For what might be the most random and unpractical Tool ever, I present Wordsmith.org’s Internet Anagram Server (or “I, Rearrangement Servant”). I suppose this would come in handy when you needed to be witty, or if you had a character in your novel who loved anagrams, or if you were a blogger trying to come [...]
Flickr: Thomas HawkFound while trawling the web: a five page (!) glossary of newspaper terms. Many of these are amusingly archaic (does anyone need to know “cablese” anymore?) but there will be times when you, a reporter, will be asked to write a “hed” and “deck” for your 10-”inch” story–or to go to the “morgue,” [...]
I really really love the word maven. I don’t know why. It’s just something about the way it sounds, maybe, the drawn-out maaaaaaaaaay followed by the short ven. Maybe because there are few words that rhyme with it: haven, raven, shaven. Maybe I just like it. A maven, the dictionary tells us, is “A person [...]
One of my favorite etymologies (this is how you know I’m a nerd) is that of the word “heretic.” Merriam-Webster defines heretic as: 1: a dissenter from established religious dogma; especially: a baptized member of the Roman Catholic Church who disavows a revealed truth 2: one who dissents from an accepted belief or doctrine: see also NONCONFORMIST [...]
Godiva’ s new ad campaign, as seen on a poster in a Metro station: A woman in a slinky dress kneels on the floor next to an enormous chocolate box. She’s tearing the ribbon off to get to the chocolates, which are at least the size of her head. Tagline: “Let the decadence begin.” Now, [...]
Tom Chandler at Copywriter Underground covered nine (why not 10?) top buzzwords for 2007 and inadvertently taught me about Buzzwhack.com. My favorite buzzwords on Tom’s list are above, but you can read the whole list here. Other “good” (for some definitions of the word) buzzwords: yogurt cities: Cities with thriving “active cultures” — museums, symphonies, [...]
Last month I wrote briefly about how “facebook” has become a verb. “To facebook someone” is equivalent of saying “to look up someone’s profile on Facebook.com.” This makes sense. To “google” is to perform an internet search (never mind that Google has its fingers in pretty much every business and software known to man). To [...]
Earlier this month, visitors to M-W.com voted “w00t” the 2007 Word of the Year. I’ve been waiting to post this because I have been hoping that if I let enough time pass, this will sink in. Would w00t–which means, as the dictionary succinctly put it, “yay”–not be better served as the word of five years [...]
Textalyzer, a free online tool, combines Microsoft Word-style readability statistics with detailed “instance counting” for up to (it says) 1000 words. That means it will display a table with up to the 1000 most commonly used words in your document; I doubt anyone would ever need that many, but it’s there if you need it. Textalyzer [...]
I came across a coffee poster today in the course of duty that had some very interesting words on it. This goes way past “sweet, lively, spicey, silky-bodied.” Off the top of my head (I made the mistake of assuming the poster would be available online at the Specialty Coffee Association Of America‘s website, and [...]