Category: Uncategorized
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…
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…
MTA Annoyances
Tim Warner at the blog MTA Annoyances has given my book a very nice review. Thanks, Tim!
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.
Book Reviews
More reviews for my book have come in. Dana at Linguistic Life had several nice things to say, and says “Grant’s reported to be one of the happiest lexicographers out there.” So! I shall never be called a young curmudgeon again. Jan Freeman at the Boston Globe gives both the book and the web site…
Spelling reform? No.
Any advocate of drastic spelling reform must have an insufficient understanding of just how differently English is spoken in the various groups that contribute to our various American English dialects. Which is why stories like this are such howlers: those paragraphs written in “simpler” spelling simply do not work in whole swaths of America. First,…
Crank etymologist
Thinking phonetic similarities between words prove origin or relation is a common mistake of amateur etymologists, as in this junk etymology, where the author, a known crank who favors simplistic and unverified Irish origins for a variety of English words—because he thinks American and English lexicographers have an anti-Irish bias—posits that bunkum comes from a…
Radio Tour
Tomorrow morning I’m doing three radio interviews. If you’re in those markets, have a listen. Update: Rescheduling of radio interviews is very common. The WYYY interview will now happen Thursday July 6. The interview on The Bear 97.9 will air tomorrow morning. The interview with Johnny Manson went off without a hitch. Rick Gary and…
Today on Talk of the Nation
Today around 3 p.m. I’m scheduled to be on the radio show Talk of the Nation, broadcast on public radio affiliates around the country. The web site says the topic will “examine how the Web has changed the way people research words,” but I imagine the discussion will stray and extend. Update: The show went…
Minnesota loves me, too
I did a nice radio interview with Bob Hughes at WJON AM 1240 in St. Cloud, Minnesota, this morning. It was a good chat. He seemed genuinely interested in language and dictionaries and we had a real conversation instead of him throwing cookie-cutter questions at me and me throwing boilerplate answers back.