Month: February 2006
A quick debunking of a language quack
This article is so filled with rubbish I hardly know where to begin. I’ll just crush a bit of the low-hanging fruit: Snoop Dogg…is credited with a form of rap-speak known as “shizzle.” Credited only by people who don’t know better. He merely popularized it. The “izz” infix is recorded in its current incarnation as…
Piggin
Nice word: piggin, defined in the 1913 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary as “a small wooden pail or tub with an upright stave for a handle,—often used as a dipper.” The 10th and 11th editions of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary still have it as an entry, although as this article points out, piggins aren’t as common…
Free iPod Nano from Feedster!
I finally received the iPod Nano given as a gift by Feedster! At the end of last year, they named Double-Tongued Word Wrester as having the third best feed of the year for 2005. The Nano is the prize for that. They even engraved it. Yay! Now, I don’t want to seem churlish and ungrateful,…
Ridiculous queries from a copy editor
I have just finished going through a copy editor’s queries on the manuscript of my upcoming book, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. I am late in returning the MS pages, but that’s because someone brilliantly decided to deliver them immediately before the holidays, when I was headed to Missouri for nine days and when,…
Newspapers want search engines to pay
I hate to sound like numeeja tard Kyle Shannon in 1995, but old media just don’t get it. They want news aggregators to pay for using their headlines—never mind that most of these newspapers would suffer ginormous drops in online readership if it weren’t for sites like Google News directing traffic their way. The search…
Hype Machine
I see that Dana’s also sucking on the MP3 blog RSS feed firehose (how’s that for a string of attributive nouns?) that is Hype Machine. I can’t keep up with it. In the last 24 hours, it’s given me more than 24 hours worth of music. I need an iPod capable of folding space-time.