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A Word a Day
For anyone who finds MBA-speak infiltrating daily life (I'll admit to once telling a friend we could "table the discussion for later"), learning new, cool, real words is a good way to spend a rainy afternoon. Anu Garg runs A.Word.A.Day, the website, where, instead of the morning's daily dose of spam, acolytes can receive daily linguistic edification. (The urge to use big words in a review like this is difficult to suppress.) Now he's taken the best of these words and themes and collected them in a slim little volume good for both casual grazing and sit-down-reading.
What's to Like Garg has a logical mind, dividing the book into small chapters with clever themes. There are some humdingers of words, but there are also many surprisingly small entries, as in the chapters "Words that Make the Spell-checker Ineffective" (example: specie, meaning "in kind") and "Words Not to Put on Your Resume" (example: distrait, or absentminded). Anyone who wants to get really meta will like the chapters that are words about words (example: verbigeration, the obsessive repetition of meaningless words and phrases). The truth is, it's just fun to learn new words, stretch the brain a little bit, and to find out how certain etymologies came to be. Pixilated (as opposed to pixelated), meaning whimsical or eccentric, came from the word "pixie," for example, while cremains (from the combining of the words cremate and remains) means exactly what you think. What's to Consider Late in the book, Garg introduces the concept of the malapropism ("the humorous misuse of a word by confusing it with a similar-sounding word"), which seems like an important idea in geek culture. Lots of geeks are autodidacts and readers, and we fall into the habit of mispronouncing or slightly misusing big word. (For years I said prejudice as "pre-justiced" because that was how I thought of the meaning.) To be exact in language -- both in pronunciation and in meaning -- is to have a certain kind of power. It may seem a little prissy to worry about it, but communication is one of those things in daily life that really matter, that people use to make a judgement about how smart or interesting a person is. A weblog filled with all "like, you know" kind of commentary is tedious; a witty one gets forwarded to friends.As corporate-speak becomes more and more intertwined with technology, it's up to all of us to create a discourse community (a concept a friend from Harvard told me about) that makes conversation sparkly and yet exact, even in the middle of a cube farm. But mostly, it's just fun to think about words and how they could be used. Not that it will ever happen, but maybe at the next meeting, during the next inane bizdev presentation, someone will lean over and whisper "Clearly Manager X must have been decerebrated over the holidays, or he would never have perorated like that this afternoon." And we'll all actually know what he's talking about.
Summary Anu Garg loves words, and the book reflects it. He has a natural curiosity and desire to explain bigger concepts about how language evolves and becomes useful. Playful and humorous in his writing style, he's created a book that other people will want to borrow from you.You can purchase A Word a Day from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Is that most geeks are male, most slashdotters are geeks, most males are left-brained, and communications is a predominantly right-brained activity. Is it any wonder that IT is consistently faulted for having poor communications skills? Reading this book will not change the fundamental problem.
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Did anyone else just check their prefrences to see if there was a word-of-the-day Slashbox? I know, I was disappointed too.
I read the internet for the articles.
site has a Word of the Day function:
http://www.oed.com/cgi/display/wotd
Today's word is 'mutton', which isn't very interesting until you read the the archaic forms. There is one from 1518: "And from thens to the halfe strete, To get vs there some freshe mete. Why, is there any store of rawe motton? "
Okay, I find the archaic bits interesting. YMMV.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
It's surprising than anybody can natter on about the history of 'malapropism' without mentioning that it originates in a coinage: Mrs. Malaprop is a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals.
Since I became one, I've always liked the fact that I am a speaker of a neolatin language in an English-speaking society; most of the words that are considered "big words" by English speakers are directly derived from our group of languages, and to us they are simple and common words. Many of the "big words" in the review are an example of that. It takes no effort to understand them, and we can always use them if we want to impress someone :).
Seriously speaking, though, it's interesting how (apparently, at least) most, if not virtually all words in English (that come from a non-Latin root) have one or more Latin-derived synonyms. It's always fun to think of them for any random word.
Being a bit of a word freak, I took the Google search button
c lient=googlet&q='+escape(q)
o m/search?q='+escape(q)
javascript:
q=document.getSelection();
for(i=0;i q=frames[i].document.getSelection();if(q)break;
}
if(!q)void(q=prompt('Keywords:',''));
if(q)location.href='http://www.google.com/search?
and modified it for use with dictionary.com. The result
javascript:
q=document.getSelection();
if(!q){
void(q=prompt('Enter word to define using dictionary.com. You can also define any word on this web page by highlighting the word and clicking Dictionary.',''))
};
if(q)location.href='http://dictionary.reference.c
is a button on your personal toolbar allowing you to lookup a word which you have highlighted in any webpage.
BTW, I had to insert html breaks in the code to get past slashdots javascript filter.
W.F. Bolton (the dude who wrote the text book used in my college linguistics class) called do-it-yourself eytmologies, Folk Etymologies.
Btw, the etymology of etymology is: "the study of true word origins." Etumos being Greek for "true...."
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill