historical record if you want :-)
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word comments
I'll save my sincere apologies and a longer explanation for when the fires are out, but for now a status report:
· Adding words to lists is fixed
· Newlines in comments will be fixed soon
· Editing comments will be available soon--hopefully tonight, maybe tomorrow
· I'll make the display of 'recently looked up' optional as soon as possible, probably 1-3 days. That was an oversight from the profile merger: that originated on Wordnik, where it didn't matter because the site didn't used to have public profiles.
· I'll add 'list it' to the options in the 'Take this word and...' drop-down
· I'll go through everything here and hit as many other items as I can.
More soon.
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word comments
pro, i'm working on that right now. the comments are all in there, struggling to get out. comments will also be editable again soon.
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Hi pro, thank you. The character issue on existing comments is being fixed as I type, and should be up today. I'll try and fix the forwards from Wordie on lists with unicode characters soon--hopefully by tonight or tomorrow.
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word comments
Hi rolig, this is a fine place to leave comments. The list of lists in the sidebar is being truncated, I'll fix that today. Thanks much for pointing that out.
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word comments
A million apologies for the character encoding issues on imported comments. That's being fixed right now, as well as comment editing and some display issues. I think I may be saying this a lot in the next few days, but please be a little patient. We'll have everything back to normal as soon as possible.
November 12, 2009
john commented on the word betrayed
Sionnach, your lists are back—there was a bug on the lists page.
I worked hard, and will keep working, to make things fit together sensibly, but some restructuring was necessary to combine the two sites.
I feel horribly that this transition has been bumpier than I'd hoped, but I'm working as quickly as possible to smooth rough edges, fix bugs, and add back all the Wordie functionality. I'm very sorry for the headaches, but please bear with this for just a little longer.
November 12, 2009
john commented on the user rolig
Hi rolig, wanted to apologize for the character encoding issues that have appeared on some of your lists. It's my doing--the Wordie database was kind of a mess after a few years not always careful noodling. We did the best we could moving things over, but some characters got a bit mangled.
November 11, 2009
john commented on the word johnboat
All aboard! See tupelo.
November 10, 2009
john commented on the word cover
“FOR nearly three decades, I’ve felt conflicted about presidential salutes. After all, my United States Marine Corps instructors drilled into me the idea that “you never salute without a cover�? which, in civilian, meant without a hat.�?
The New York Times, A Final Verdict on the Presidential Salute, by Carey Winfrey, October 31, 2009
November 10, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
There is always the possibility that we'll arrive on Wordnik and discover the Statue of Liberty half-buried in sand.
November 10, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
hi all. mollusque, as of now you'd have to drop the case you don't want and add another, and if you were moving from lower to uppercase, it would mean not seeing the comments on the lowercase version. which is clearly not the desired behavior in most cases. once wordie is in and we work out any kinks, dealing sensibly with case sensitivity is high on our to-do list.
speaking of integration, it's going to happen next week :-) there might be a brief period (an hour?) during which both sites will redirect to a maintenance page, after which requests to wordie will be redirected to the equivalent page on wordnik. all our accounts and lists and words will get moved over en masse. and when there are username conflicts (happily, there are fewer of those than i expected), we'll have a process in place for working them out.
the plan is that within a week or so of the migration all wordie features will be fully available on wordnik. but immediately after the migration, a few minor features will be temporarily unavailable. i'll post details soon, but they'll include collaborative lists (existing ones will work, but you won't be able to create new ones) and email notifications.
pretty much the entire wordie homepage is going to get stuffed into zeitgeist, though there are a few items on it that won't be available immediately. again, in a week or two anything that didn't make the first pass will get moved over.
we're trying hard to make this as seemless as possible. and once the transition is complete, i think you'll see fewer bugs, better performance, and we'll have all this dictionary shit to enjoy or crack wise about. as always, please post here or email me if you have any questions or suggestions.
November 9, 2009
john commented on the word irritable heart
Soldiers in the Civil War suffered from irritability, disturbed sleep, shortness of breath and depression, a syndrome Jacob Mendes Da Costa, an Army surgeon, described in 1871 as “irritable heart.”
The New York Times, When Soldiers Snap, by Erica Goode, November 7, 2009
November 8, 2009
john commented on the word columny
“In those days, he called himself a “harmless little fuzzball.�? He’s a lot less harmless now. I went on to columny, as my pal Bill Safire called it, and Rush went on to calumny.�?
The New York Times, Who Are You Calling a Narcissist, Rush?, by Maureen Dowd, November 3, 2009
November 4, 2009
john commented on the word reporterette
“I had a four-hour dinner once with Rush Limbaugh at the “21�? Club in Manhattan, back in the days when I was still writing profiles as a “reporterette,�? to use a Limbaugh coinage.�?
The New York Times, Who Are You Calling a Narcissist, Rush?, by Maureen Dowd, November 3, 2009
November 4, 2009
john commented on the word yottabyte
“And what is a yottabyte? I’m glad you asked.
There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?�?
TechCrunch, NSA Datacenters To Store Yottabytes Of Surveillance Data, by Devin Coldewey, November 1, 2009
November 2, 2009
john commented on the word mentality
Don't you know, little fool, you never can win?
Use your mentality, wake up to reality.
I've Got You Under My Skin
November 2, 2009
john commented on the list craigslist-stuff-for-sale
madmouth, that restriction is about to go away :-)
Couple of weeks tops, I'll give advance notice before it happens.
November 1, 2009
john commented on the word bugs
Hi folks, so sorry about the plugged up front page. I'll try to roto-route it tonight or tomorrow. I'm in a mad dash to build nuevo Wordie right now, which will be launched in a few weeks, so it's kind of hard to spend time on ancien Wordie. But a semi-refreshing front page is totally annoying to me too.
Speaking of Wordie++, it's coming along handsomely I think, and will feel very, very much like this one—but faster, and with less bugs :-)
October 30, 2009
john commented on the word it sucks to be me
frogapplause, love that. just did my first wordie spit take in weeks.
October 29, 2009
john commented on the word netizen
I like that idea. Like an Island of Lost Toys, but for words.
October 28, 2009
john commented on the word facebookery
Done by Facebookies, presumably.
October 27, 2009
john commented on the word gin and hair tonic
One of the boozy dwarves who's always drunk-dialing the sweet tooth fairy.
October 26, 2009
john commented on the word chivy
“Like the bill that will probably emerge from Congress, the Massachusetts reform mainly relies on a combination of regulation and subsidies to chivy a mostly private system into providing near-universal coverage.�?
The New York Times, After Reform Passes, by Paul Krugman, October 25, 2009
October 26, 2009
john commented on the word hamthrax
I think he's talking about swine flu:
“I don't know whether this is seasonal flu or hamthrax, but I can't sit at the computer any more. I need to lay down and shiver convulsively.�?
@wyhaines (Kirk Haines)
October 26, 2009
john commented on the word adsense
Billions? I sold you guys for a handful of Burger King gift certificates ;-)
In Wordie: The Movie, I'd like to be played by John Cusack, please. His impact on world events is really amazing.
October 22, 2009
john commented on the word adsense
Been gone a while, eh _mark? As you can see over on advertising, Wordie has had ads for almost two years. They originally ran only on Tuesdays, but I got sick of subsidizing all the costs (at no point have the ads ever fully covered even the hosting costs). I mean, it's always been a labor of love, but throw me a bone.
October 22, 2009
john commented on the word sea change
sweet tooth fairy!
October 20, 2009
john commented on the list crash-blossoms
What an auspicious beginning. Fantastic.
October 19, 2009
john commented on the word lame
Ga, sorry the front page of Wordie was borked all day. Figures that would happen on the first day in months I wasn't online :-(
October 18, 2009
john commented on the word bananas
One of Woody Allen's earlier movies. Sylvester Stallone has a small role in it.
October 17, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
Thanks gangerh, I agree—that page is more or less a stub right now. In the near future we'll add more data to it, and try to make it more easily scannable. Any suggestions? Are vertical lists better?
October 17, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
Thanks a million for those bug reports—I'll fix the line breaks, the word linking, and the use of html in comments.
Super glad people are checking out Wordnik, but of course it's totally kosher, and maybe for the best, to keep on using Wordie for things social until we move over. With a little time to rasp away the rough edges, things should Just Work when that happens.
October 17, 2009
john commented on the user Prolagus
Hi Pro, saw your comment on Wordnik. Wordie material hasn't yet moved over there, so for now I think it makes sense to just carry on wherever you want--for most of us here that means Wordie, I imagine. I don't think merging of comments and threads will cause much if any disruption at all when it happens.
October 17, 2009
john commented on the word madeupical
Who the hell is the 'johntest' guy? I don't trust him. Might be madeupical.
October 16, 2009
john commented on the word interview without coffee
That's fantastic. Because it really sounds horrible, doesn't it?
Though I thought they drank tea over there.
October 16, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
So the Wordnik redesign is up. I think I love it, but honestly I've been staring at it so long I'm not sure. But I definitely tried hard to make it a suitable landing pad for when we move house—it should take only a little poking around to see I plagiarized Wordie more than a few times. And with this in place it'll be easier to make minor tweaks more or less on the fly, so we'll continue noodling with it up until the point Wordie is integrated, with the goal of making that seamless and pleasant.
Something else you may notice about nuevo Wordnik is that it's ripping fast, despite having hugely more data than it had even a few months ago (and ludicrously more than Wordie). There have been many pretty rad engineering changes under the hood with this update, thanks to my colleagues Tony and Kumanan.
As always, please let me know if anything is broken, or if you have suggestions, questions, or criticism.
October 16, 2009
john commented on the word beth din
“For centuries, allegations and disputes involving children, marriage and business have been decided by rabbinical courts called beth dins, which conduct their own inquiries and do not report their findings to the secular authorities, even when they judge someone guilty of a crime.�?
The New York Times, Orthodox Jews Relying More on Legal Prosecution of Sex Abuse, by Paul Vitello, October 13, 2009
October 14, 2009
john commented on the word haredim
“Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who refer to themselves as the “haredim,�? meaning those who fear God, reject modern secular culture and for centuries have kept strict control over what they consider internal affairs.�?
The New York Times, Orthodox Jews Relying More on Legal Prosecution of Sex Abuse, by Paul Vitello, October 13, 2009
October 14, 2009
john commented on the word lobster cuddlers
Wow. I'm feeling a bit of the Spanish shame.
October 12, 2009
john commented on the word fugo
My new favorite word. Are there also words for bombs carried by other vehicles? Trains, say, or horses?
October 12, 2009
john commented on the word simperer
Wow, WeirdNet wins with alliteration.
October 12, 2009
john commented on the word quiet
Yeah, quiet. It's alway gone through mysterious cycles, but I can't help but wonder if part of it is trepidation about the Wordnik merger.
Much of which I hope will go away when the redesigned Wordnik launched soon. It's hugely Wordie inspired.
October 11, 2009
john commented on the word wind energy drying devices
“The issue has brought together younger folks who are more pro-environment and very older folks who remember a time before clotheslines became synonymous with being too poor to afford a dryer,�? said a Democratic lawmaker from Virginia, State Senator Linda T. Puller, who introduced a bill last session that would prohibit community associations in the state from restricting the use of “wind energy drying devices�? — i.e., clotheslines.
The New York Times, Debate Follows Bills to Remove Clotheslines Bans, by Ian Urbina, October 10, 2009
October 11, 2009
john commented on the word bingo wings
Ha! Just heard this and thought I would certainly be the first to list it. Outwitted once again by bilby.
kad suggests "bingo wing span" :-)
October 11, 2009
john commented on the word digital native
Hey sionnach, guess that makes you a digital native :-P When I worked at Woods Hole there were 10,000 ancient Hollerith cards lying around the computer department. If I had to program with those things I'd be a poet right now. Ok fine, a poetaster. But definitely not a programmer.
Harking back to my XO laptop comment from two years ago, a friend got one, and turns out they're totally useless. Cute as they are, they're just too underpowered to do anything useful.
October 11, 2009
john commented on the word jacquard
“The clothing also pushed boundaries, in particular how soft fabrics like chiffon look molded on the torso. Prints and jacquards, evoking oceans and species like moths, were engineered for each garment.”
The New York Times, A Blast of Youth, A Glimpse of the Future , by Cathy Horyn, October 8, 2009
October 9, 2009
john commented on the word rfl
hernesheir, I like that! Whichbe has a great list called Underwaterritory, but that's more about diving than fishing. And she has a great one too, Fishful thinking, but again that's more general fishiness than fishing itself. Tally ho, I say!
October 9, 2009
john commented on the word rfl
In the spirit of RFCs, this is the place for Requests For Lists. Some people have an hankering to make lists. Other people really want a list on a certain topic, or contributions to their public lists. Here is where the twain shall meet.
I'll kick it off: I'd really appreciate contributions to Down on the Farm, my just-created list of farm and agriculture-related words.
October 6, 2009
john commented on the word reality performer
From a CNN.com story:
"The reality performer posted messages about Jewell's death on Twitter."
Aren't we all reality performers?
October 4, 2009
john commented on the word lambchop
Yes!
October 4, 2009
john commented on the list the-ize-have-it
Hi 'zu, welcome, and nice list! You know you hit—a nerve? a nail's head?—when someone takes the ball and runs with it the way fbharjo has.
October 3, 2009
john commented on the word mediagenic
“I don’t believe that public opinion is spontaneously supporting Mr. Polanski at all,�? she said. “I believe that there is a distinction between the mediagenic class of artists and ordinary citizens that have a vision that is more simple.�?
The New York Times, Polanski Case Exposes Divisions in France, by Doreen Carvajal and Michael Cieply, September 29, 2009
September 30, 2009
john commented on the list txt
btw, "Don't text and drive, yo."
September 28, 2009
john commented on the list txt
Hey gangerh, digging this list. How about smtoe?
Would you mind mass-tagging these all... something? Maybe txtspk?
September 28, 2009
john commented on the word smtoe
Acronym for "sets my teeth on edge."
September 28, 2009
john commented on the word wordnikie suggestion box
Seanahan, great idea—maybe we stick with square brackets for links to comment pages, and introduce curly braces to link to main word pages?
September 28, 2009
john commented on the word ojek
“It empties its perennially clogged streets of ojeks, the kamikaze-like motorcycle taxis that weave in and out of traffic, and find shortcuts on sidewalks.�?
The New York Times, Jakarta Journal - Nannies Get a Holiday. Rich Families Get a Suite., by Norimitsu Onishi, September 27, 2009
September 28, 2009
john commented on the word bibliomancy
Reminds me of a favorite bar game from my misbegotten youth: psychic DJ. Stick a buck in the jukebox, close eyes, press buttons.
September 26, 2009
john commented on the word wordnikie suggestion box
Ah, mollusque, that is an idea near to the hearts of a few of us. It's a bit down the road and for performance and feasibility reasons will be something closer to facetted search than wide-open database access. But something along those lines is planned.
Seems like comments is in the lead, possibly categorizable. Thanks.
September 25, 2009
john commented on the word wordnikie suggestion box
To Pro's question, and something I was going to mention today: it would be a good idea to register for Wordnik using the same email address and username you used when registering for Wordie--that will make things easier all around when the sites are merged. We'll have a system in place for handling conflicts, and will try to make it as equitable and simple as possible.
Telofy: we're working on a redesign for a combined Wordie/Wordnik site. The html/css will be more semantic, with few to no embedded styles. And fonts will be sized with em's or some other scalable unit, so people can more easily size them as they wish.
September 25, 2009
john commented on the word disappearing lists
PU, can you email me (john@wordie.org) the names of the lists, and I'll look for them directly? Very sorry you're they've gone missing, but I feel pretty confident they still exist and haven't been permanently lost. Will look into it as soon as I have their names and verify they're still in the db.
September 24, 2009
john commented on the word wordnikie suggestion box
Hey folks, question for you. Comments on Wordie were originally called 'citations,' because I thought that's what the feature would be used for. As we got more social the labeling slowing migrated towards 'comments.'
The Wordnik equivalent is 'Notes.' As it stands it's not clear if a note is public or is a communication between you and Wordnik (they're public), and the word itself has too many related but different meanings: endnotes, footnotes, private notes, etc. The whole feature is being overhauled to be more clear, including the labeling.
So the question is, when Wordie and Wordnik are merged, what do we call them? My inclination is 'comments,' but if anyone thinks otherwise, I'd love to hear it.
A quick status update on the whole shebang: kad, spawn (hat tip c_b :-) and I landed in CA last week. I'm in the midst of helping redesign Wordnik, which should hopefully be completed sometime in October. It'll be a big improvement over the current site, and will incorporate many of the ideas expressed here. That will pave the way for Wordie integration, which will happen some time not too long after the redesign launches (actual date TBD). As always, please email me comments, concerns, and suggestions.
September 24, 2009
john commented on the word schwa
This page is very hurtful to me. My mom's name is Schwa.
September 24, 2009
john commented on the word a pretty girl is like a melody
Wow, I had no idea that Stephin Merritt (The Magnetic Fields) was riffing on this. Cool!
September 22, 2009
john commented on the word limpoma
Wow, gross.
September 22, 2009
john commented on the word 24-7 spokane mistress
Well... Get thee to Spokane!
September 21, 2009
john commented on the word cumshaw
Oh, madmouth, thanks for this.
Tell your waiter you're gonna give them a great big cumshaw, you're likely to get a tureen dumped in your lap. Accidentally, of course.
September 20, 2009
john commented on the word zabaleen
“For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city. They collected the trash, sold the recyclables and fed the organic waste to their pigs — which they then slaughtered and ate.�?
The New York Times, Egypt Discovers the Flaw in Killing All Its Pigs, by Michael Slackman, September 19, 2009
September 20, 2009
john commented on the list skip-the-light-fontastic
Love this list. Though I thought it was about skipvia at first :-)
September 20, 2009
john commented on the word cheese grits
Oh Waffle House, how I love thee! Best thing about the South. Here I am in front of one, in February 2002. That's from four cross-country road trips ago (I move too much).
The little white Honda, aka The Lemming, sure was a trooper.
September 18, 2009
john commented on the list ponderable-plant-names
Totally loving this list as well, thanks hernesheir.
When you're done, or donish, would you mind bulk tagging these whatever you think is appropriate? Maybe 'plants', or 'flora', or both?
September 18, 2009
john commented on the word tempus fugit
“You can barely see the gears in the timepiece actually moving — none of that tempus fugit nonsense often ascribed to working clocks.�?
The New York Times, How the Railroads Took Control of Time, by Alan Feuer, September 16, 2009
September 17, 2009
john commented on the word pamphlet
Right on c_b, I agree on all accounts--I like the sound and feel of this word, and I love its association with direct democracy and Paine in particular.
A certain right-wing demagogue has tarnished the name of one of Paine's best-known pamphlets, Common Sense by appropriating it as the title of one of his own books, which is annoying, but also amusing. He must not have read The Age of Reason, a full-throated attack on organized religion and not the kind of thing most American conservatives want to be associated with.
Thomas Paine died in New York City, in the West Village, around the corner from where I used to live—there's a plaque on the building in which he died.
September 16, 2009
john commented on the word pandrogynous
“In 2003, the leader of the band, Genesis P-Orridge, began undergoing procedures to become “pandrogynous,�? including getting breast implants.�?
The New Yorker, HIGH FIDELITY: Music that lives in the headphones of angry teens, by Sasha Frere-Jones, September 14, 2009
September 16, 2009
john commented on the word chat
“On a hot summer day, children can be seen riding their bikes around enormous mounds of chat — pulverized rock laced with lead and iron.�?
The New York Times, Welcome to Our Town. Wish We Weren’t Here., by Susan Saulny, September 13, 2009
September 16, 2009
john commented on the user seanmacdhai
hi seanmac, can you send me a delete request from the email address you used to create the account? i'll zap you as soon as i get that.
September 16, 2009
john commented on the word wordnikie suggestion box
Still on the road (hellloooo Indianapolis!) and won't be regularly online for a few more days, but wanted to pipe in about the dashboard page ideas before sacking out.
I should have phrased it better, but there aren't any plans right now for anything in the way of 'daily me'-style customization. I was thinking of a 'zeitgeist' page that would be the same for everyone. Similar to the current Wordie homepage, but also including snapshots of what people are doing with the Wordnik data--words being looked up and favorited, pronunciations added, etc. It would be in the spirit of 'Wordie' tab, but it wouldn't be called that, and it would have more and more kinds of info on it. I think it would be a disservice to both sites if Wordie was just sort of glued onto the side of Wordnik. I think there will be sections that are very clearly derived from Wordie (list pages being the most obvious), but others where a careful integration makes more sense. A 'Zeitgeist'* page is one of those--if the idea is to be awash in recent activity, might as well dive into a deeper river that includes material from both current sites.
The reason I think this should be on its own page, and not the homepage, is that to someone new to the site, a wall of stats and comments is impenetrable and intimidating. With Wordie I didn't really care about that, despite the fact that the vast majority of visits weren't from regulars, because I built it strictly for our entertainment :-) But Wordnik is both entertainment and a utility. So rather than try to square that circle on one page, it seemed a better idea to have two pages tailored to different purposes and audiences. The homepage might have a subset of recent additions, but not the full firehose.
As telofy intimated, this could be done by changing the state of the homepage when you're logged in. But right now my inclination is to keep it simple and just separate them.
* totally stole that page title from Librarything**
** as i did these little sotto voce footnote asides. thanks tim!
September 13, 2009
john commented on the word wordnikie suggestion box
Hi all, sorry I've been a bit absent, just packed up our house and sent it off in a truck. We're driving cross-country right now and taking a few extra days to visit family, who conveniently live in a straight line between Pittsburgh and Chicago.
I'm cataloging and trying to absorb all this good stuff, and enjoying, as always, the digressions. A little surprised no cupcakes have been flung.
One question: yarb & c_b, would you mind if the comments and perpetually moving snapshot did have its own page, but it wasn't necessarily the homepage? Think Librarything's 'zeitgeist,' or the way Twitter and Facebook don't really have homepages when you're logged in. When was the last time you looked at Wikipedia's homepage? I'm wondering if the 'official' homepage could be a basic intro to new folks and a jumping-off point for searches, and regulars could use a different page as their home base?
September 12, 2009
john commented on the word madeupical
Here it is on Wordnik. I like that Wordnik's giant computer brain suggests "cromulent" as a related word.
September 11, 2009
john commented on the word palestra
Or possibly a new fat substitute.
September 10, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
Ptero: thank you, and extremely involved! All suggestions will be listened to and seriously considered, and many implemented, I hope. Though since I'm no longer a one man band I have to retire my standard excuse for non-implementation (lack of time and competence) and start using a new one: Erin* won't let me :-)
Totally kidding. Actually when Erin (McKean, CEO of Wordnik and my new boss) saw that people were concerned that Wordnik was too serious for the likes of us, she laughed and laughed. Then paused, possibly horked a little, and laughed some more. Wordnik does some serious shit. The corpus is enormous, growing rapidly, and a feat of engineering. But it's not meant to be a mausoleum for words—more like a theme park.
* Until now I had totally forgotten about that Errata post from two years ago, but I clearly wanted Wordie to join Wordnik before Wordnik even existed. How weird.
September 10, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
Thanks everyone :-) I think things will work out Pro--in part because the Wordnik community is still nascent. Erin and co. are hoping we *become* the Wordnik community, schoolyard antics and all. Milosrdenstvi is right--14,000 people have signed up for Wordie, give or take a few bots, but it is what it is because of the spirit of a few score of us. I really hope and believe we can transplant that.
Moll, Wordnik is case sensitive--we'll finally be able to talk about turkey and Turkey without confusion. Wordnik has some heavy duty engineering talent, which is going to enable a growing number of very cool things. One existing example: Wordnik's autocomplete, which is awesome. As opposed to mine, which was so useless it verged on being another form of 'random word.'
September 9, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
I totally understand trepidation. I have it too--I very much hope that my favorite Wordies stick around, and that Wordie+Wordnik works for the people who've contributed so much. So I am going to plead with you all to hang in there at least until we see how it goes. And to tell me what would make it work for you--I'll reiterate my promise to listen to everything everyone says and take it to heart.
VO: A redesign of Wordnik is imminent and in my purview. One current thought is that there might not be as many, or any, sub-pages, except for a talk page--the Wordie page. Sort of like Wikipedia--one data page (better organized and easier to use than the current series of Wordnik data pages), and one discussion page (hopefully funnier and less contentious than Wikipedia's). Which would help the talk pages stay a little cleaner and more Wordie-esque than the data-intense pages (though I think data density can be a great thing when it's well-organized).
This is for word pages--I'm imagining lists will pretty much remain as-is functionally, though they'll wear Wordnik's upcoming new design. Though we (I have to admit, it's fun being more than just a royal we :-) are totally open to ideas.
September 9, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
Should have mentioned this in the blog post too: Wordnik is officially adding madeupical to the corpus. A sort of bring-the-new-neighbors-brownies kind of gesture :-)
September 9, 2009
john commented on the word wordnik
Hey folks, wanted to let you regulars to be the first to know, they is now we. We've been assimilated :-)
September 9, 2009
john commented on the word bugs
Hi Asativum, you should be able to see your comments now.
September 6, 2009
john commented on the word boycott
“There aren't many individuals in history whose names are taken in vain more than Capt. C.C. Boycott, the notorious Irish landlord who cut the wages of his tenant farmers and got himself ostracized -- and the English language enriched -- in return.�?
The Los Angeles Times, , by Michael Hiltzik, August 31, 2009
September 3, 2009
john commented on the word cow
“A cell on wheels, or COW, is a miniature version of a cell site that is typically used to provide temporary service for outdoor special event.�?
The New York Times, AT&T Races to Expand the Network, September 3 , 2009
September 3, 2009
john commented on the word ass muffin
A rear-facing muffin top?
September 3, 2009
john commented on the word corpus
I was blathering about dictionaries at some point recently and kad thought I was talking about a porpoise.
August 31, 2009
john commented on the word suchnot
As used by kad five minutes ago, when describing the contents of our attic: "camping gear, teapots, and suchnot."
August 31, 2009
john commented on the word ^5
@mikerugnetta says this is an "internet high-five." Love it.
August 29, 2009
john commented on the word coverlet
“He’s a regular guy or as close to regular as any 35-year-old can possibly be who sleeps under a poster of his favorite football star while tucked under a coverlet imprinted with the names of N.F.L. teams.�?
The New York Times, Giants Die-Hard Takes One for the Team, by Manohla Dargis, August 28, 2009
August 29, 2009
john commented on the word farctate
Century Dictionary, via Wordnik, says this means "stuffed; crammed or full; without vacuities."
Without vacuities. Nice.
August 28, 2009
john commented on the list we-all-scream-for-it-ben-jerry-s-ice-cream-flavors
Huzzah!
August 28, 2009
john commented on the word ice cream
Funny that there isn't a list of Ben & Jerry's flavors. Like, for instance, AmeriCone Dream.
August 27, 2009
john commented on the word timbales
A Cuban percussion instrument.
August 26, 2009
john commented on the word international drum month
Thanks for the heads-up. That only leaves me five weeks to obtain and learn to play the timbales.
August 26, 2009
john commented on the list words-from-georgia
Yeah, the script is beautiful. If and when you slow down on the list, would you mind tagging the whole thing 'georgian,' for the record? You can use the 'add tags' link below the title of any of your own lists to tag all the words in a given list in one fell swoop.
August 25, 2009
john commented on the word join, or die.
The first political cartoon published in an American newspaper. By Ben Franklin, no less.
August 24, 2009
john commented on the word blocker
“Each team fields five players at a time. Out of those five players, four are blockers and one is the jammer (point scorer). The four blockers from each team line up together and form a pack, while the two jammers line up 30 feet behind.�?
—Gotham Girls Roller Derby
August 23, 2009
john commented on the word pivot
“The skater wearing the star on her helmet is the jammer. The skater wearing the stripe on her helmet is called the PIVOT. The pivot is the pack leader and defensive play caller, similar to football's middle linebacker position.�?
—Gotham Girls Roller Derby
August 23, 2009
john commented on the word jammer
“The objectives of roller derby are relatively simple. Each team fields a single point scoring skater ("Jammer") whose object is to lap as many opposing skaters as they can.�?
—Gotham Girls Roller Derby
August 23, 2009
john commented on the word nuked lunch
I also enjoyed the sequel, Baked Lunch.
August 21, 2009
john commented on the word attosecond
“Stress may be most readily associated with the attosecond pace of postindustrial society, but the body’s stress response is one of our oldest possessions.�?
The New York Times, Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop, by Natalie Angier, August 17, 2009
August 21, 2009
john commented on the word perseveration
“And though perseverance can be an admirable trait and is essential for all success in life, when taken too far it becomes perseveration — uncontrollable repetition — or simple perversity.�?
The New York Times, Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop, by Natalie Angier, August 17, 2009
August 21, 2009
john commented on the word mangue bit
“Returning to his home state of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil, Otto quickly became a part of the mangue bit movement, which fused home-grown rhythms like the maracatu, frevo and ciranda with the latest in imported computer and studio technology.�?
The New York Times, Brazilian, but With a Different Beat, by Larry Rohter, August 19, 2009
August 21, 2009
john commented on the word pubic
Mildly amusing, sort of, that right now on the homepage this is listed just above yak-shaving.
August 20, 2009
john commented on the word yak-shaving
Just came across this term on Seth Godin's blog (who apparently discovered it on Joi Ito's Web), and I love it.
August 20, 2009
john commented on the word pauciloquent
From Wordnik: "Uttering few words; saying little."
August 18, 2009
john commented on the word boondoggle
Before it became a bad word, “boondoggle�? was an innocent, humble craft. It was the Boy Scouts of America who claimed credit for coining the word, to refer to the plaited leather lanyards that they made and wore around their necks.
That all changed on April 3, 1935, at a hearing in New York City on how New Deal relief money was being spent. A Brooklyn crafts teacher reluctantly testified that he was paid to show the jobless how to make “boon doggles.�? The outcry was swift. “$3,187,000 Relief is Spent to Teach Jobless to Play,�? trumpeted a front-page headline the next day in The New York Times. “ ‘Boon Doggles’ Made.�?
The New York Times, Boondoggle. One’s Name for Another’s Necessity., by Michael Cooper, August 17, 2009
August 18, 2009
john commented on the word watergate
Yes please!
August 18, 2009
john commented on the word tablescaping
As seen here.
August 17, 2009
john commented on the word poirot
In America, I think solicitors are people trying to sell you stuff.
Isn't Wordie mildly intoxicating? ;-)
August 17, 2009
john commented on the word shinbone
Also, connected to the knee bone.
August 15, 2009
john commented on the word neophile
“A neophile or neophiliac can be defined as a personality type characterized by a strong affinity for novelty.�? Wikipedia
August 14, 2009
john commented on the word white spider
“Carlo Marioni, 65, a New York bartender with more than 40 years’ experience who now works at Pietro’s, agreed: “Those years, for lunch, they used to drink three martinis. Then they’d come back before dinner for rusty nails, white spiders.�?
The New York Times, Sixties Accuracy in Every Sip, by Robert Simonson, August 11, 2009
August 13, 2009
john commented on the word bivvy sack
See also bivy.
August 12, 2009
john commented on the word plu
Also an acronym for People Like Us.
August 10, 2009
john commented on the word bubi
Hi ricovicino, thanks so much for that. I didn't think this could possible be real, but it is, and it made my evening.
Welcome to Wordie :-)
August 9, 2009
john commented on the word browse
In response to some of VanishedOne's comments on Ruby on Rails, the new browse links on the homepage now also let you see words and phrases that start with punctuation.
This is a work on progress, as tends to be the case with things I start on the train ride home and deploy the same night.
From now I'll put this New Jersey Transit logo on quick-and-dirty train work: .
This is not a commentary on NJTransit, which generally does a fine job, and which Wordie owes much.
August 9, 2009
john commented on the word topo gigio
It must be confusing you with a member of the illitterati .
Me it has dialed: I'm being presented an ad for "JCPenny in Manhattan."
JC Penny is in Manhattan? WTF?
August 9, 2009
john commented on the word illitterati
Idiot celebritties? I kinda like itt.
August 9, 2009
john commented on the word noughties
“The "nillies" seems to lack the correct ring, while the "double-o"s is bound to be the intellectual property of Ian Fleming's estate.
Reggie Kray might favour the 'noughties' The "noughties" could be the one to head the - admittedly sorry - list of contenders.
And yet the "noughties" still sounds like a word East End villains might use to describe imprisonable activities - or even worse a polite, middle-class code for the reproductive organs.�?
BBC News, The noughties: So where are we now?, January 1, 2000
August 9, 2009
john commented on the word topo gigio
Had to Gooble this one, but likewise, I loved it at first glance.
August 8, 2009
john commented on the word ruby on rails
Yeah, that would be me. I just added a 'browse' section to the right column of the home page, which presents every word and phrase on Wordie listed in alphabetical order. Briefly borked things when I moved it into production.
All better now. Let me know if there's anything I can do to improve that 'browse' business. It's partly for the machines amongst us, but I found it a lot of fun to poke through.
August 8, 2009
john commented on the word ruby on rails
A web development framework, using the Ruby language and based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern.
August 8, 2009
john commented on the word splattercore
“Dalton is the editor of “Mythtym,�? a new anthology of essays, fiction and artwork -- both serious and campy -- about werewolves, unicorns and what she calls “mirror horror.�? As she explains: “If you watch enough of those movies, they’re all exactly the same. These splattercore movies have their own tropes -- like how the best way to show blood is to cut someone up in the shower so you see it on the tiles. But then you realize that these clichés are based on archetypes. The mirror as a symbol seems most powerful in a time of fear, when people step back and look at themselves.�?
The Los Angeles Times, Trinie Dalton's horrors and unicorns, by August Brown, January 29, 2009
August 7, 2009
john commented on the word phonophore
Oh man, I'm sorry, I saw that and thought it was a bug in my handling of unicode characters. Wasn't automagical, was manually intrusive :-(
From now on I'll refrain from second-guess copyedits in languages and notations I don't know.
August 7, 2009
john commented on the word twitter
Been down all morning, and Facebook is under attack too. I'm feeling kind of left out that Wordie wasn't targeted.
August 7, 2009
john commented on the word undictionaried
See Erin McKean on redefining the dictionary. Or madeupical, for that matter.
August 6, 2009
john commented on the word macher
“For instance, a lot of the things that high-minded left-wingers hate about contemporary Washington — the legal corruption, if you will, associated with lobbying and influence peddling and corporate money — are a direct result of having built a big, expensive government that every would-be macher in the world feels they need to influence.�?
The New York Times, Are Liberals More Corrupt?, by Gail Collins and Ross Douthat, August 5, 2009
August 6, 2009
john commented on the word modcon
I had always thought this was real estate shorthand for "modern conveniences," as in "the kitchen has a trash compactor and all the other modcons."
But apparently it's also a semi-annual heavy body modification convention.
August 4, 2009
john commented on the word fred
I think so. This was in Portland, Maine, in the mid-nineties. The cool racer guys were often as not from other shops; we were more like the scrappy punk rock (the staff) and family (the customers) shop. We were the only proper bike shop in town selling tricycles, I think. I moved, sadly, but they're still there: Back Bay Bicycle. Stop in if you're in Portland, they're super nice.
August 4, 2009
john commented on the word squirrely
See comment on fred.
August 4, 2009
john commented on the word fred
In my misbegotten youth I was a bicycle mechanic, and the cool racer types who hung around the shop where I worked would dismissively refer to non-cool-racer types as "Freds." Freds are the kind of cyclists who don't ride much, but are over-geared. They have little rear-view mirrors glued onto their helmets, and a spare tire and a pump and two water bottles and a little toolkit and an altimeter strapped or bolted onto different parts of their bike frame. Freds have kickstands and fenders and a rack and a bell. They have a little basket on their handlebars. They both tuck their pant legs into their socks and wear a reflective strap on each ankle to prevent getting chain grease on their trousers. And most of all, Freds are squirrely: they have trouble riding in a straight line, possibly because of all the appurtenances affixed to their bike and their person. So you don't want to ride too close to a Fred, because they're unpredictable and despite their harmless appearance, inadvertently dangerous.
August 4, 2009
john commented on the word electret
Heaviside? What a delightful name.
August 4, 2009
john commented on the word creepy crawling
“Was Manson's dress rehearsal for homicide, known as "creepy crawling", some kind of humorous terrorism that might have been fun? Breaking silently into middle-class "pigs'" homes with your friends while you are tripping on LSD and gathering around the sleeping residents in their beds, not to harm them but to watch them sleep (the way Warhol did in that movie) and "experiencing the fear"? It does sound like it could have been a mind-bending adventure. When the Mansonites went further and moved the furniture around before they left, just to fuck with the waking homeowners' perception of reality, was this beautiful or evil? Could the Manson Family's actions also be some kind of freakish "art"?�?
The Huffington Post, Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship, Part 1 of 5, by John Waters, August 3, 2009
August 4, 2009
john commented on the word quidity
Just rescued this from the orphanage, so someone besides myself originally entered it. Can't find much on it anywhere, except for this blog post, which defines it as "the essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity of a thing."
Fine word, somewhat mysterious. Anyone know any more about it?
August 2, 2009
john commented on the word quidity
http://megweaves.blogspot.com/2009/05/quidity.html
August 2, 2009
john commented on the word bugs
Thanks much for the reports--I've been fiddling about again, if you hadn't guessed :-) It's for the best in the long run, but sorry for the recent collateral damage.
Profiles should be fixed (sorry for disappearing you skipvia), the duplicate derelict has been evicted, and the comment page profiles are properly possessive.
Treeseed, private notes were broken when you reported that, but they should be fixed now. If that's not the case for you would you mind emailing me, and letting me know what browser you're using?
VanishedOne, your comments page is back.
Sionnach, I still have no idea what's causing your duplicates (I can't duplicate the bug). I may email you, if you don't mind, and ask for specifics to help me debug. I'm really sorry about that--I very much don't want a bug to drive away a favorite Wordie, but I can see how it would be maddening.
August 1, 2009
john commented on the word pirhanna
Tagging 25 seemingly random words 'std,' 'slut,' and a bunch of other nonsense is against the official Terms of Service.
If the random nonsense was even mildly amusing, it would be covered under the humor exemption. But this case failed to meet that standard.
August 1, 2009
john commented on the word pirhanna
Some kind of tag abuse going on, looking into it.
Update: all better now. Thanks c_b!
July 31, 2009
john commented on the word features
Hi bilb, that would be a large insect you've found--I'll fix by tonight (my tonight :-) at the latest.
I'll see if I can quickly add a 'toggle tags' option in your profile preference section, too.
July 31, 2009
john commented on the word paco
“She and the group of mothers she helps organize have become the only bulwark, it seems, against the irrepressible spread of paco, a highly addictive, smokable cocaine residue that has destroyed thousands of lives in Argentina and caused a cycle of drug-induced street violence never seen before in this country.�?
The New York Times, Cheap Cocaine Floods Argentina, Devouring Lives, by Alexei Barrionuevo, February 23, 2008
July 30, 2009
john commented on the user smrtrthnu
Hi smrtrthnme, thanks for the Latin list, I'm loving it. Any way you could add translations to some or all of those?
July 30, 2009
john commented on the word mancation
aka prison
July 30, 2009
john commented on the word white culture
Oh bring it on—I love this line of attack. The longer the idiotocracy running the Republican party persists in this retrograde nonsense, the longer they'll stumble around in the wilderness losing elections. Morality aside, the demographics are just against them. America is a diverse place and getting more so, and tactics that intentionally alienate everyone but the ever-shrinking rump Republican base guarantee failure.
They'll figure this out eventually and try to start appealing to a wider audience. But if they get thrashed for a few more election cycles before that happens, I wouldn't mind. Palin in 2112!
July 30, 2009
john commented on the word white culture
Don't be vague like that, lg_nazi. Have the courage of your convictions. What, exactly, is Obama trying to sell? What groups is he disproportionately favoring?
The group that has most benefitted from his policies has certainly been the bankers he bailed out. So if you're talking about rich white people, I agree with you entirely.
July 30, 2009
john commented on the word white culture
It's absolutely tremendous that the ad currently on this page says "Confucius Institute Teach you pure Chinese."
These clowns are maybe the best retort to racism I've ever seen.
July 30, 2009
john commented on the word douche-cock
UD spells this dochecock.
July 30, 2009
john commented on the word white culture
Glenn Beck is a douche-cock. That said, there's a very popular web site dedicated to answering skipvia's very question. To me, it's embodied by the Volvo 240 station wagon.
July 30, 2009
john commented on the word anomaly detection
“The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo�? type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.�?
The New York Times, In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable, by Benedict Carey, July 27, 2009
July 29, 2009
john commented on the word pole position
Can't believe this hadn't been listed yet. It refers to the prime starting position in horse and car racing: at the front of the pack, on the inside. It's also the name of a great (for its time) arcade video game of the early 80s.
Anyone know of any good motor sports or automotive or racing lists?
July 28, 2009
john commented on the word frigor
“Frigor�? is one of the names given by 19th-century scientists to the realm of absolute zero, the bottom limit of cold. This is a place, the chemist and physicist James Dewar imagined, so cold that molecular motion ceases and the “death of matter�? ensues.
The New York Times, Less Than Zero, by Mary Roach, July 23, 2009
July 28, 2009
john commented on the word derel
““Dash was like me, a polished derel�?—a polished derelict, says Kunle.�?
New York Magazine, Chasing Dash Snow, by Ariel Levy, January 7, 2007
July 27, 2009
john commented on the word rak
“McGinley and Colen met Snow when they were in art school (at Parsons and RISD, respectively) and Snow was 16 and living on 13th Street in Alphabet City and starting a graffiti crew called Irak (in graffiti slang, to “rak�? is to steal, which they did) with a guy named Ace Boon Kunle, “a big, black homosexual,�? as McGinley describes him, whose tag is Earsnot.�?
New York Magazine, Chasing Dash Snow, by Ariel Levy, January 7, 2007
July 27, 2009
john commented on the word dodrantal
From phrontistery.info: "of nine inches in length".
July 26, 2009
john commented on the word ad verecundiam
Thanks sionnach—it's so pleasing to discover a phrase to describe something you're aware of, but didn't previously have a label for.
Here's a good synopsis of it.
July 26, 2009
john commented on the word jovian
“Being an astronomy buff used to be a lonely pursuit, just you and the telescope, staring up into the night sky. But in an age when anyone can make a planetary discovery through a $400 telescope then instantly share it with the world — hey, check out my cool Jupiter shots on Flickr! — amateur astronomers have capitalized on opportunities like the big thud on the Jovian gas giant to confirm that they are not alone.�?
The New York Times, The Bruise Heard Round the World, by Alex Williams, July 24, 2009
July 26, 2009
john commented on the word bokeh
“Fujifilm says its $280 FinePix F70EXR and $600 FinePix S200EXR use its advanced EXR sensor and multiframe technology to enable users to simulate the wide-aperture background blurs (or bokeh) of D.S.L.R. cameras.�?
The New York Times, Fujifilm Adds EXR Sensor to Super-Zooms, by Rik Fairlie, July 22, 2009
July 24, 2009
john commented on the word lesbian bullet
“Have the 1990s vanished so quickly from memory? Has Hillary Clinton’s murder of Vince Foster, shooting him in the head with a lesbian bullet, been so completely forgotten?�?
Whiskey Fire, Regions of My Disease, by Marc Ambinder, July 22, 2009, as quoted in The New York Times, ‘Birther’ Boom, by Eric Etheridge, July 22, 2009
July 23, 2009
john commented on the word chumiles
“The Baron clanked in on his pointy silver-capped cowboy boots and began poking around, asking questions about the Southern Mexican cuisine on the menu — What was the difference between a cemita and a torta? Do they ever cook with chumiles, a tiny, fragrant insect sometimes used in salsa? — while Ms. Mata got busy at the stove.�?
The New York Times, A Bronx Star Without Pinstripes, by Melena Ryzik, July 21, 2009
July 23, 2009
john commented on the list guide-to-the-perplexed
Thanks brobbins, fantastic source for a list. Welcome to Wordie!
July 22, 2009
john commented on the word galápagos syndrome
“The Japanese have a name for their problem: Galápagos syndrome.
Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins — explains Takeshi Natsuno, who teaches at Tokyo’s Keio University.�?
The New York Times, Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global, by Hiroko Tabuchi, July 19, 2009
July 20, 2009
john commented on the word bint
From the Wiktionary: "(British, pejorative) (also Digger slang) Woman, girl."
July 20, 2009
john commented on the word chorine
“Lena was farmed out fairly frequently and had to endure occasional racist slurs, beatings for minor infractions and schoolgirl mockery: she was called “little yellow bastard�? because of her supposedly “white daddy.�? At age 16, to the disapproval of some family members, she became a chorine at the celebrated Cotton Club, where Ethel Waters singing “Stormy Weather�? had a lasting effect on her.�?
The New York Times, No Prisoner of Love, by John Simon, July 16, 2009
July 19, 2009
john commented on the word health alteration committee
“Assassination is a word that still haunts the C.I.A. The most lurid of the volumes produced by the Senate committee headed by Frank Church of Idaho in the mid-1970s detailed the C.I.A.’s plots to kill foreign political figures, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. Such intrigues were overseen by the agency’s so-called Health Alteration Committee, which once O.K.’d the dispatch of a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief to a left-leaning Iraqi colonel.�?
The New York Times, Government Hit Squads, Minus the Hits, by Scott Shane, July 18, 2009
July 19, 2009
john commented on the word hypersphere
Reminds me of Rounder Records.
July 19, 2009
john commented on the user briwref
Hi briwref! Thanks for all the collective nouns--I love "A darth of cheneys" :-)
The ones you added as comments to a shrink of violets, would you mind adding them to the list itself? It's growing to be quite a fantastic open list, your additions would be most welcome there.
July 19, 2009
john commented on the word aché
“In the lexicon of Santeria, “aché�? is the term applied to the life force, or to vital energy and good vibes. That word turns up in Caridad De La Luz’s new Off Broadway production, “Boogie Rican Blvd., the Musical,�? but in a larger sense Ms. De La Luz herself seems to embody and be guided by those qualities, both onstage and off.�?
The New York Times, A Wise(cracking) Latina Makes Her Way Onstage, by Larry Rohter, July 17, 2009
July 19, 2009
john commented on the word kibo
“NASA officials said it was a nuisance but not a safety issue, and they hoped to resolve the problem before the next spacewalk on Monday.
Indeed, Wolf and Kopra wasted no time 220 miles up prepping the Kibo lab -- Hope in Japanese -- and the new porch for their mechanical hookup.�?
The New York Times, Astronauts Embark on First Outing, Associated Press, July 18, 2009
July 19, 2009
john commented on the word anchor
“In 1952, the first presidential year in which television outshined radio, Mr. Cronkite was chosen to lead the coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. By Mr. Cronkite’s account, it was then that the term “anchor�? was first used — by Sig Mickelson, the first director of television news for CBS, who had likened the chief announcer’s job to an anchor that holds a boat in place. Paul Levitan, another CBS executive, and Don Hewitt, then a young producer, have also been credited with the phrase.�?
The New York Times, Walter Cronkite, Voice of TV News, Dies, by Douglas Martin, July 17, 2009
July 18, 2009
john commented on the word cronkiter
“Along with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Mr. Cronkite was among the first celebrity anchormen. In 1995, 14 years after he retired from the “CBS Evening News,�? a TV Guide poll ranked him No. 1 in seven of eight categories for measuring television journalists. (He professed incomprehension that Maria Shriver beat him out in the eighth category, attractiveness.) He was so widely known that in Sweden anchormen were once called Cronkiters.�?
The New York Times, Walter Cronkite, Voice of TV News, Dies, by Douglas Martin, July 17, 2009
July 18, 2009
john commented on the word wanqueur
Although hamsteur is fantastic too. Also happily unsavory. I love this game. Well played!
July 18, 2009
john commented on the word wanqueur
FTW!
July 18, 2009
john commented on the word late blight
First the bananapocalypse, now this. This is awful:
“A highly contagious fungus that destroys tomato plants has quickly spread to nearly every state in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, and the weather over the next week may determine whether the outbreak abates or whether tomato crops are ruined, according to federal and state agriculture officials.
The spores of the fungus, called late blight, are often present in the soil, and small outbreaks are not uncommon in August and September. But the cool, wet weather in June and the aggressively infectious nature of the pathogen have combined to produce what Martin A. Draper, a senior plant pathologist at the United States Department of Agriculture, described as an “explosive” rate of infection.”
The New York Times, Outbreak of Fungus Threatens Tomato Crop, by Julia Moskin, July 17, 2009
July 18, 2009
john commented on the list escapemn-s-list
Hi EscapeMN, thanks for the words and the definition. A bit of guidance, if you don't mind: if you add those two words (epiplexis and epiplectic) to the list by putting them in the 'add word' form and hitting 'add', they'll be put into Wordie in a way that lets you see who else has listed those words, and it will let other people add them to their lists. That also creates a unique page for the word, and lets you add comments and definitions to the word page itself.
Welcome to Wordie!
July 17, 2009
john commented on the user sionnach
Ga, Sionnach, I somehow missed your bug report a few weeks ago about all the duplicates. I'll look into that ASAP, which unfortunately probably means this coming weekend. Last thing in the world I want is to diminish Wordie's appeal to you :-)
July 16, 2009
john commented on the word marsupial
Fire away at Jerseyland. It's more like my penitentiary.
July 16, 2009
john commented on the list landscape
When I first saw the name of this list, I misread it as "Listscape."
July 16, 2009
john commented on the word long john silver
Hi TaniaS, staying alert, I took the liberty of removing your spam link. Thanks!
July 15, 2009
john commented on the list logicalbiscotti-s-omniglottery
Omniglottery, I love that. Are you perchance affiliated with the delightful Omniglot.com?
July 14, 2009
john commented on the word quelquefois
Dayum? Dayum! That took me a second, as I was pronouncing it "day-yum" in my head.
July 14, 2009
john commented on the word features
Oops. Fixed, thanks. Perfectly straight forward indeed :-)
July 14, 2009
john commented on the word euskara
See also Euskera.
July 14, 2009
john commented on the word euskera
I've also seen this spelled Euskara.
July 14, 2009
john commented on the word hyena butter
I was dubious that the anus could be considered a gland, but apparently in hyenas and dogs there is indeed an anal gland. Which sometimes requires grooming. Yuck.
July 13, 2009
john commented on the word features
Soup is done :-)
July 13, 2009
john commented on the list gypsy-rapist
Wow. I'm having a lot of trouble triangulating what your blog might be about. Pantophobia, I really hope :-)
July 12, 2009
john commented on the word bilat
“The club is “a place to see and be seen,” as its Web site says — that is, unless you are a visiting president who after a day and a half of blinis, beluga and bilats (the diplo term for “bilateral meetings”) just wants to hang out with the clan.”
The New York Times, Obama Dines In, to Some Russians’ Distaste, by Peter Baker, July 7, 2009
July 8, 2009
john commented on the word glame
See also gawesome: GAY + AWESOME
July 8, 2009
john commented on the word glame
Applies to shitty Google products. Written GLame and pronounced "Gee-Lame," a la GMail.
July 8, 2009
john commented on the word iquitarod
“My 14-year-old daughter just told me that someone on Twitter has come up with a new term for Palin's resignation: Iquitarod.”
The Huffington Post, The Iquitarod!: Sarah Palin's Latest Arctic Sport, by Geoffrey Dunn, July 6, 2009
July 7, 2009
john commented on the word chichevache
Best defense: don't be virtuous.
July 4, 2009
john commented on the word hijra
“Outside the hall where the Naz Foundation news conference was held, dozens of young men and women gathered to celebrate, along with a group of hijras, men who dress and act like women who classify themselves as belonging to neither gender.”
The New York Times, Indian Court Overturns Gay Sex Ban, by Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar, July 2, 2009
July 2, 2009
john commented on the word amusia
“Anne Barker, however, sits at the opposite extreme: she suffers from amusia, an inability to hear or respond to music.”
The New York Times, Our Brains on Music: The Science, by Mike Hale, June 29, 2009
July 1, 2009
john commented on the word euridice
Doesn't mentos have some meaning in Greek, in addition to being a breath mint? But this just struck me as a nice bit of freely-associated doggerel. And I love the phrase "copy-off." And I love that the list it's on is called "Jejuju"--I have no idea what that means, either, and Gooble isn't helping.
June 25, 2009
john commented on the word badarak
What the Armenian church calls the divine liturgy.
June 23, 2009
john commented on the word euridice
Best definition in months. Been a while since Wordie left me snickering uncontrollably.
June 23, 2009
john commented on the user john
:-)
June 22, 2009
john commented on the word sarod
“Unlike his father, a volatile and uneven performer, Mr. Khan maintained an austere demeanor onstage while coaxing passages of extraordinary intensity from his sarod, an instrument with 25 strings, 10 plucked with a piece of coconut shell while the remainder resonate sympathetically.”
The New York Times, Ali Akbar Khan, Sarod Virtuoso, Dies at 87, by William Grimes, June 19, 2009
June 20, 2009
john commented on the word ustad
“Mr. Khan, whose name is often preceded by the honorific Ustad, or master, was born in Shibpur, a small village in Bengal (now Bangladesh).”
The New York Times, Ali Akbar Khan, Sarod Virtuoso, Dies at 87, by William Grimes, June 19, 2009
June 20, 2009
john commented on the word preggo
Some kind of pasta sauce, isn't it?
June 19, 2009
john commented on the list kawaii-headdesk
U, can't believe I missed this list first time around. I have a love-hate (ok, mostly hate) relationship with the words on it, but I love the list itself. And I really appreciate you putting into words, in the description, the inchoate discomfort this kind of language makes me feel, and your recognition that these are all of a piece. They're not just words, they epitomize a syndrome. I can live with rancor and bad spelling, but the cutesy superiority complex part is nauseating.
June 18, 2009
john commented on the word ughten
So this is like gloaming, for the morning?
June 18, 2009
john commented on the word donkey basketball
Image search earns its keep here.
June 17, 2009
john commented on the word little man in boat
How about "little gland in a coat," which is both gender neutral, and avoids anthropomorphizication. Or maybe moat?
June 16, 2009
john commented on the word squeeze box
Slang for accordion
June 12, 2009
john commented on the word barbecue
Yep, pickles. Slaw works too.
I'm very catholic in my appreciation of condiments. To paraphrase Will Rogers, I never met one I didn't like. There's a greasy burger place in the building where I work. I'm on the 2nd floor, and the kitchen is almost directly below my desk--I'm trying to convince them to install a dumbwaiter. When you order a cheeseburger, they always ask "ketchup, mustard, or mayo," to which I always answer, yes.
June 11, 2009
john commented on the word barbecue
ps -- Can any further discussion about this take place over on advertising, please? Barbecue is a very nice word and I'd rather not pollute it with talk of base commerce.
I would give my left pinkie for a really good pulled pork sandwich right now. With pickles.
June 11, 2009
john commented on the word barbecue
Arcadia, are you sure whatever pop-up you saw wasn't triggered by some other page? I use Google Adsense for ads, and the only kind of ads I have configured are the 250x250 jobbies you see in the upper right. I don't think Google even offers popups, and if they did I'd probably drop them all together. Which would really hit me where it hurts, since I average around $2.50 a day from them.
June 11, 2009
john commented on the word pappenheimer
From dictionary.com: "A heavy rapier of the 17th century, having a swept guard with two perforated plates. Also called a Walloon sword. Named after Gottfried Heinrich, Graf zu Pappenheim (1594–1632), German leader in the Thirty Years' War"
June 11, 2009
john commented on the list bio
Howdy, quick-draw mcgraw. I must say, this is one of the more unique off-label uses of Wordie. It's vaguely spammish, but after asking the ouija board, I'm gonna say it's not exactly spam, since you're not linking to anything promotional.
But... are you really going to send this to prospective employers?
June 11, 2009
john commented on the word take rate
“If we need to basically depend on the endowment, let’s increase the take rate,” Mr. Greenberg said, referring to the percentage of the endowment drawn down by the college every year.
The New York Times, A Small College Struggles With Economics, by Jonathan D. Glater, June 9, 2009
June 10, 2009
john commented on the word gynecomastia
Boobs know this as manboobs.
June 10, 2009
john commented on the word ymca
It's Fun To Stay At The...
June 5, 2009
john commented on the word cow of the future
“Still, Erin Fitzgerald, director of social and environmental consulting for Dairy Management, says the industry wants to avert the possibility that customers will equate dairies with, say, coal plants. It has started a “cow of the future” program, looking for ways to reduce total industry emissions by 25 percent by the end of the next decade.”
The New York Times, Greening the Herds: A New Diet to Cap Gas, by Leslie Kaufman, June 4, 2009
June 5, 2009
john commented on the word funemployment
Funemployment. Paycation. The Unemploymentality. Every generation has an argot to describe the confusing terrain of joblessness — the dole, deadbeat dads, UB40, and so on — and the lexicon of younger casualties in the most severe American economic downturn since World War II speaks volumes.
Here's how the blog Recessionwire defines “funemployment”: “A period of joblessness that you actually enjoy — maybe you get to lay out, sleep in, work out, read up. It helps to have savings, severance, or an unemployment check to help pay the bills. We're hearing this word used more and more, especially as people realize they may not be able to find a new job right away, so they might as well try to enjoy the time off.”
SFWeekly.com, Funemployment: Jobless young San Franciscans are welcoming the worst recession of their lives with open arms. Too bad the party can't last forever., by Peter Jamison, June 2, 2010
June 4, 2009
john commented on the user john
Thanks VO, nuked that other bozo too.
June 4, 2009
john commented on the word pansy
“The Alexander merited a place of honor on Esquire’s list of “the pansies,” the worst drinks of the Prohibition era. These included long-forgotten abominations like the Sweetheart, the Fluffy Ruffles, the Pom Pom and the Cream Fizz.”
The New York Times, Bar? What Bar?, by William Grimes, June 2, 2009
June 4, 2009
john commented on the word enfeeble
Mr. Bigsby, the sympathetic biographer, does give a strong taste of Miller’s critics. More than a few saw his work as programmatic. Mary McCarthy, for one, wrote that “Death of a Salesman” was “enfeebled” by Miller’s “insistence on universality.”
The New York Times, Some Like It Hot, Some Like It Literary: A Playwright’s Life, With Marilyn, by Dwight Garner, June 2, 2009
June 3, 2009
john commented on the word widower
Not to mention childbirth.
May 29, 2009
john commented on the word stylophone
The name Apple originally wanted for the iPhone*, but were prevented from using because of the trademarks on this fantastic little instrument.
* lie
May 29, 2009
john commented on the word dap
“But some sociologists pointed out that African-American boys and men have been hugging as part of their greeting for decades, using the word “dap” to describe a ritual involving handshakes, slaps on the shoulders and, more recently, a hug, also sometimes called the gangsta hug among urban youth.”
The New York Times, For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug?’, by Sarah Kershaw, May 27, 2009
May 28, 2009
john commented on the word bromance
“The prevalence of boys’ nonromantic hugging (especially of other boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that over the last generation, boys have become more comfortable expressing emotion, as embodied by the MTV show “Bromance,” which is now a widely used term for affection between straight male friends.”
The New York Times, For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug?’, by Sarah Kershaw, May 27, 2009
May 28, 2009
john commented on the word kalishnarumpet
I probably would have spelled it Kalashnirumpet, but this design from the Extra Action Marching Band is teh alsome.
May 28, 2009
john commented on the word praxis
Ironically inactive, I like that. Though I think my own inactivity is sincere.
May 27, 2009
john commented on the word orwell v huxley
Thanks bilb, that was great. The book he's riffing off of--Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death--is great too.
I'm kinda proud to think that Wordie is contributing to the problem.
May 27, 2009
john commented on the word dozenal
Maybe their web site is returning so many PHP errors because they tried to program it in base 12?
May 27, 2009
john commented on the word middie
Slang for midfielder in lacrosse; also spelled middy.
May 26, 2009
john commented on the word middy
Also slang for "midfielder" in lacrosse, though a more common spelling might be middie.
May 26, 2009
john commented on the word insomnia
Pro, I feel for you, and at the same time I'm envious. Having moved too many times, the very notion of being able to call anyone my people seems fantastic. It sounds like a gift you'll always have, wherever you live.
I spent 7 years in New York and know what an alienating place it can be, even if you love it. I hope you find some peace while you struggle with the tension between roots and opportunity.
May 25, 2009
john commented on the word jigaram
According to this blog, this is a Farsi term of endearment, the literal translation of which is "my liver."
May 25, 2009
john commented on the word rapture of the nerds
See citation on singularity.
May 25, 2009
john commented on the word singularity
The concept of ultrasmart computers — machines with “greater than human intelligence�? — was dubbed “The Singularity�? in a 1993 paper by the computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that the acceleration of technological progress had led to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.�?...
The science fiction author Ken MacLeod described the idea of the singularity as “the Rapture of the nerds.�?
The New York Times, The Coming Superbrain, by John Markoff, May 23, 2009
May 25, 2009
john commented on the word honq
According to qikipedia and straight dope, the English slur "honky" possibly derives from this Wolof word, which supposedly means red or pink.
May 24, 2009
john commented on the word postmodernism
Great Chomsky quote (something I don't think I've ever said before), also on the Wikipedia page sarra links to below:
"He asks why postmodernist intellectuals won't respond as "people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc? These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames.".
May 24, 2009
john commented on the word pomo
Short for postmodernism.
May 24, 2009
john commented on the user john
Alandriadenisewalker, I have no record of ever having received an email from the account you used to register for Wordie. If you have any questions or comments concerning Wordie that you'd rather send to me directly rather than through the site, please do, my contact info is on the about page.
May 24, 2009
john commented on the word radish
I lerve whichbe's definition. Great citation on destiny, too.
May 24, 2009
john commented on the list merovingians
Is Chrodobert a sort of medieval Dilbert? Kvetching about his dead-end job in the stables?
May 22, 2009
john commented on the word nascar effect
Nice! From the link below: "A collection of award icons, banners, webrings and ads that clutter the bottom or top of a Web page. Like a race car covered in ads, they blur and become meaningless."
May 22, 2009
john commented on the word turdus migratorius
Happens on roughly a quarterly basis.
May 21, 2009
john commented on the word aphasia
StefAnne: It wasn't posted by anyone. They gray definitions next to words come from WordNet.
May 19, 2009
john commented on the user john
Hi Guys. Um... can I offer anyone a beverage?
May 19, 2009
john commented on the word manpoo
What my eleven-year-old cousin calls shampoo marketed at men, products with scents like these.
May 11, 2009
john commented on the word motherboy
From an episode of Arrested Development: “Lucille always has trouble sleeping this time of year because she gets excited before Motherboy, a dinner dance aimed at promoting mother/son bonding.�?
May 11, 2009
john commented on the word whom
It tolls for yinz. Go stillerz!
May 10, 2009
john commented on the word burcad badeed
“Grass-roots, antipirate militias are forming. Sheiks and government leaders are embarking on a campaign to excommunicate the pirates, telling them to get out of town and preaching at mosques for women not to marry these un-Islamic, thieving “burcad badeed,�? which in Somali translates as sea bandit.�?
The New York Times, For Somali Pirates, Worst Enemy May Be on Shore, by Jeffrey Gettleman, May 8, 2009
May 9, 2009
john commented on the word donk
Image search--and this Wikipedia entry--show that it's a car moded with awesomely ginormous wheels. I would *love* to do this to my Prius.
May 9, 2009
john commented on the word park(ing) day
“PARK(ing) Day is an annual, one-day, global event where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spots into “PARK(ing)�? spaces: temporary public parks.�?
This one's for you, reesetee :-)
May 8, 2009
john commented on the word gardnerella
“Gardnerella Vaginalis is an infection of the female genital tract by bacteria of the Gardnerella vaginalis strain, often in combination with various anaerobic bacteria. Also called bacterial vaginosis.�?
healthcentral.com
May 7, 2009
john commented on the word wifebeater
American slang - a white sleeveless undershirt.
May 5, 2009
john commented on the word heteronormative
Unless I'm riding, in which case I tend to sport jodhpurs.
May 5, 2009
john commented on the word cocktail situations
“One White House insider described Mr. LaHood as “a master of odd jobs,�? whose knowledge of Washington allows him to take on assignments as varied as lobbying lawmakers on the budget and helping political novices in the cabinet navigate Beltway social rituals (“cocktail situations,�? as Energy Secretary Steven Chu calls them).�?
The New York Times, G.O.P. Résumé, Cabinet Post, Knack for Odd Jobs, by Mark Leibovich, May 4, 2009
May 5, 2009
john commented on the word ayuntamiento
From a comment by frangarnes on murcielago:
Spanish definition of ayuntamiento:
1. Acción y efecto de ayuntar o ayuntarse.
2. Corporación compuesta de un alcalde y varios concejales para la administración de los intereses de un municipio.
3. Casa consistorial.
4. Junta (reunión de personas para tratar algún asunto).
5. Coito.
(My 'macaronic') English translation of that:
1. Action or effect of 'ayuntar' or 'ayuntarse'.
2. Corporation composed of a mayor and several town councillors for the government of a town.
3. Town hall (or city hall).
4. Meeting, assembly.
5. Coitus.
May 5, 2009
john commented on the word heteronormative
Oh, I'm sorry, I don't mean to get my kickers in a twist--I hate to be a hater.
There's nothing wrong with the word per se. It's just that there was a period in the nineties when it was in heavy rotation with a certain type of person, pseudo intellectual kids from the Northeast U.S. who went to a certain set of schools, read (or pretended to have read) a certain set of books, who dressed disturbingly alike, and who repeated certain words and phrases with a knowing glance, like they were occult signifiers to be shared only between initiates. "Heteronormative" was one of those words, and it just left a bad taste in my mouth.
May 5, 2009
john commented on the word funtoosh
“In which the viceroy, Wavell, understood that he was finished, washed-up, or in our own expressive word, funtoosh.�?
Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
May 5, 2009
john commented on the word jati
See citation on shudra.
May 5, 2009
john commented on the word shudra
“The basis of this resistance lay in the village, and its distinct form of community: the jati. These groups, numbering in the thousands, were governed by strict rules of endogamy and by taboos about purity, and arranged a social hierarchy: varna. The precise ideological sources of this system are obscure, but elements may be traced to one of the very late hymns of the Rig Veda, which describes the dismemberment of the cosmic giant Purusha, the primeval male whose sacrifice created the world: 'When they divided the Man, into how many parts did they apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet?/ His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Warrior (kshatriya), his thighs the People (vaishiya), and from his feet the servants (shudra) were born.' The resulting intricate filigree of social interconnections and division -- a hierarchical order of peerless sophistication -- defies any simple account Perplexed Westerners came to describe it by the term 'caste', but a wide distance separates the deceptively well-defined doctrinal claims of the caste order and the actual operations of what is an essentially local, small-scale system.�?
From The Idea of India, by Sunil Khilnani, excerpted in a review in The New York Times, The Jewel Without the Crown, by Judith M. Brown, Feburuary 15, 1998
May 5, 2009
john commented on the word nano
A small 4-passenger car built by India's Tata Motors, primarily for the Indian market.
May 5, 2009
john commented on the word paulistano
“Many Paulistanos, as São Paulo residents are called, say the interminable stop-and-go traffic and the wide gap between haves and have-nots are recipes for assaults and carjackings, especially now that Brazil’s boom times have come to a halt.�?
The New York Times, Fearful Brazilians Keep Armored Car Sales Booming, by Alexei Barrionuevo, May 3, 2009
May 5, 2009
john commented on the word heteronormative
I've heard too many pseudo-intellectual poseurs use this word to not dislike it--I buy the Valse hypothesis. All apologies to Rick Moody, but it has been ruined by semiotics majors from Brown, wearing clunky glasses and knit scarves and babbling about Derrida and reeking of smug.
So maybe it's not the word I dislike, but everyone I've ever met who has used it, up until now :-) Rolig, I very much appreciate your measured tone. You are Obama-like (Obamaesque? Obamian?) in your ability to speak dispassionately about topics that are sometimes combative or incendiary.
And knitandpurl, I agree it's useful to differentiate some of the trappings this word has acquired (pretention, smugness), from its original meaning, which certainly describes a real phenomenon.
May 4, 2009
john commented on the word nehru
See also nehru jacket.
May 3, 2009
john commented on the word nehru jacket
Interestingly, this was listed over a year ago, but the word Nehru itself hadn't been. Until now.
May 3, 2009
john commented on the word first bed
“Ms. Lario’s latest criticism also comes in the context of speculation about a brewing power struggle between the children of Mr. Berlusconi’s first marriage, or “first bed,�? as the Italian phrase goes, and those of his second, with Ms. Lario, over his media and even political empire.�?
The New York Times, Premier’s Roving Eye Enrages Wife, but Not His Public, by Rachel Donadio, April 29, 2009
May 3, 2009
john commented on the word lug
Wow--a god! See also discussion on hasbian.
May 3, 2009
john commented on the word hasbian
When I was in college in the late 80s and early 90s the term was LUG--Lesbian Until Graduation. I heard it from lesbian friends, talking about fears that they'd fall for someone who was only experimenting. I think it did say a lot about the people using it--it said they were scared of having their hearts broken. Like a lot of bitter words it was used to dispel or mask feelings of fear and vulnerability.
The norms in play, in my experience, were those of lesbians pissed off at breeders--a far nastier term in my book, though kind of funny in a perverse way.
May 3, 2009
john commented on the word heteronormative
Nice job unpacking that, MM :-)
Seriously though, I agree. It's a loathsome word and my new least favorite.
May 2, 2009
john commented on the word leotard
“I’m going to turn over a new leaf, TROS, and make a conscious, conscientious effort to break myself of the bad habit of using the word “retard.�? But I don’t think the “retard jar�? is for me. Instead, I’m going to use a substitution for the word. From now on, instead of saying “retard�? or “that’s so retarded,�? I’m going to say “leotard�? and “that’s so leotarded.�? I won’t be mocking the mentally challenged, just the physically gifted. I will pick on the strong—and the limber—and not the weak.�?
Savage Love, by Dan Savage, April 29, 2009
May 1, 2009
john commented on the word wiremen
“How many people does it take to change every light bulb in Grand Central Terminal?
Six, it turns out. And it’s a full-time job.
On Tuesday, those wiremen — their official title — unscrewed the last remaining incandescent bulbs in the building, replacing them with compact fluorescent bulbs and completing the greening of the lighting system at the bustling station.�?
The New York Times, At Grand Central, a Fluorescent Twist to a Light-Bulb Joke, by A.G. Sulzberger, April 28, 2009
April 30, 2009
john commented on the word island dwarfing
“Island dwarfing is a recognized phenomenon in which larger species diminish in size over time in response to limited resources.�?
The New York Times, A Tiny Hominid With No Place on the Family Tree, by John Noble Wilford, April 27, 2009
April 29, 2009
john commented on the word banana slug
The official mascot of the UC Santa Cruz athletic teams. They have a fantastic domain name: goslugs.com.
April 28, 2009
john commented on the word coolsploitation
“For the last two years, Bustelo has been a fixture at parties and giveaway suites from the Winter Music Conference to Sundance to the Oscars, and the company behind it has been sending truckloads of it to 50 Cent and Perez Hilton.
Whenever there is coolsploitation, however, there is potential trouble, and marketing experts say that Café Bustelo’s reboot will not be easy.�?
The New York Times, Out of the Bodega and Onto the Scene, by Ben Sisario, April 24, 2009
April 26, 2009
john commented on the list symonds-s-list
Welcome, sy!
There are also some useful Wordie how-to link on the about page.
April 24, 2009
john commented on the list denizens
How about Tico?
April 24, 2009
john commented on the word tico
A native of Costa Rica. Costa Rica's well-regarded English-language weekly newspaper is called the
April 24, 2009
john commented on the word range anxiety
“The problem of refueling is so significant that fans of electric cars have a phrase for it: range anxiety, the nagging fear that you’ll run out of juice before you can find a charge spot and be stranded at the side of the road.�?
The New York Times, Batteries Not Included, by Clive Thompson, April 16, 2009
April 23, 2009
john commented on the word curated soundscape
What @harrisj calls a mix tape.
April 23, 2009
john commented on the word palenque
See palenquero.
April 23, 2009
john commented on the user madmouth
Thanks for the additions to and citations on Yiddishkeit, they're great. Much appreciated!
April 23, 2009
john commented on the word cattlesnake
Half cat, half rattlesnake.
April 23, 2009
john commented on the word shovelhead
Also a type of Harley Davidson motorcylce engine produced from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties.
April 23, 2009
john commented on the word cosmetic neurology
“In 2004, he coined the term “cosmetic neurology�? to describe the practice of using drugs developed for recognized medical conditions to strengthen ordinary cognition.�?
The New Yorker, Brain Gain, by Margaret Talbot, April 27, 2009
April 22, 2009
john commented on the word douchebaguette
JamesFlynn is not the first to coin this term! Image search reveals all.
April 22, 2009
john commented on the word douchebaguette
C_b, thanks for pointing that out, I dislike the disproportionate association of feminine and negative terms. Though anything associated with the privates has been pejoritized at some point or another.
I agree, the bread connotation is the best part. Revolting food connotations are great force multipliers. Like dick cheese.
April 21, 2009
john commented on the word douchebaguette
The product may be used primarily by women, but let's face it, most douchebags are guys, so this kind of makes sense.
If you want an explicitly male variant, there's always douche-cock.
April 21, 2009
john commented on the word nebelwerfer
A WWII German rocket artillery launcher.
April 18, 2009
john commented on the word nebelwurfer
Also spelled nebelwerfer.
April 18, 2009
john commented on the word bugs
Think I just fixed the list description links thing, c_b. Sorry for the long wait on that folks, slipped past my (rusty, WWII-era) radar earlier.
April 17, 2009
john commented on the word exuberjoyment
I love this word, just love it.
April 16, 2009
john commented on the word geezer
Mike Skinner, aka "The Streets," who is awesome, mentions geezers in every third song. He uses the term in the yarbian sense, generally talking about un- or under-employed British guys in their 20s, whose major activities include smoking dope and playing Grand Theft Auto. From "Geezers Need Excitement:"
Geezers need excitement.
If their lives don't provide them this,
they incite violence.
Common sense, simple common sense
April 16, 2009
john commented on the word twitter
Best definition ever: “Twitter seems to be, first and foremost, an online haven where teenagers making drugs can telegraph secret code words to arrange gang fights and orgies. It also functions as a vehicle for teasing peers until they commit suicide.�?
McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Truly Groundbreaking Marketing Research: Understanding Twitter, by Dan Kennedy, March 31, 2009
April 16, 2009
john commented on the word mobsourcing
Letting things be decided by the stupidity of a crowd. The ugly side of crowdsourcing.
April 16, 2009
john commented on the word kettling
See also kettle.
April 16, 2009
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