Category: Uncategorized
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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
Tale of Two Covers
It looks like my book has finally been released. Amazon has it for sale, anyway, and promises delivery in 24 hours rather than in two or three weeks (which is what it says when a book is pending but not yet released). One of the many tasks required to put a book together is designing…
Regendering
Annie on behalf of Maud points us to the site regender, which changes the gender pronouns on any web page. This is going to cause a lot of confusion at FictionMania.
Stupid New Yorkers
I fear the stupidity of my fellow New Yorkers more than I fear a dirty bomb, another plane rammed into a building, or anything like that. More than half of the survey’s respondents (53 percent) said that if they had to flee New York after a disaster, they would drive or take taxis. The report…
Kick a word expert’s behind at Scrabble
As part of the fund-raising drive for the fantastic NPR affiliate KPBS in San Diego, A Way With Words cohost and author Martha Barnette is auctioning off a chance to challenge her at Scrabble. Only 34 hours left in the bidding! Big secret: you can totally kick her ass. She’s gonna spend forever doing things…