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“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)
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Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. -Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and writer (121-180)
(from today’s AWAD)
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I attended a lecture tonight that I thought was bit outdated in terms of vocabulary and language learning, but I did learn something interesting: that an educated human has about 100,000 words in her lexicon, but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.
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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.“
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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?
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Recent Customer Reviews – 5 Reviews Total
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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.
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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.?
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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!
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-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!
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