Linguist, lexicographer, radio host, public speaker

Month: June 2006


  • Pervasive WiFi

    This is a list of all the Wifi signals iStumbler on my MacBook picked up at the Brasil Coffee Shop at the corner of 30th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan at 7:15 p.m. Friday, June 9, 2006. There are 53. (Click for a readable image.) This suggests a number of ideas: Wireless devices are…

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  • Long tail again

    This article from the New York Times about Netflix seems like an obvious ripoff of the famous Chris Anderson “Long Tail” article in Wired from October 2004. How could David Leonhardt write an article like that and not mention the concept of “long tail” at all?

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  • WOR 710 AM

    Today the web site got a mention on the WOR Morning Show, hosted by Ed Walsh and Donna Hanover.

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  • And what do they call a pickled mangel-wurzel?

    Lynn Murphy, an old American Dialect Society hand (one of those people I only know through the ADS email list, which I first joined in 1992, though she hasn’t been very active on it for a number of years), has a new blog: Separated By A Common Language, about the differences between British and American…

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  • Newsday blogs

    It’s exceedingly strange to me that none of the Newsday blogs link to any other Newsday blogs, as far as I can see. Those blogs should behave like a blog network, with headlines, links, and cross-promos appearing on every page.

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  • Tracy Henke

    The woman who is in the middle of the terror funding brouhaha? Tracy Henke? I went to high school with her. She was in the year above mine at Buchanan High School in Troy, Missouri.

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  • Two Years

    Oh, yeah, one more thing: today Double-Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary celebrated its two-year anniversary. And another: last night I got my first copy of my new book, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. It looks great! Much better than the last one.

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  • Server weirdness

    Sorry for the bad kind of up-and-down that Double-Tongued and this site have been undergoing today. There’s apparently another user on the shared box who is tying up MySQL. Alas, I’m nowhere near being able to afford the $200 a month hosting plan that lets me have a MySQL server all to myself (nor do…

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  • Maud and Dana

    Two of my favorite bloggers got nice mentions in the Daily News today. Notice I didn’t say favorite female bloggers. Shouts out to Maud and Dana, though Dana deserved a full paragraph in the story, not a passing mention. Also mentioned are three other bloggers I’ve met, Jen, Meg, and Elizabeth. All very nice. I…

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