Linguist, lexicographer, radio host, public speaker

Month: July 2006


  • New York Dolls

    “After seeing him on TV, Kane, who has appeared in several films himself as a non-speaking extra, drinks a quart of peppermint schnapps, beats his wife with cat furniture, and jumps out a third story window, shattering his kneecaps and elbow.”

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  • Elise’s recipes

    In an Internet full of cruddy cooking web sites overloaded with ugly advertising and ripped-off recipes, it’s refreshing to go to Elise and find a clean layout, friendly text, full credit given for recipes when they are borrowed, great pictures, and a good bunch of friendly commenters. Time and time again when googling for recipes…

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  • Fightin’ Words

    I meant to post this earlier. Chris Vaughn interviewed me while I was in Oxford, England, and wrote a nice article for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram about military slang and jargon.

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  • Never go to a woo-woo type for word origins

    This is the stupidest folk etymology I’ve seen in a while: The word “rune,” as far as I know, comes from the word “runner” where a runner would run with a rune stone four miles down the road, and then he’d give it to another runner, who’d run another four miles to another runner, who’d…

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  • Interview at Number One Hit Song

    Dana, one of those people I know through the Internet (I know: it’s weird that 15 or so years into the Internet Age—I date the Internet Age from when it became a popular tool, not from when it was invented—people still think you’re weird if you have friends or lovers you met on the Internet.…

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  • Inuit Sign Language

    Inuit Sign Language seems, plausibly, to be the newest language in North America. There’s a long article from 2005 in This Magazine about its relevance in a much-discussed legal case.

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  • Double-Tongued Improvements

    I’ve finally managed to move the Double-Tongued database to another server. This should greatly improve uptime and should eliminate all the “momentarily offline” messages visitors have been receiving for some weeks. The problem was that DTWW has been outgrowing its hosting plan. Because it was a shared server, there were limitations on the number of…

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  • 二枚舌辞書

    This article in Japanese mentions Double-Tongued Word Wrester and, happily, also translates the name into that language: 二枚舌辞書. I think it just translates back into English as “double-tongued dictionary,” which is perfectly fine since that’s how I often refer to it, too. Update: Thanks to David Lurie for correcting the Japanese here; I was missing…

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  • MTA Annoyances

    Tim Warner at the blog MTA Annoyances has given my book a very nice review. Thanks, Tim!

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  • Why “The Professor and the Madman” should have a warning on the cover

    Courtesy of Dana comes this hilarious rant: First, They Came for the Foreskin.

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