you’ve got a small lexicon

I attended a lecture tonight that I thought was bit outdated in terms of vocabulary and language learning, but I did learn something interesting: that an educated human has about 100,000 words in her lexicon, but basically only about 2,000 of those are put to use. I posted on my frustration with conventional language in Slang –hyperlink needed– and this attests to the fact that maybe while I’m uniquely bothered by it, it’s not a phenomenon unique to my social life… unimaginative hackneyed language is a fact of life.

more on dictionaries…

Julia Angwin in her WSJ article suggests maybe Google is our best modern dictionary. Brilliant! Her test was to research a word in online and conventional dictionaries. Why didn’t I think of that? Eventually she came to Wordnik, which I mentioned in my icktionaries entry. I couldn’t put my finger on why I was not fully convinced of its merit. I thought it might not suit my simple needs, but perhaps I wasn’t asking the right questions of it.

One merit I did find was “the safety of expert opinions… experts do the finalizing on Wordnik.” and this need I share with Julia, who wrote, “And although Google is doing a pretty good job aggregating meanings, I would prefer some human experts to give authority and heft to a new database of meaning. The idea of Google as our modern dictionary has lit a bulb for me. Julia leaves us with this sentiment that I’d like to think on, “I am still hoping for a dictionary that will leave Google in the dust.“

EFL Customer Review?

Since next to no one reads my class blog “at school” (I have to quote it because school is on the computer) I thought I’d re-post this tidbit (sans formatting).

Bf and I thought this was adorably funny and we both wonder if this Andy person is an EFL leaner…. What do you think?

ASICS Gel-Velocity® SKU #7282712 ( View on Zappos.com Classic)

Write a Review of This Product
Recent Customer Reviews – 5 Reviews Total
Posted: Jan 12, 2009
Reviewer: from Los Angeles
Overall: (2 Stars) Comfort: (1 Stars) Style: (5 Stars)
Andy – These shoes look nice but not comfortable. If you walking all day, your feet would get hurt. It is very tight at the foot fingers. My right foot thumb got injured because the shoes are too tight. You should buy a half size bigger.

Spanish, You Got Served (Almost)

Hello! Been busy, previously with intense amounts of professional work and now with intense amounts of academic work (since starting grad school!). Here’s a link to an NYT article I found to be muy interesante.

The new tennis champ almost was prohibited from speaking his native language. What do you think? Fair/Unfair? Announcer’s own xenophobia? A microcosmic example of the materialism plaguing the U.S.?

icktionaries

I’ve been thinking about the lexical charting we call dictionaries since I discovered the wiktionary. That’s a little lie, I watched Erin McKean’s TED Talk last year and regretted my life choices that didn’t include working towards a lexicography career, which has been a dream of mine since, say, 11 or 12. Also, her blog is way cooler than mine (though less updated, given the CEO-ing and all)! Check it out! I digress.
I just checked my blogroll; it didn’t include Wordnik, the modern dictionary concept she spoke of at TED. I swiftly took care of that. And since it’s so new, I’d like to look into Wordnik. I didn’t need a word, only wanted, so based on a song I was listening to, I looked up “silent”. An amusement park opened on my screen. Synonyms, antonyms, usage graphs — by decade or how often to expect to hear the word! — examples, anagrams, flickr photos?, just about everything to track a word… and that was under the “summary” tab. Talk about comprehensive! And in true democratic fashion, we the people can log in a leave notes. Wiktionary may allow for more than just notes, but it’s not nearly as fun or expansive. Plus, I need the safety of expert opinions, and from what I gather, experts do the finalizing on Wordnik.

My concern is that I’m not sure if the site will suit my needs when I need simply the definition of a word. If all I need to complete my night’s reading is the def. of “parsimonious”, why would I go through the hee haw of wordnik for a simple few lines of expert-verified OED officiality? I suppose I could just ignore the tweets and pics and go straight for the list of old-skool dictionary entries. Not bad, McKean and co.

Full disclosure, I can’t stop looking up words on Wordnik, like hee haw, which does not exist there yet. Is it part of my civic duty to submit it?
And I started this off hoping to drop the sex-lexicon link. There’s no opportunity; I went so off-track I’m on a different line altogether. I’ll just addendum it here. It’s something Zap Brannigan would think up and I love it. You can browse it! My 12-year-old self is very happy. But what would happen if sex-lexis moved into the Wordnik arena…. ay gevalt!

pictures as stories

This blog was born of my love of words and the sentences and ideas they make, and I do not disqualify words when they are packaged with pictures. It’s all good to me. Pictures For Sad Children is making me happy today, so this post is about comics. I have a penchant for turning fun things into academics so…
What is a comic? Is anything with pictures and a blurb a comic? Are panels and strips required? What about narrative storytelling? I should say now that I don’t make a distinction between graphic novels and comics. Is that wrong?

Some musings:
PFSC goes non-linear in pretty much every strip… so it’s not a strip per say, and it’s easy to get confused about which panel to read next. I hate reading out-of-order. Why would the author/artist try to trick me like that? I just want to follow the story!
I was wondering, if I read xkcd from beginning to end, will I have read a graphic novel?
What do you think about this one, from a guest-artist at Tiny Kitten Teeth? The panels are unrelated. Wth? As a side-note, the last one is the absolute Louis CK definition of hilarious!
And here’s an Internet comic that keeps the same picture panels, and changes only the dialogue with each update. That’s like eating tofu for dinner every night, and just changing the marinade. What I mean to say is, delicious!

I probably wouldn’t think so much about comics if it weren’t for the fact that a)I like comics and b)I read some of Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics: Invisible Art’ in an English class at Rutgers. Of course my brain has never been the same, but I actually don’t remember much of what I read, so it’s on my wishlist. So is Ten Cent Plague, which gives a history of comics under the premise that comics is more rock-n-roll than rock-n-roll. I dig it. On a similar note, probably the most bad-ass rock-n-roll Bible you’ll ever read is this one.

Scattered, but there are my musings. This works best when you respond to the questions I asked, or ask some of your own. Thanks for participating.

P.S. Maybe I’ll update this post if I ever figure out why comics in the old newspapers were called “funnies” and then talk about why that could never work today (see The Manga Bible above and Mom’s Cancer).

finished-ish

-ish is so juvenile. From now on it’s -esque all the way. Because I’m a lady, and ladyies speak with sophistication and class. No more baby stuff.
examples:
“What time is it?” “Eh, 6-esque.”
“Can you give me a synonym for juvenile?” “… child-esque”

Beautiful!

Slang

I have a problem. Conventional language in conversation frustrates me. Predictable topics, handy phrases. I hear it and fight the urge to walk away. Sadly, I’m found guilty by a jury of me all the time of using such offensively banal language. And I can’t walk away form that.

International Literature

I’m happy to be working at the 5th annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. If anyone is in the New York City area, please check out the schedule. A lot of the events are free, though some require reservations or paid tickets. I’m looking forward to the experience, and I think this is a major event that all people should take part in, to learn about what’s happening in the rest of the world and experience the diversity in thought and culture of our great globe.

Tweeting Twats On Twitter

Has anyone else noticed all the fun twists on everyday language Twitter is fueling? How many variations on Twitter do we use now, and even better, how many more can you come up with? Cleese’s confessional includes what is by far my favorite modification on the word.
[update: i just saw "tweeps" here]

But besides verbing it up with the word “tweeting”, I’ve noticed people choosing to start their “tweets” (when will it be time to drop the quotes?) in mainly two ways: as a standard sentence, or as a direct response to the question “What are you doing?”

I kind of like the latter choice. I think sticking to the direct-answer format forces creativity through confinement. Does that make sense to anyone but me? I think it forces users to think about and chose their verbs more carefully, and I think that process is the key to more eloquent speech, and a practice that I encourage. Strengthen your nouns and verbs, I would coach, in a hypothetical English coaching instance. Be descriptive without relying on adjectives! What fun! Thing is, posting in that manner leaves a subordinate clause blowing in the wwwind…

No one really knows what Twitter is, and no one can really say, or has the right to say, how it should and shouldn’t be used. It’s just so damn interesting to see what people are doing with their sentences, when all they have to produce them is 140 characters! There are the direct-answer people, the advertisers, the single word people, and then there’s people like the Mime (who does not amuse me btw). If you have preferences, observations, or ideas, let me know!

June 19: article on “things” that Twitter