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A Way with Words, a radio show and podcast about language and linguistics.

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Newsletter for June 8, 2009: If I Said You Had a Beautiful Bodleian, Would You Hold it Against Me?
Grant Barrett
San Diego, California
1532 Posts
(Offline)
1
2009/06/08 - 6:09am

Greetings from radioland! It's another newsletter from "A Way with Words."

This week was a brand-new episode, featuring a word quiz with *both* of our quiz guys, plus discussions of overuse of exclamation marks, bogarting, rattling your dags, pigeonholing, and more. Listen:

https://waywordradio.org/bogarting-bangers/

Last week was a moldy oldy--err, a "classic" from the "archives"--in which we "discussed" (unnecessary quote marks are fun!) flights of wine, what people call the strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk, borborygmus, and more. Listen:

https://waywordradio.org/days-of-wine-flights-and-mullets/

Perhaps this is only of interest to our British friends, but there's a bit of manufactured scandal as to whether the producers of the television program "Countdown" feed answers to lexicographer Susie Dent on the sly. We say: who cares? She's brilliant! And we wish our producer would feed us answers when the quiz guys come calling. (If we did a television show like "Countdown," we'd call it "Comeuppance." Twenty-two minutes of your hosts muttering dimly into their shirts and grinning sheepishly at the camera.)

http://tinyurl.com/mgh5o8

How do we know there are more than a million words? Well, Grant has been working as part of a team on Wordnik, a brand-new online dictionary that aims to show all the information about all the words. So far, the site has accumulated more than 1.7 million words and there are many thousands more in the pipeline. The public beta is open to all comers this morning, no login required:

http://www.wordnik.com

Best wishes from the language trenches (where the incoming fire is incredibly grammatical),

Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett
Co-hosts of A Way with Words
https://waywordradio.org
words@waywordradio.org

Call with your questions at any time:
U.S. (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Podcast: https://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: https://waywordradio.org/discussion/
Newsletter: https://waywordradio.org/newsletter/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/
Skype: skype://waywordradio

________________________________________________________

A Way with Words is sponsored by Mozy:

Mozy online backup protects your valuable computer files from data loss as a result of virus, theft, and other forms of disaster.

http://Mozy.com/waywordradio
________________________________________________________

Guest
2
2009/06/08 - 10:55am

I'm loving wordnik.com so far. It may just replace my favorite go-to site for dictionary lookup.

I think I especially love the Bubble graph, but I would like a clickable help with detailed explanation on it, or maybe a click through to a table with year, frequency score, usualness score. (Why is there more than one bubble for the same year? Or is that just an illusion?).

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