Category: Uncategorized
Knob? What knob?
Gillette man’s custom shifter knobs are sent to customers around the world. “A man from Idaho once sent Roosa a film canister containing then-live ticks that he had pulled off his dog along with several of his own wisdom teeth that a doctor had extracted. He wanted the teeth to be placed in the center…
Torn From Parents, a Top Speller Vents His Anger
Thirteen-year-old Kunal Sah is a finalist in the Scripps National Spelling Bee and working under hardships not of his own making. He’s separated from his parents, who were sent back to a province in Bihar State, India, after being denied political asylum, while he lives in Utah with his aunt and uncle. They have all…
Bombing Dresden: “It was Wagnerian. It was theatrical.”
German journalist Daniel Sturm conducted an engrossing interview with Gifford Doxsee, who was in Dresden with Kurt Vonnegut and is an Ohio University professor emeritus of history. They discuss Vonnegut, the war, death, bombing, corpse removal, and politics.
No surprise that most people on the web just want to watch
Anybody who has ever spent time observing the ad hoc warez or music download networks—be they FTP, Hotline, Napster, Gnutella, or anything similar—would not find the story that a sliver of a percent of people who visit user-driven web sites upload content to be a surprise. They already know most people are observers or takers.…
Here’s my chance to use the word inscrutable in a headline
Rick Harrison stretches his lexical muscles with a rumination on big words, and quotes me to boot: “Most words are new to most people most of the time.” And don’t you forget it. One of the words I encountered today that I’ve never seen before: ridgeling, an animal, especially a horse, with one or both…
It’s Natural That Hillary Clinton Changes Her Accent to Match Her Audience
Torie Bosch explains it in Slate’s Explainer: We’re all guilty of changing the way we speak in subtle ways, depending on whom we’re talking to. Linguists call this “code shifting”—you don’t want to talk to your boss the same way you talk to your old college roommates. We often code shift subconsciously, by picking up…
Upgraded Server Today
We just finished upgrading the server, so if you encountered any difficulties over the last half-hour, that would be why. The new setup should be better able to handle the increased user load.
The Con’s English
Bryan Curtis reviews for Slate Randy Kearse’s Street Talk, a slang dictionary he wrote in prison. My colleague Jesse Sheidlower is quoted as giving the book generally good marks, commenting that it’s a bit better than folk dictionaries usually are: “One of the typical things about self-edited books of this sort is that they’ll include…
Dictionaries will cease to exist when the sun goes supernova
Scotland’s Sunday Herald writes, In the past four years, sales of English-language usage guides and dictionaries have plummeted by 40%, while other reference books, including maps, atlases and encyclopedias, have also shown a significant decline, according to research by Book Marketing Limited. Some publishers have even predicted that dictionary sales could cease completely. I doubt…
Quoted in Details, talking about “douchebag”
Simone Dumenico has written a musing on the term “douchebag” in which he quotes me, and, I’m pretty sure, calls me a douchebag, too: I feel his pain, but then I’m also part of his pain. Because he and I are both part of the same continuum of strivers, of consumers desiring comfort and convenience.…