Are You Slated for Crashville?

26 Beatnik slang words and phrases we should start using again, immediately.

Words Are Dying. Why?

Spell check.

From a story on Hot Word...

A group of physicists recently collaborated on a statistical survey of words. You may be wondering why physicists are interested in language. In this case, it is not language per se, but how words imitate the statistical patterns of the stock market and animal populations. This group of researchers, led by Alexander Petersen of the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, culled data from Google’s digitized books to analyze how word use varies over time.

In particular, the scientists looked at “word competition.” Why would words compete? Well, this isn’t about competition between words. Obviously, for language as a whole to function, nouns need verbs, which need prepositions and adverbs. In this sense, competition refers to aggression between different variations of a word: is “color” used more than “colour”? It may be hard to imagine this, but before spell-check there were often misspelled words in newspapers and published books. As the researchers point out: “With the advent of spell-checkers in the digital era, the fitness of a ‘correctly’ spelled word is now larger than the fitness of related ‘incorrectly’ spelled words.”

Is the Print Dictionary Doomed?

Slate discusses it, here.

Do You Want to Have a Dictionary Wall?

Of course you do.

American Publishing's Founding Father

It was Noah Webster.

From a piece in the Daily Beast...

The newly minted Yale grad was feeling discouraged. The 24-year-old teacher had quit his day job to write a book, and only his two closest college buddies thought anything of his work. As he noted in his diary, he encountered “serious obstacles.” He couldn’t get an advance, and he “was destitute of the means of defraying the expenses of publication.”

This familiar-sounding tale of the struggling young author seems as if it could have happened last year. But the date was 1783. The man was Noah Webster, Jr. (1785-1843) and the literary offering was his legendary speller, initially entitled, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, the first book ever published in the new United States of America.
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With the digital revolution now turning the book biz upside-down, we might do well to remember how Webster single-handedly put American publishing on the map. While the Hartford wordsmith is today synonymous with his American Dictionary, first published in 1828, in his lifetime, he was better known for his stupendous bestseller. The Harry Potter of its day, his text for grade-school children would sell better than any other book except the Bible for nearly a century. The final tally: a staggering 100 million copies.

Mesopotamian Dictionary - 90 Years in the Making

A project begun in 1921 to translate ancient cuneiform has finally finished, notes the Guardian.

From the story...

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary identifies and explains the words carved in stone and written in cuneiform on clay tablets by Babylonians and Assyrians in Mesopotamia between 2500 BC and AD100.

The project was first embarked upon in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, founder of Chicago University's Oriental Institute, and has seen millions of index cards referencing 28,000 words in the Semitic Akkadian language compiled over the last 90 years.

The various meanings for each word are laid out in the 21-volume dictionary, as well as their context and means of use. The entry for the word "umu", for example, meaning day, runs to 17 pages and covers its use in the Epic of Gilgamesh: "Those who took crowns who had rule of the land in the days of yore."

RIP Oxford English Dictionary

The first edition was printed in 1928, ten volumes worth. The last edition may be coming soon, as the Oxford English Dictionary may go all digital. The New Yorker has more.

From the piece...

Perhaps, but it seems inevitable that the O.E.D., which has had an online presence for over a decade, will eventually abandon its weighty print form. When the first complete edition was published, in 1928, it comprised ten volumes and four hundred thousand definitions, ending with the Scrabble dream word “zyxt.” The second edition weighs in at a hundred and thirty-five pounds—about as much as the average woman—and fills four feet of shelf space. Weight and size are central to the idea of what the O.E.D. is; authority, in dictionaries, seems to come proportionate to mass, and when it comes to dictionaries, the O.E.D.’s authority is supreme. I have a sense that a weightless O.E.D., instead of being the last word in words, would become just more “information” of the sort that’s found everywhere online.

In terms of use, too, an online-only O.E.D. seems to run counter to the very idea of the O.E.D.: the process of consulting this vast compendium of the English language—made quasi-ritualistic by the addition of the sacerdotal pedestal and magnifying lens—would be reduced to nothing more than a breezy click of the mouse.

Not that breeziness itself is unappealing. Admittedly, I rarely find myself turning to a printed dictionary of any heft, let alone to the O.E.D., when speed or ease is of any concern at all (the correct spelling of “sacerdotal” above comes courtesy of the Merriam-Webster online).

Move Over, Klingon Geeks

There are new geeks in town.

Pictorial Webster's - The Process

Pictorial Webster's: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

Word Birds

Chronicrooner

N. ‘kron-a-kroo-nur One who frequently sings or hums loudly in the office, train, and other public spaces, oblivious to the effect produced. Also (v.) chronicroon. Usage: Lauren looked up from her computer to see that everybody in her cubicle warren was standing and staring at her. She’d been chronicrooning again, belting “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” at her desk. Oops.

This is quite the internet oddity. Word Birds.