T.H.E.: 'A scary new word to emerge in our cover story is "hyper-bureaucracy", which describes "an out-of-control system" that emerges in the search for optimum efficiency and takes no account of the costs in time, energy and money that are needed to achieve it. It is a bureaucratic nightmare in which there is no end to the extra information that can be acquired. The monitoring of contact hours and how academics spend their time are examples of the type of bureaucracy that "eats up people and resources", according to Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick.'
'As scores of historians have not failed to point out, this standard narrative is inherently implausible inasmuch as the medieval conception of the cosmos was less anthropocentric than diabolocentric, the earth being regarded as ‘the filth and mire of the world, the worst, lowest, most lifeless part of the universe, the bottom story of the house’ (Montaigne as quoted by Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, op. cit., 102) and the actual centre of the universe being identified with hell.' (Intro. to Collapse V, p. 11 note.)
Boing Boing: 'Postmamboism is a portable theory that places music at the center of understanding and uses music to interrogate other fields of study... The term Postmamboism derives from the Kikongo word imbú, likely used in Cuba from the 16th century on, that is variously translated as "word," "law," "song," or "important matter," and which is pluralized as ma-imbú, or mambo. The prefix "post" is understood to mean not "what replaced," but "what happened after the world was transformed by."'
Charles Stross: 'Ever wondered why sometimes the names of characters in works of fiction are ... familiar? In the SF field there's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tradition called Tuckerization (after SF author Wilson Tucker), whereby authors sometimes use the names of friends or acquaintances in their stories.'
Cheers for the tag clouds; but has somebody changed the wordnik.com/comments layout? I'm suddenly seeing the word newer displayed lower than usual because the column is too narrow for it, and a scrollbar on the right because the div the comments are in is slightly too short for its contents. Visible in Firefox and IE8.
Edit: oh, and it also now seems to start at comment 41, which is inconvenient for me since I have a shortcut directly to it instead of Zeitgeist (the latter being linked from every page, after all).
G.J. Chaitin: 'METABIOLOGY: a field parallel to biology, dealing with the random evolution of artificial software (computer programs) rather than natural software (DNA), and simple enough that it is possible to prove rigorous theorems or formulate heuristic arguments at the same high level of precision that is common in theoretical physics.'
foreignpolicy.com: 'Mutaa is a form of "temporary marriage" only acceptable within Shiite communities, one that allows couples to have religiously sanctioned sex for a limited period of time, without any commitments, and without the obligatory involvement of religious figures. In conservative Muslim societies known for their strict sense of propriety, mutaa offers an escape clause. The contract is very simple. The woman says: "I marry myself to you for a specific period of time and for a specified dowry" and the man says: "I accept." The period can range between one hour and a year, and is subject to renewal. A Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim man, but a Muslim man can temporarily marry a Muslim, Christian, or Jewish woman, as long as she is a divorcée or a widow. However, those interviewed for this article confirmed that Hezbollah-the "Party of God"-has allowed the practice to spread to virgins or girls who have never married before, as long as the permission of her guardian (father or paternal grandfather) is obtained.'
Cosmos and History: 'He had also coined the concept of a “psychoterratic” illness, one in which psychological symptoms are induced by land sickness: “the people of concern are still ‘at home’, but experience a ‘homesickness’ similar to that caused by nostalgia. What these people lack is solace or comfort derived from their present relationship to ‘home’, and so, a new form of psychoterratic illness needs to be defined. The word ‘solace’ relates to both psychological and physical contexts.”'
I had my stalkability feed turned off on Wordie.org, but I did make fairly frequent use of my commenting record. (Of course, I imagine comment and list searches are also on the to-do list.) As I remember it, the main use I found for the stalking feed was to see who'd dropped off the face of Wordie altogether and who was active but not commenting.
Well, they talk about the pros and cons of turning a hobby into a job...
I'm not going to split hairs over implicature, or what the aim of the merger was if Wordie is/was characterised by aimlessness; I thought I was actually saying something pretty moderate. Look, I can well understand if you just want to be the tech guy: send one of the others out to do the leadership stuff. But if you want to execute big plans...
It's the 'Jack of all trades, master of none problem', isn't it? I think they sincerely thought they could combine the best of both worlds, so I doubt the staff seriously look down on 'by-products'; but they're finding it harder than they imagined to get a fully-functioning site together, let alone one with a design clearly targetted at either purpose. (Witness my comments in various places about how parts of the site seem to ignore anything in the database that isn't a single word or hyphenated, which demotes some of the best Wordie pages to second class: I don't think anyone stroked a white cat when putting that into the design, it just happened to be built that way.)
Sorry if this is a bad place to jump into the meta-site discussion, PossibleUnderscore.
The Wordnik autocomplete is another part of the site that ignores strings in the database that contain whitespace, isn't it? All those fascinating pages, not so much hidden as brushed quietly out of ready view...
The achy spammy products are plenty on Wordnik and there are many who think achy spammers resemble colon cleansers, but they deserve much worse than that. These kinds of achy spam products will make the site's members irritated.
No examples at all, for a word with its own Wikipedia page? It must be a product of the high standards that limit sources to reputable ones like Penisbot.com (still in evidence on Shackled).
Today's spammers haven't come anywhere near the Mi-vox standard... *sigh* I miss the pre-migration days when accounts came with open 'So-and-so's Words' lists, and spammers would fail to notice that anyone could add suggestions to them...
As a tag, this seems to be a piece of Wordie Classic which presumably got caught up in the character encoding problems. Can anyone remember what it's supposed to be?
Ditto for the URL tags one of the spammers made on Welcome and comprehensive: clicking on them produces unpredictable results (404 from a word page, the Fixing Things page from the spammer's profile page), but in general things break.
Atlas Obscura: 'In the small village of Gravendal in Dalarna, Sweden there is an old wooden water tube, leading water to the local electric power station. Because of it´s age, this tube is full of holes so water squirts out in various places, in wintertime it forms amazing ice sculptures in the trees nearby. Locally this phenomenon is called the "elk shower".'
I just tried to edit my comment on /people/midsamme, and the page briefly showed an 'unable to complete request' and then vanished completely; it wouldn't reload, although closing the tab and returning to the page via my link below worked normally until I made another editing attempt.
Actually, the O.E.D. lists a verb 'to destruct' (defined as equivalent to destroy) with destructed attested in an example from before 1638, but it does have the note: 'Quot. a1638 is an isolated use. The recent (chiefly U.S.) use in Rocketry is prob. in part a back-formation on DESTRUCTION.' So probably and in part you're right.
Learn English with Vexamples, and learn about technology at the same time!
Anyway: has anyone yet some across a page with whitespace in the word string while using the Random Word feature, or does it produce only single (and hyphenated) words? I'm beginning to suspect it's restricted in the same manner as Recently Viewed (though given the sheer size of the database now, it'll be hard to tell without confirmation from John & co.); and if it is, then it's clearly inferior to classic Wordie's.
I wonder whether using headline-style English in examples without a health warning is altogether a good idea; although all this case exemplifies is salaciousness anyway.
Can anyone here read Arabic and tell whether this is spam, or just happens to feature a domain name? I don't want to make any accusations based on uncertain Google Translate results.
Times: 'She was, indeed, Rylance told us, one of the first graduates of Brunel University’s MA course in “Shakespeare Authorship Studies”... The Brunel course “examines the historical construction of Shakespeare as a cultural icon and ‘sacred cow’ ” as well as promising to “examine and consider the suggested alternatives to Shakespeare as author with a completely open mind”. It surely cannot be long before Brunel also offers an MA in 9/11 studies, where the various candidates for being the “real” attackers of the World Trade Centre are examined by arts postgraduates.'
Times: 'Presiding over all is the twinkling, charismatic personality of Mark Rylance, the first artistic director at the Globe and the leading figure in the global anti-Stratfordian movement, dedicated to casting doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship and to discovering the real Bard’s identity.'
'Belle de jour displayed a double life, a back and forth between two spaces, compartmentalized yet symmetrical... In Belle toujours, the boxes remain, vestiges of the past compartmentalization, but the double life no longer is. Life has unified itself onto a single plane, in a Paris which resembles a cemetery for brothels.'
Seconded! (Although I imagine John & co. already know it needs restoring. Besides, it's fairly quiet here at present, and I imagine it'll stay so until major problems - e.g. that comments on tag pages don't yet appear - get squashed.)
Am I correct in thinking word pages with spaces or other punctuation, and longer words, don't appear on recently viewed?
I'd taken to using it as an alternative to random searches, but if many entries aren't going to appear there, I may just have to stick with random searching, for all its flaws.
Additionally, adding initial capitals to words in the page titles now means that both of those pages will appear in the browser's title bar as Lymphatic, even though the site otherwise distinguishes between them.
Why is this tagged spam? To be sure, the examples are outright commercial, but I'd have thought the spam tag implied intent, and I doubt whoever coded Vexamples intended to spam the site.
Zeitgeist comments are linked to anchors that don't exist: comment-somenumber rather than comment-word--somenumber or comment-body-word--somenumber. (Actually, anchors come with a cost anyway: they make it harder to tell from the link colour which comments you've read already.)
Tags are quite often failing to appear when entered, although they turn up on a page refresh. Seen in Firefox 3.5; I haven't tried tagging in any other browser.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disqualify LOtUSFLOW3R, KRLA and BARX, on the grounds that none of them can be represented only with the characters 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E and F (plus an optional leading $ or 0x, or trailing h). See the Wiki page linked in the description if that made no apparent sense.
The pun in the leading example doesn't make sense until you visit the source site and discover it's an imagined cross between a collie and a malamute; I'd incorrectly assumed it was a weak pun on mutt.
Of course we can be Wordies on Wordnik. Let's say that Doctor Wordnik imbibed a certain potion and now exhibits the Mister Wordie personality at times: Doctor Wordnik is a suave yet slightly serious soul who devotes his life to learnedly helping people sort through meanings and collect etymologies, while Mister Wordie is the charming but disorganised and slightly crazy personality who just likes to hang around poking fun at Vexamples.
(I also dislike '-nikkers', because it sounds exactly like knickers, which is wholly misleading.)
B.B.C.: 'There is a recognition among psychologists and other education professionals that school phobia/school refusal covers a range of different problems.
'Some of the younger sufferers can be diagnosed as having "separation anxiety", leaving them distressed at parting from their parents at the school gate. But some psychologists say this is more about refusal, not phobia - a true school phobic will experience a reaction even if their parents are present.
'"Other children could be classified as having a social phobia to do with performance aspects of school - reading out loud or changing for PE," says Mr Blagg.'
This is unusual: no examples at all, and I'm 'the first person to look up this word on Wordnik'. Yet apparently I can expect to see this word about once a year. (I wonder whether this is a sign that the Great Vexample Purge has commenced.)
'It was a variation on a wonderful 17-year old joke by Michael Heseltine from back before the 1992 election, when he taunted Labour leaders Neil Kinnock and John Smith for trying to woo the financial community with a series of lunches and dinners in the City of London - what became known as the prawn cocktail offensive.'
The headline example says: The other amuses were a shot of artichoke soup with hibiscus foam and a slice of salmon belly with scallion sauce. According to the O.E.D.amuse can be a noun (obs., rare), but it's defined as pre-occupation, musing, meditation.
Vexamples was doing okay for the first few words... Eighty-seven percent of owned cats are spayed or neutered LOCATION: A HOUSE SOMEWHERE IN NEW JERSEY, USA Cat owner standing with hands on head surveying the damage -- having conversation with self.
The change from /people/profile/membername to /people/membername has broken some links from Wordie: see my comment from about nine months ago about ordinary.madness, which was linked to href="/people/profile/ordinary.madness" and therefore pointed to wordie.org/people/profile/ordinary.madness, the profile URL, but now points to wordnik.com/people/profile/ordinary.madness, which Wordnik thinks should be the profile of someone named profile.
I wonder whether anyone (other than myself, just now) ever clicks on the Wordnik logo at the top of the page. I mean, who's going to feel a sudden desire to go back to the homepage?
As a tag, this is spaceout when followed to its own page, but not when it appears on gosh; I'm guessing this is a tag from Wordnik Original, since e.g. product placement seems to be working as a classic Wordie tag.
The awkward part is thinking up suitably scintillating things to say when there are so many surnames, online handles and product names in the database. Random word searches are less fun than on Wordie Classic, to be honest, although watching the left-hand Zeitgeist column go by is sometimes a workable substitute.
Agreed; we've lost some of that lovely interaction between the two. (For example, I had to ponder whether to put a comedy tag on diecast and let someone come across it however much later, or whether to try to work it into something worth a comment.) Maybe John could be prevailed upon to add tags back into the comment pages, in proper Wordie style.
You know, when I started using this for FULLY CAPITALISED words as well as mESsEd uP ones, I hadn't realised just how many of those turn up on Wordnik...
Couldn't we have the whole quotation, Vexamples? As it is, if we want to find out what 'BABES GET THEIR MOUTHS AND PUSSIES PLOWED WITH' we'll have to visit girls-going-pee.com/desperate_pee/peeing/, and, you know, some of us might be at work...
I'm not sure I like these private profiles that even logged-in people can't see, largely because the standard Wordie method of talking directly to someone (to say things like 'this might interest you' or 'stop the spam or suffer the Wordie Treatment') is to leave a profile comment. An elective class of members who can't be greeted like that feels rather un-Wordie.
If people don't want their profiles to be scrutinised, couldn't they just not fill them in? Or are people's lists of lists, tags and favourites now considered sensitive information? In which case maybe finer-grained privacy options would do the trick, for when someone feels like making a 'Gay BDSM slang unique to Leeds, U.K.' list.
This isn't particularly important compared to getting fully working comments on list and tag pages, but if you look at the . newly added to Wordie Paradox, you'll see it apparently has a comment left over from Wordie Classic. Currently this comment can't be seen, because . redirects to a random word page. .. traverses to the home page, while ... and above semi-work; their sub-pages aren't accessible. It's nice to discover a Wordnik Paradox, but I don't like to think of any poor Wordie comments getting lost in the wilderness without the care of their independent flockmaster.
Vexamples turns libellous: Karlyc -- I hear you're hiding that you're secretly a pedophile who brainwashed that woman who was a paid worker for the McCain cabal into carving a B on her face while you frog-marched to neo-nazi propaganda aimed at taking down the next president of the united states.
Where does Vexamples get them from? From the mind of Count O'Blather, the creator of The Crims, comes WHORE, an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of a nascent 'lady of the night' through the development of serious drug addiction and sexual slavery all the way to an ignominious white chalk mark photo-op in a dumpster off Times Square.
I wonder whether the dictionary definitions should be fixed above the examples, to make it clear when a word is absent from our dictionaries even if it has respectable-looking usage examples. Not that this one does have a respectable-looking top example: '...im prod also to say my friens who i showed this wonderful seies to read the midnight sun draft and has been asking me to, too but i refuse because i can only imagine the devistation...'
The hexadecimal stuff is just your common-or-garden character encoding problem, but the big BANANA seems different: click on its mangled form and all you get is a page saying 'Disallowed key characters in global data.' Hopefully we'll get it back soon.
n. A remarkably frequently seen source of lengthy 'examples' on word pages.
I wonder (whether or not Wordnik can claim a fair use defence on that amount of text) whether their terms would hold up in court: 'In consideration of agreeing to your use of CiteULike, you acknowledge that the ownership in any intellectual property rights (including, for the avoidance of doubt, copyright) in CiteULike belongs to us. Accordingly, any part of CiteULike (or its source HTML code) may not be used, transferred, copied or reproduced in whole or in part in any manner other than for the purposes of utilising CiteULike meaning that you may only display it on your computer screen and print it out on your printer for the sole purpose of viewing its content.'
From the Examples: The woman yanked Dick's testicles to fight him off. http: / / digg. com / world_news / 88_year_old_woman_yanks_nude_intruder_s_testicles opensourcefood and run it as a personal project.
Aargh! Accidental duplication through newfangled case-sensitivity! Though I did discover in the process that Futility Closet's list isn't actually exhaustive; I'm currently still seeking a source that is...
Paw Prints: 'When Charles Dickens moved into Tavistock House, he made sure that every detail of it was to his taste. One of the features he installed was a hidden door to his study, made to look like part of an unbroken wall of books, complete with dummy shelves and fictitious titles. Dickens clearly derived much amusement from the invention of titles for these volumes. They ranged from the purely facetious—Five Minutes in China, three volumes, and Heavyside’s Conversations With Nobody—to straight puns, such as The Gunpowder Magazine. In later years he added Cat’s Lives (nine volumes) and The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, which consisted of volumes on ignorance, superstition, the block, the stake, the rack, dirt, and disease. The companion—The Virtues of Our Ancestors—was so narrow the title had to be printed sideways.'
It looks as though links in old Wordie posts which were formed with square brackets now point to capitalised versions of word pages if the linked text does, which means that some links have actually been repointed. Maybe comments with timestamps from the First Age of Wordie should automatically be made to point to lowercase versions...?
Well, some of them are already in the database (pulled from whatever sources) and therefore can turn up on a random word search (I'm tagging them caput). Whether that's the whole story I'm not sure.
h+ Magazine: 'It was created by wealthy cryonicists for the purpose of wealth preservation, as well as to fund both their cryopreservation and their eventual resuscitation.'
h+ Magazine: 'Leaving money to your future self is complicated. The courts have decided that cryopreserved people are not suspended or preserved. Rather, they are irrevocably dead, and by being dead have no legal right of ownership or inheritance. These laws may change if the first cryopreserved people are resuscitated and sue for some new kind of civil rights, but that could be decades away. In the meantime, those who are not yet being preserved have spent years pondering and discussing possible methods of self-inheritance. They call it Cryonics Estate Planning and there are now at least three ways to achieve the goal.'
According to this, it's a 'generic term' coined to refer to having to decide whether to carry out your deceased parent's dying wish. Whether it'll catch on remains to be seen, of course.
I can't hear these wonderful pronunciations everyone else seems to be talking about, in either Firefox or IE (WinVista). As far as I know my Flash installation is up to date; I'm behind a network proxy, if that's any help.
Edit: ditto in Opera under my Ubuntu installation.
'Kirstin, the significance of this fire for so much that-labor law that came after this and Frances Perkins's centrality to it all?' Whatever piece of code selects the headline quotations is starting to give WeirdNet a run for its money.
Not quite the oddity I was hoping for: '...If you feel that your material does not constitute infringement, you may provide Wordnik with a counter notification by written communication to the attention of "DMCA Counter Notification Dept." at <<insert contact email>> that sets forth all of the necessary information required by the DMCA...' (From page source)
irstin is the product of some kind of spidering bug: it's from a drop-down list of names on the source page, but initial letters have been chopped off. This one should be Kirstin.
Sorry, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. When the screaming stops, please reload this page and with any luck it won't happen again.
Should you find yourself sans luck, or should it *ahem* happen again, please do let us know by sending a (hopefully) polite missive to youarebroken@removed to deter spam.
I see the tag handling is classic Wordie: the current Word of the Day, belter, has a definishing tag containing the " character, resulting in a truncated link. I tried to reconstruct the full URL by casting a hex, but the page I end up on still tells me nothing has been tagged with that string, irrespective of whether I decapitalise it.
Meaning: 'The annual meeting of the body charged with conserving Atlantic tuna opens on Monday to warnings that this is its "last chance" to manage things well.'
In case it wasn't obvious: 'Welsh Labour leadership candidate Carwyn Jones has reiterated his commitment to holding a referendum on full law-making powers for Wales.'
Comments by vanishedone
vanishedone commented on the word hyper-bureaucracy
T.H.E.: 'A scary new word to emerge in our cover story is "hyper-bureaucracy", which describes "an out-of-control system" that emerges in the search for optimum efficiency and takes no account of the costs in time, energy and money that are needed to achieve it. It is a bureaucratic nightmare in which there is no end to the extra information that can be acquired. The monitoring of contact hours and how academics spend their time are examples of the type of bureaucracy that "eats up people and resources", according to Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick.'
March 4, 2010
vanishedone commented on the word dialobocentric
Ouch. You can tell I've been away awhile...
February 28, 2010
vanishedone commented on the word dialobocentric
'As scores of historians have not failed to point out, this standard narrative is inherently implausible inasmuch as the medieval conception of the cosmos was less anthropocentric than diabolocentric, the earth being regarded as ‘the filth and mire of the world, the worst, lowest, most lifeless part of the universe, the bottom story of the house’ (Montaigne as quoted by Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, op. cit., 102) and the actual centre of the universe being identified with hell.' (Intro. to Collapse V, p. 11 note.)
February 28, 2010
vanishedone commented on the word postmamboism
Boing Boing: 'Postmamboism is a portable theory that places music at the center of understanding and uses music to interrogate other fields of study... The term Postmamboism derives from the Kikongo word imbú, likely used in Cuba from the 16th century on, that is variously translated as "word," "law," "song," or "important matter," and which is pluralized as ma-imbú, or mambo. The prefix "post" is understood to mean not "what replaced," but "what happened after the world was transformed by."'
December 16, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Cthulhu
This does give Clooloo, Clulu and Tulu as apparent variants from Lovecraft's writing.
December 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Baby death ward 'standards lapse'
You don't say...
December 12, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wraith
Vexamples has given up: She looked like a small white wraith--do you know what a wraith is?
It's interesting to see an etymology from the Century Dictionary; even the mighty O.E.D. just calls the word's origin 'obscure'.
December 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Tuckerization
Charles Stross: 'Ever wondered why sometimes the names of characters in works of fiction are ... familiar? In the SF field there's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tradition called Tuckerization (after SF author Wilson Tucker), whereby authors sometimes use the names of friends or acquaintances in their stories.'
December 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
Cheers for the tag clouds; but has somebody changed the wordnik.com/comments layout? I'm suddenly seeing the word newer displayed lower than usual because the column is too narrow for it, and a scrollbar on the right because the div the comments are in is slightly too short for its contents. Visible in Firefox and IE8.
Edit: oh, and it also now seems to start at comment 41, which is inconvenient for me since I have a shortcut directly to it instead of Zeitgeist (the latter being linked from every page, after all).
December 6, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word metabiology
G.J. Chaitin: 'METABIOLOGY: a field parallel to biology, dealing with the random evolution of artificial software (computer programs) rather than natural software (DNA), and simple enough that it is possible to prove rigorous theorems or formulate heuristic arguments at the same high level of precision that is common in theoretical physics.'
December 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list heavy-lifting
And unlike some other spam lists around here, this one is open...
Edit: although I suppose it's dimly possible someone was just trying to add links to example pages.
December 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word the
Especially when you do as it instructs: thee (1) or (2)?
December 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Queen insult Labour man off list
This is from the RSS feed, but the title displaying on the article page itself is pretty bad: 'Would-be councillor in Queen 'vermin' slur off list'.
December 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mutaa
foreignpolicy.com: 'Mutaa is a form of "temporary marriage" only acceptable within Shiite communities, one that allows couples to have religiously sanctioned sex for a limited period of time, without any commitments, and without the obligatory involvement of religious figures. In conservative Muslim societies known for their strict sense of propriety, mutaa offers an escape clause. The contract is very simple. The woman says: "I marry myself to you for a specific period of time and for a specified dowry" and the man says: "I accept." The period can range between one hour and a year, and is subject to renewal. A Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim man, but a Muslim man can temporarily marry a Muslim, Christian, or Jewish woman, as long as she is a divorcée or a widow. However, those interviewed for this article confirmed that Hezbollah-the "Party of God"-has allowed the practice to spread to virgins or girls who have never married before, as long as the permission of her guardian (father or paternal grandfather) is obtained.'
December 3, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word vexamples
But you do see them in public together... I reckon Vexamples is WeirdNet's son/daughter/nephew/niece or something.
December 2, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word multistakeholderism
"It could be the end of multistakeholderism"
December 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wordnik
I thought Wordnik, Inc. was part of corporate America.
December 1, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word psychoterratic
Cosmos and History: 'He had also coined the concept of a “psychoterratic” illness, one in which psychological symptoms are induced by land sickness: “the people of concern are still ‘at home’, but experience a ‘homesickness’ similar to that caused by nostalgia. What these people lack is solace or comfort derived from their present relationship to ‘home’, and so, a new form of psychoterratic illness needs to be defined. The word ‘solace’ relates to both psychological and physical contexts.”'
See also solastalgia.
November 30, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
I had my stalkability feed turned off on Wordie.org, but I did make fairly frequent use of my commenting record. (Of course, I imagine comment and list searches are also on the to-do list.) As I remember it, the main use I found for the stalking feed was to see who'd dropped off the face of Wordie altogether and who was active but not commenting.
November 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wordnik
Well, they talk about the pros and cons of turning a hobby into a job...
I'm not going to split hairs over implicature, or what the aim of the merger was if Wordie is/was characterised by aimlessness; I thought I was actually saying something pretty moderate. Look, I can well understand if you just want to be the tech guy: send one of the others out to do the leadership stuff. But if you want to execute big plans...
November 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user PossibleUnderscore
It's the 'Jack of all trades, master of none problem', isn't it? I think they sincerely thought they could combine the best of both worlds, so I doubt the staff seriously look down on 'by-products'; but they're finding it harder than they imagined to get a fully-functioning site together, let alone one with a design clearly targetted at either purpose. (Witness my comments in various places about how parts of the site seem to ignore anything in the database that isn't a single word or hyphenated, which demotes some of the best Wordie pages to second class: I don't think anyone stroked a white cat when putting that into the design, it just happened to be built that way.)
Sorry if this is a bad place to jump into the meta-site discussion, PossibleUnderscore.
November 29, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word autocomplete
The Wordnik autocomplete is another part of the site that ignores strings in the database that contain whitespace, isn't it? All those fascinating pages, not so much hidden as brushed quietly out of ready view...
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word AOL disc collecting
Here, here and here. Is there a list of odd hobbies (hoddies?) yet?
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word madeupical
Spam Cleanse
The achy spammy products are plenty on Wordnik and there are many who think achy spammers resemble colon cleansers, but they deserve much worse than that. These kinds of achy spam products will make the site's members irritated.
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
New spam on madeupical. More sadly still, it was the only comment activity in over three hours.
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bona
According to the O.E.D., in Polari this means 'good; excellent; attractive'.
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bonafied
'Having been made bona', no doubt.
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Starwisp
No examples at all, for a word with its own Wikipedia page? It must be a product of the high standards that limit sources to reputable ones like Penisbot.com (still in evidence on Shackled).
Edit: oh, there is one example on starwisp.
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
They're mostly dealt with, but the descriptive text on /people/midsamme is still there, and so is the spam on /lists/cheap-nike-shoes-handbag-boots-sunglass. Cheers.
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wordie treatment
Today's spammers haven't come anywhere near the Mi-vox standard... *sigh* I miss the pre-migration days when accounts came with open 'So-and-so's Words' lists, and spammers would fail to notice that anyone could add suggestions to them...
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ©
As a tag, this seems to be a piece of Wordie Classic which presumably got caught up in the character encoding problems. Can anyone remember what it's supposed to be?
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
Ditto for the URL tags one of the spammers made on Welcome and comprehensive: clicking on them produces unpredictable results (404 from a word page, the Fixing Things page from the spammer's profile page), but in general things break.
On a related note, this spam list page links to http://www.brandmavin.com/'>http://www.brandmavin.com/ as a word, and it takes one to http:. Not that I especially want more functional spam, you understand.
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word optional
Oddly enough, 'X is not an option' conveys the opposite of 'X is not optional'.
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word elk shower
Atlas Obscura: 'In the small village of Gravendal in Dalarna, Sweden there is an old wooden water tube, leading water to the local electric power station. Because of it´s age, this tube is full of holes so water squirts out in various places, in wintertime it forms amazing ice sculptures in the trees nearby. Locally this phenomenon is called the "elk shower".'
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word morular
There's an advertising universe? I wish it existed outside this one...
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
I just tried to edit my comment on /people/midsamme, and the page briefly showed an 'unable to complete request' and then vanished completely; it wouldn't reload, although closing the tab and returning to the page via my link below worked normally until I made another editing attempt.
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word self-destruct
Actually, the O.E.D. lists a verb 'to destruct' (defined as equivalent to destroy) with destructed attested in an example from before 1638, but it does have the note: 'Quot. a1638 is an isolated use. The recent (chiefly U.S.) use in Rocketry is prob. in part a back-formation on DESTRUCTION.' So probably and in part you're right.
November 28, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word morular
Do you think it knows a morula is a skin lesion? Hardly the sort of association most sellers want for their products...
November 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
Spammers are afoot: see description and first two comments on /people/midsamme.
Edit: also /lists/cheap-nike-shoes-handbag-boots-sunglass and e.g. /words/morular/comments, which I see from the creator's profile other people have spotted.
November 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user midsamme
Do I spend my money on Premium Force Pro or on Force Factor? It's the battle of the spammers! Unless of course they're actually working in league...
November 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word vegging
33 examples, compared to just one on veging. Do people pronounce this to rhyme with pegging, or just add the extra g anyway?
November 27, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word random
Looking at the other examples, I am struck by how little randomness is in the selection of the 'random, horrific attack' ones.
November 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word random
Learn English with Vexamples, and learn about technology at the same time!
Anyway: has anyone yet some across a page with whitespace in the word string while using the Random Word feature, or does it produce only single (and hyphenated) words? I'm beginning to suspect it's restricted in the same manner as Recently Viewed (though given the sheer size of the database now, it'll be hard to tell without confirmation from John & co.); and if it is, then it's clearly inferior to classic Wordie's.
November 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Videotaped
I wonder whether using headline-style English in examples without a health warning is altogether a good idea; although all this case exemplifies is salaciousness anyway.
November 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word secondset
Not currently, probably because they may not last long: see CiteULike.
November 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pound it until it is well grinned
When I saw this on Zeitgeist, I expected it to be on 'Take This Word And...'
November 26, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word domestic violence lessons planned
So says the RSS feed, anyway. The actual page says 'School lessons to tackle domestic violence outlined'.
November 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word netsearch
Why take this over the already exemplified websearch, unless you mean to encompass other Internet protocols?
November 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word spam
Can anyone here read Arabic and tell whether this is spam, or just happens to feature a domain name? I don't want to make any accusations based on uncertain Google Translate results.
November 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word unicycle hockey
Spotted here.
November 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word La Regate des Baignoires
The International Regatta of Bathtubs, spotted here.
November 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word rotary phone throwing
See cell phone throwing.
November 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cell phone throwing
Spotted here; it says there's also rotary phone throwing.
November 25, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word forget what witticism you were originally going to insert here because you've just banged your knee on your desk
It really happened, although whatever I would have said probably wasn't actually very witty. My knee has stopped hurting now.
November 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word PLOWED
That was no sentence...
November 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word PLOWED
What for? It's part of our glorious cultural heritage.
November 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word aniki
'Figurative brotherhood among yesterday's carrots is better than nothing.'
November 24, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word i also just realized that you cant use capital letters on here
A strange thing to see on 'recently listed' these days.
November 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
Also, I seem to be unable to update list descriptions.
November 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
I don't think this one's been reported yet: http://www.wordnik.com/comments currently produces a 404.
November 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Shakespeare Authorship Studies
Times: 'She was, indeed, Rylance told us, one of the first graduates of Brunel University’s MA course in “Shakespeare Authorship Studies”... The Brunel course “examines the historical construction of Shakespeare as a cultural icon and ‘sacred cow’ ” as well as promising to “examine and consider the suggested alternatives to Shakespeare as author with a completely open mind”. It surely cannot be long before Brunel also offers an MA in 9/11 studies, where the various candidates for being the “real” attackers of the World Trade Centre are examined by arts postgraduates.'
November 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word anti-Stratfordian
Times: 'Presiding over all is the twinkling, charismatic personality of Mark Rylance, the first artistic director at the Globe and the leading figure in the global anti-Stratfordian movement, dedicated to casting doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship and to discovering the real Bard’s identity.'
November 23, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word nO
http://www.wordnik.com/tags/nO/
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word toujours
The part Vexamples picked up is underlined:
'Belle de jour displayed a double life, a back and forth between two spaces, compartmentalized yet symmetrical... In Belle toujours, the boxes remain, vestiges of the past compartmentalization, but the double life no longer is. Life has unified itself onto a single plane, in a Paris which resembles a cemetery for brothels.'
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word alien language
Oooh, new tag...
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word shibboleth
Preferably someone willing to risk being torn apart by accidentally conjured Horrors.
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word nO
As for wHY, I suspect it has something to do with the page nO has been used to tag.
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word software
I take it to be a mass noun: software is code, water is wet...
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word most commented on
Seconded! (Although I imagine John & co. already know it needs restoring. Besides, it's fairly quiet here at present, and I imagine it'll stay so until major problems - e.g. that comments on tag pages don't yet appear - get squashed.)
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word shibboleth
Well, shoggoth and Shub-Niggurath are also sh...th with a double consonant near the midpoint.
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word recently viewed
Am I correct in thinking word pages with spaces or other punctuation, and longer words, don't appear on recently viewed?
I'd taken to using it as an alternative to random searches, but if many entries aren't going to appear there, I may just have to stick with random searching, for all its flaws.
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word congener
Vexamples: master of suspense.
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list morbid-curiosity-words-you-should-be-very-hesitant-to-use-image-search-on
I look forward to getting the option back to deactivate automatic image search.
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Rhodium
Vexamples has the technological bias one might expect from a piece of software.
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user taciturnyetprolix
Am I right in thinking you're another victim of decapitation?
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
I keep seeing % in examples displayed as \ %, e.g. in the headline example on sucker. Is some escape code bleeding into view?
(Incidentally, is % some sort of hoax page or just where you park the maintenance page when you're not using it?)
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word R-Texas
If only there were a U.S. state named Type.
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word SACRIRICE
This?
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pecked
I take it the sense in the headline example is that of Century Dictionary #4.
November 22, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Lymphatic
Additionally, adding initial capitals to words in the page titles now means that both of those pages will appear in the browser's title bar as Lymphatic, even though the site otherwise distinguishes between them.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word surnames
Their inclusion in the databse is more understandable than Internet usernames, but to my mind they still make random word searches less appealing.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Gloves
Vexamples, I thought your line about Gloves being born mellow was bad enough; then I saw your collection of advice to assassins.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user secret_maltese_agent
Capitalisation and a new definite article on dis compared to ribbon? What will tomorrow bring to the series?
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word PHOBOS
Why is this tagged spam? To be sure, the examples are outright commercial, but I'd have thought the spam tag implied intent, and I doubt whoever coded Vexamples intended to spam the site.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
Are we meant to leave feature requests with the red 'phone, or just bug reports? It seems disorganised to have both on the same page.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word artofnature
Yes.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word kanji
'All the words'? Only if our available fonts include all these characters.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
Zeitgeist comments are linked to anchors that don't exist: comment-somenumber rather than comment-word--somenumber or comment-body-word--somenumber. (Actually, anchors come with a cost anyway: they make it harder to tell from the link colour which comments you've read already.)
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Kansas City
Oh, you're talking about Pronunciations...
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Kansas City
I've just tried it, and it worked normally from both its own page and the list page.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word xxxxxxxxxx
A chain link fence?
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the user feedback
Tags are quite often failing to appear when entered, although they turn up on a page refresh. Seen in Firefox 3.5; I haven't tried tagging in any other browser.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lbania
A country neighbouring Oz.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list errors
artofnature is spaceout in OCSJTS terms; teammate-can is presumably dashingly, although that doesn't fully cover what's gone wrong.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word otou-san
Having said that, in general I agree about the surfeit of usernames; for every EatChildren there's a clutch of undistinguished names like VanishedOne.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Rehearse
This is how we deal with zombies.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hindu
This being the hindu page, I imagine you're speaking of the subtle body.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word otou-san
Like lampbane said; it's just that the examples are mainly pulled from Western anime sites.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wordnikkers
Wordie merch seems to be still available. However, there are still only two items available.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list deadbeef
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disqualify LOtUSFLOW3R, KRLA and BARX, on the grounds that none of them can be represented only with the characters 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E and F (plus an optional leading $ or 0x, or trailing h). See the Wiki page linked in the description if that made no apparent sense.
November 21, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word hindu
You sometimes see older comments with no content; I wonder whether they might be comments that had a subject line but nothing in the body.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wordnikkers
Isn't Robotnik known as Doctor Eggman in Japan, anyway? Making Doctor Wordnik... Doctor Alphabetspaghettiman?
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word comments
That's better; cheers!
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word RTLele
You said it. Wordnik is the most comprehensive dictionary in the known universe...
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Loupee
For a wolf with fur loss?
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Commute
The pun in the leading example doesn't make sense until you visit the source site and discover it's an imagined cross between a collie and a malamute; I'd incorrectly assumed it was a weak pun on mutt.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Euergetes
I can expect to see this word several times a year? I take it the year in question is 246 B.C.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word comments
I like the bolded text apart from the shade: it stands out too much compared to the rest of the blue text on the site.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wordnikkers
Of course we can be Wordies on Wordnik. Let's say that Doctor Wordnik imbibed a certain potion and now exhibits the Mister Wordie personality at times: Doctor Wordnik is a suave yet slightly serious soul who devotes his life to learnedly helping people sort through meanings and collect etymologies, while Mister Wordie is the charming but disorganised and slightly crazy personality who just likes to hang around poking fun at Vexamples.
(I also dislike '-nikkers', because it sounds exactly like knickers, which is wholly misleading.)
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word feedback
Since we can't list profiles, this will have to do. This way to the Feedback account.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
And strangely enough, if you try twice to get to its comments page you end up here.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wordnikkers
But what about future products of interbreeding? Weldniks?
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ational
Normally the site overdoes things when it comes to hyphens (e.g. it-essentially), but here the opposite seems to have occurred.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wordnikkers
No, there are other Wordie-like things still to do. Like tagging!
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Abridged
Courtesy of Vexamples: Abridged, her theory runs:
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word school phobia
B.B.C.: 'There is a recognition among psychologists and other education professionals that school phobia/school refusal covers a range of different problems.
'Some of the younger sufferers can be diagnosed as having "separation anxiety", leaving them distressed at parting from their parents at the school gate. But some psychologists say this is more about refusal, not phobia - a true school phobic will experience a reaction even if their parents are present.
'"Other children could be classified as having a social phobia to do with performance aspects of school - reading out loud or changing for PE," says Mr Blagg.'
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list go-get--make-it--use-it-fizz-it--volt-it
Sorry, I mangled the copy-and-paste, and comment editing seems to be broken on this page. /lists/take-this-word-and
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list go-get--make-it--use-it-fizz-it--volt-it
Maybe this is a relation of bilby's Take This Word And... list?
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word g-wirelessevolution
This is unusual: no examples at all, and I'm 'the first person to look up this word on Wordnik'. Yet apparently I can expect to see this word about once a year. (I wonder whether this is a sign that the Great Vexample Purge has commenced.)
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word prawn cocktail offensive
Michael Crick: '"Never has so much ermine been wasted. Never have so many stoats died in vain. Never mind jobs for the boys - under this prime minister it's stoats for the goats".
'It was a variation on a wonderful 17-year old joke by Michael Heseltine from back before the 1992 election, when he taunted Labour leaders Neil Kinnock and John Smith for trying to woo the financial community with a series of lunches and dinners in the City of London - what became known as the prawn cocktail offensive.'
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word urself
chained_bear.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ANYONE'S
Quick! Someone contact the Zimbabwe Telegraph and ZimDaily Forums and find out whether they'll link to wordnik.com.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word metroes
Does anyone else pluralise metro like this, or just that NAACHGAANA site?
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word pengurus
Masterly writers?
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ffffffff
I'm not sure which examples worry me more: the ones which are clearly hex numbers, or the ones that aren't.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word MouseXAxis
At least those are more-or-less bona fide code samples, rather than the mangled chunks of page source that seem to turn up elsewhere.
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word wordnikkers
Surely 'surreptitiously overrun'? (Where surreptitiously is defined as noisily.)
November 20, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word update
Oh, and list names do indeed appear on the comments page, but in their-hyphenated-forms.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word vexamples
Coined on opensourcefood.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word update
On this word's pages, taking this word and listing it produces a 404 page where the blue listing box should be. Other word pages seem to be fine...
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list obsessive-compulsive-slightly-judgmental-tagging-syndrome
Hooray, our handy reference list is back!
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dowload
This?
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word NIGGA
From your point of view, possibly...
(Didn't John warn you people about Wordies?)
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word BANANA
The character encoding is messed up; I mentioned that on Wordie Paradox.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word profile
As it turns out, even private profiles' lists of lists aren't secret:
here's chained_bear's, and here's lasciviousturtle's. So the only real use of setting one's profile to private is to stop people talking to one.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word chained_bear
But the point is, her profile page seems not to exist, which indicates that something technical went wrong in the migration process.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word earthworms
Earthworms: change your attitude;
Earthworms: eat them grilled or stewed;
Earthworms: they're a natural food...
~ 'Worms', by Instant Sunshine
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word EatChildren
A username from some other site, by the look of it. Hopefully not from this site, anyway.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word amuses
The headline example says: The other amuses were a shot of artichoke soup with hibiscus foam and a slice of salmon belly with scallion sauce. According to the O.E.D. amuse can be a noun (obs., rare), but it's defined as pre-occupation, musing, meditation.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Eighty-seven
Vexamples was doing okay for the first few words... Eighty-seven percent of owned cats are spayed or neutered LOCATION: A HOUSE SOMEWHERE IN NEW JERSEY, USA Cat owner standing with hands on head surveying the damage -- having conversation with self.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
The change from /people/profile/membername to /people/membername has broken some links from Wordie: see my comment from about nine months ago about ordinary.madness, which was linked to href="/people/profile/ordinary.madness" and therefore pointed to wordie.org/people/profile/ordinary.madness, the profile URL, but now points to wordnik.com/people/profile/ordinary.madness, which Wordnik thinks should be the profile of someone named profile.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word chained_bear
Unactivated profiles from Wordie seem to show up as public (compare she), so it does look as though something has gone wrong...
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word completionist
I'll try them from outside the university network when I take my laptop home over Christmas.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word YOW
See YEW, later.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word YEW
Just to add to the
confusiondiversity, I've been using Wordie Classic and the First Age of Wordie.November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Oddest
Strangely enough, despite the snippet 'World's Oddest, Scariest, Grasshopperiest Clock Jan', Grasshopperiest has no examples on its own page.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word homepage
I wonder whether anyone (other than myself, just now) ever clicks on the Wordnik logo at the top of the page. I mean, who's going to feel a sudden desire to go back to the homepage?
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ghost comments
Well, one side-benefit of the move has been that the simip page is accessible again.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Woopra
Wordnik seems to be very fond of contacting wordnik.com.woopra-ns.com.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ditties
I'm having further doubts about this Century Dictionary; or maybe it's just the way the definitions are given only for the exact form of the word.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word comments
Ah yes: the newly christened Vexamples.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word completionist
You'd think so, but it's not only cross-browser but happening on two different OS installations.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word comments
I think we're still waiting for a 'more' link to be added.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word completionist
Trouble is, as mentioned on (I think) bugs I can't actually hear the pronunciations.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word nowoftensarcastic
As a tag, this is spaceout when followed to its own page, but not when it appears on gosh; I'm guessing this is a tag from Wordnik Original, since e.g. product placement seems to be working as a classic Wordie tag.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word completionist
The awkward part is thinking up suitably scintillating things to say when there are so many surnames, online handles and product names in the database. Random word searches are less fun than on Wordie Classic, to be honest, although watching the left-hand Zeitgeist column go by is sometimes a workable substitute.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word caput
There's Related, although caput's page is making me wonder what context is meant to be implied.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word So
Compared to so, the definitions here look a touch surprising, and it isn't even WeirdNet that's responsible...
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word caput
Agreed; we've lost some of that lovely interaction between the two. (For example, I had to ponder whether to put a comedy tag on diecast and let someone come across it however much later, or whether to try to work it into something worth a comment.) Maybe John could be prevailed upon to add tags back into the comment pages, in proper Wordie style.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word belvedire
Architecture that resembles Escher's, but built that way by accident.
November 19, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word mancession
Or maybe it could be a recession (or other -cession, as you note) afflicting Mancunians, or a manse.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word caput
You know, when I started using this for FULLY CAPITALISED words as well as mESsEd uP ones, I hadn't realised just how many of those turn up on Wordnik...
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word PLOWED
Couldn't we have the whole quotation, Vexamples? As it is, if we want to find out what 'BABES GET THEIR MOUTHS AND PUSSIES PLOWED WITH' we'll have to visit girls-going-pee.com/desperate_pee/peeing/, and, you know, some of us might be at work...
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word profile
I'm not sure I like these private profiles that even logged-in people can't see, largely because the standard Wordie method of talking directly to someone (to say things like 'this might interest you' or 'stop the spam or suffer the Wordie Treatment') is to leave a profile comment. An elective class of members who can't be greeted like that feels rather un-Wordie.
If people don't want their profiles to be scrutinised, couldn't they just not fill them in? Or are people's lists of lists, tags and favourites now considered sensitive information? In which case maybe finer-grained privacy options would do the trick, for when someone feels like making a 'Gay BDSM slang unique to Leeds, U.K.' list.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word competely
...lost.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word with-and
Victor Eremita's unsuccessful sequel.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word depresses
Stop them!
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word o
For some reason, some of the examples are for Latino (interpreted as Latin o?).
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ln÷oæΣï
It came up on a random word search.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Bucket
Do you think we'd get told off if we advised the world at large - with complete, albeit specific accuracy - that it's pronounced Bouquet?
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word `
Look out below!
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word synonym
A lowercase word that weirdly never existed on Wordie Classic; see Synonym.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word faq
I wonder whether Daz would like to withdraw his affiliation with this site too.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list wordie-paradox
Over on comments I've asked for ., .., ..., etc. to be un-broken when there's time, but shall we keep them here for the historical record...?
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word comments
This isn't particularly important compared to getting fully working comments on list and tag pages, but if you look at the . newly added to Wordie Paradox, you'll see it apparently has a comment left over from Wordie Classic. Currently this comment can't be seen, because . redirects to a random word page. .. traverses to the home page, while ... and above semi-work; their sub-pages aren't accessible. It's nice to discover a Wordnik Paradox, but I don't like to think of any poor Wordie comments getting lost in the wilderness without the care of their independent flockmaster.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Preneed
Vexamples, stop advertising.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word OCSJTS
See ocsjts. Then go forth and tag.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word lists
Jolly good. I'll finally be able to add caput to the OCSJTS list.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Foodie
But what of Foodnik?
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Hatch-Waxman
For when you need your hatch professionally waxed.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word beaglebot
This explains Snoopy's longevity.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Karlyc
Vexamples turns libellous: Karlyc -- I hear you're hiding that you're secretly a pedophile who brainwashed that woman who was a paid worker for the McCain cabal into carving a B on her face while you frog-marched to neo-nazi propaganda aimed at taking down the next president of the united states.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Blather
Where does Vexamples get them from? From the mind of Count O'Blather, the creator of The Crims, comes WHORE, an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of a nascent 'lady of the night' through the development of serious drug addiction and sexual slavery all the way to an ignominious white chalk mark photo-op in a dumpster off Times Square.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ln÷oæΣï
So... do we suppose this was a victim of character encoding problems, or that it's supposed to look like this?
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word themseleves
Eleven of them.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word retropunk
'Build Your Own Retropunk Keyboard'
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word byakhee
Not quite the example I was expecting; is byakhee-2 a piece of software?
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Husband held in severed hand case
This isn't really a case of British Broadcasting Concision, more an unfortunate (or deliberate?) choice of words.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word devistation
I wonder whether the dictionary definitions should be fixed above the examples, to make it clear when a word is absent from our dictionaries even if it has respectable-looking usage examples. Not that this one does have a respectable-looking top example: '...im prod also to say my friens who i showed this wonderful seies to read the midnight sun draft and has been asking me to, too but i refuse because i can only imagine the devistation...'
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word basilateral
Apparently Eral is a town in India; I hope Basil enjoys his visit.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tress
Courtesy of Vexamples: Over by the tress are a bunch of bugs, so it's not really fun when you get to inhale them.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word most
If by honeymoon you have in mind WeirdNet #2, then it looks like it.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ghosted
Or conscientious objectors, for evading enlistment.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Prissy
I love the way my browser window's title bar says 'Prissy discussion, citations, comments and usage notes on Wordnik'.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word I
Whatever algorithm selects the examples seems to favour repetition: I'm seeing lots of 'I--I' and even a little 'I--I--I'.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word i
Two years later, I see we duly have that perpendicular pronoun.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list wordie-paradox
The hexadecimal stuff is just your common-or-garden character encoding problem, but the big BANANA seems different: click on its mangled form and all you get is a page saying 'Disallowed key characters in global data.' Hopefully we'll get it back soon.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word opensourcefood
Hmm. Vexamples?
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word profile
List comments had stopped appearing there even back on Wordie Classic; that was mentioned on bugs about three months ago.
November 18, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word ghosted
Now that words can enter the database without being listed, this place is, in Wordie terms, positively a ghost town.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word CiteULike
n. A remarkably frequently seen source of lengthy 'examples' on word pages.
I wonder (whether or not Wordnik can claim a fair use defence on that amount of text) whether their terms would hold up in court: 'In consideration of agreeing to your use of CiteULike, you acknowledge that the ownership in any intellectual property rights (including, for the avoidance of doubt, copyright) in CiteULike belongs to us. Accordingly, any part of CiteULike (or its source HTML code) may not be used, transferred, copied or reproduced in whole or in part in any manner other than for the purposes of utilising CiteULike meaning that you may only display it on your computer screen and print it out on your printer for the sole purpose of viewing its content.'
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word British Student Time
GMT minus at least three hours. Especially on a research course with no lecture schedule.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word theybang
A more inclusive shebang.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word opensourcefood
From the Examples: The woman yanked Dick's testicles to fight him off. http: / / digg. com / world_news / 88_year_old_woman_yanks_nude_intruder_s_testicles opensourcefood and run it as a personal project.
Yum.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Matthew’s Nursery Songs
See Malthus’s Nursery Songs.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Malthus’s Nursery Songs
Or Matthew’s Nursery Songs, depending on the source. This one strikes me as more likely correct.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Strut’s Walk
The source actually says Strutfs Walk, which I assume to be a typo.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word most
The honeymoon is over already, isn't it?
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Kant’s Eminent Humbugs
Or maybe Kant’s Ancient Humbugs, on which see comments.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Kant’s Ancient Humbugs
Hmm. Ancient seems to be attested here, however.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Kant’s Ancient Humbugs
Judging by this source, Futility Closet got this one wrong, and the correct title is Kant’s Eminent Humbugs.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list charles-dickens-imaginative-literature
Aargh! Accidental duplication through newfangled case-sensitivity! Though I did discover in the process that Futility Closet's list isn't actually exhaustive; I'm currently still seeking a source that is...
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word The Virtues of Our Ancestors
See citation on The Wisdom of Our Ancestors.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word The Wisdom of Our Ancestors
Paw Prints: 'When Charles Dickens moved into Tavistock House, he made sure that every detail of it was to his taste. One of the features he installed was a hidden door to his study, made to look like part of an unbroken wall of books, complete with dummy shelves and fictitious titles. Dickens clearly derived much amusement from the invention of titles for these volumes. They ranged from the purely facetious—Five Minutes in China, three volumes, and Heavyside’s Conversations With Nobody—to straight puns, such as The Gunpowder Magazine. In later years he added Cat’s Lives (nine volumes) and The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, which consisted of volumes on ignorance, superstition, the block, the stake, the rack, dirt, and disease. The companion—The Virtues of Our Ancestors—was so narrow the title had to be printed sideways.'
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word geneticgenetics
That's not an example, that's a list...
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word most
But whatever does a commercial-looking link to a page about a dental product have to do with the word most...?
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word comments
It looks as though links in old Wordie posts which were formed with square brackets now point to capitalised versions of word pages if the linked text does, which means that some links have actually been repointed. Maybe comments with timestamps from the First Age of Wordie should automatically be made to point to lowercase versions...?
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word para-site
A link aggregator.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Firbankian
Not the best of usage examples.
The O.E.D. says this has to do with one Ronald Firbank.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word MORNING
Well, some of them are already in the database (pulled from whatever sources) and therefore can turn up on a random word search (I'm tagging them caput). Whether that's the whole story I'm not sure.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word irstin
As mentioned on bugs, this is Kirstin with the first letter lopped off, making Kirstin look a little decayed.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word cryonicist
h+ Magazine: 'It was created by wealthy cryonicists for the purpose of wealth preservation, as well as to fund both their cryopreservation and their eventual resuscitation.'
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word self-inheritance
Citation on Cryonics Estate Planning.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Cryonics Estate Planning
h+ Magazine: 'Leaving money to your future self is complicated. The courts have decided that cryopreserved people are not suspended or preserved. Rather, they are irrevocably dead, and by being dead have no legal right of ownership or inheritance. These laws may change if the first cryopreserved people are resuscitated and sue for some new kind of civil rights, but that could be decades away. In the meantime, those who are not yet being preserved have spent years pondering and discussing possible methods of self-inheritance. They call it Cryonics Estate Planning and there are now at least three ways to achieve the goal.'
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Dmitri's dilemma
According to this, it's a 'generic term' coined to refer to having to decide whether to carry out your deceased parent's dying wish. Whether it'll catch on remains to be seen, of course.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
I can't hear these wonderful pronunciations everyone else seems to be talking about, in either Firefox or IE (WinVista). As far as I know my Flash installation is up to date; I'm behind a network proxy, if that's any help.
Edit: ditto in Opera under my Ubuntu installation.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word clut
In case anyone was wondering about the first definition on the main page, by the way: colour look-up table.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tomato garden piracy
Possibly a bit late to ask, but: why 'tomato garden'?
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word adobeair
The tagspam here rather exposes a difficulty with the layout when tags get numerous.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word Kirstin
'Kirstin, the significance of this fire for so much that-labor law that came after this and Frances Perkins's centrality to it all?' Whatever piece of code selects the headline quotations is starting to give WeirdNet a run for its money.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word CFP
In academia, a call for papers. I wonder what sense the person had in mind who listed wildcard as an antonym.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tos
I didn't know we ever had rights to J.K. Rowling.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tos
Not quite the oddity I was hoping for: '...If you feel that your material does not constitute infringement, you may provide Wordnik with a counter notification by written communication to the attention of "DMCA Counter Notification Dept." at <<insert contact email>> that sets forth all of the necessary information required by the DMCA...' (From page source)
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word tos
I am presently scouring the ToS linked at the bottom of this page, just in case...
If Wordnik ever sues anyone for violation, I wonder, might John's Wordie comment of eight months ago be cited by the defence...?
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
irstin is the product of some kind of spidering bug: it's from a drop-down list of names on the source page, but initial letters have been chopped off. This one should be Kirstin.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word caput
While we wait for the OCSJTS list to be restored to life, may I propose this as a fitting tag for dodgy capitalisation?
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word noisy sex woman
...loses appeal bid.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word unable to complete request
Very politely, no doubt. Try gift wrap.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word !!!
It's like !!! but with long vowels.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word !!!
Hmm. Those square brackets aren't creating links...
test
test!
!test!
!
Edit: only the first one worked. Shall we assume John knows about this stuff and leave it a while before sauntering over to bugs?
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word VanishedOne
The example is from Errata; but Errata seems to have, er, vanished.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word unable to complete request
Apparently the new name for a 500 Application Error.
Sorry, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. When the screaming stops, please reload this page and with any luck it won't happen again.
Should you find yourself sans luck, or should it *ahem* happen again, please do let us know by sending a (hopefully) polite missive to youarebroken@removed to deter spam.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word bugs
I see the tag handling is classic Wordie: the current Word of the Day, belter, has a definishing tag containing the " character, resulting in a truncated link. I tried to reconstruct the full URL by casting a hex, but the page I end up on still tells me nothing has been tagged with that string, irrespective of whether I decapitalise it.
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word comments
I've been decapitated too, which is an odd sort of welcome. (Which perversely makes it feel more like home.)
November 17, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word 'last chance' for tuna authority
Meaning: 'The annual meeting of the body charged with conserving Atlantic tuna opens on Monday to warnings that this is its "last chance" to manage things well.'
November 10, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word contender says yes to power vote
In case it wasn't obvious: 'Welsh Labour leadership candidate Carwyn Jones has reiterated his commitment to holding a referendum on full law-making powers for Wales.'
November 8, 2009
vanishedone commented on the list the-enterprise
A very musical collection of tags, but they take up rather a lot of useless space on all those word pages...
November 7, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dead girl 'met man on internet'
In the long run.
November 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word doctor admits baby 'may interact'
The missing information is that the baby is on a life support machine which may get turned off.
November 5, 2009
vanishedone commented on the word dead girl 'met man on internet'
...before she died.
October 28, 2009
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