Calling all word nerds! If you’ve never checked out Wordnik, then you’re in for a real treat. The start-up website aims to be an all-in-one dictionary resource, outfitting each word with a roundup of definitions from different online sources, related Flickr photos, recent Twitter tweets using the word, usage stats, etymologies, comments, pronunciations, and more. Plus, you can also create a profile to tag and save favorite words, put them into lists, and record your own pronunciations.

In the fall issue of Venus Zine, Jane Solomon profiles Heather Rivers, who is a computational lexicographer for Wordnik. Solomon shares this charming tidbit about the office culture:

“Because the Wordnikers started out by working remotely, they’ve grown accustomed to communicating over IM—even when they’re all together in their now-shared office space. People outside the team have found this modus operandi ‘possibly the saddest thing ever,’ especially when someone unleashes a lexicographical knee-slapper that causes everyone to erupt in laughter and then return diligently to work, all without eye contact.”

Source: Venus Zine

Image by j / f / photos, licensed under Creative Commons.

The latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (OJD) will be published without an evolving list of seemingly passé entries, which includes; tulip, melon, acorn, fungus, cheetah, leopard, beaver, otter and magpie, among many others. The dictionary’s publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP), is perpetuating a bleak world without violets, bluebells or passenger pigeons, writes Robert Michael Pyle in the July issue of Orion. But there are plenty of blackberries there (and not the kind you eat.) He writes:

On the other hand, in OJD-world you’ll have no trouble locating blogs or chatrooms. Celebrities are there, spending euros. You can check your broadband MP3 player and send attachments with bullet points, all while bungee jumping if you so desire…

OUP responded that the volume must be kept small for small hands, so when new words are added to keep up with the times, old words must come out. Sharp howls of protest arose from people who hold to the quaint belief that an essential societal good comes from young people getting to know –or at least know about—their natural surroundings.

Also on the chopping block— canary, lark, dandelion, lavender, willow, weasel, porcupine, fern, beech, sycamore, pelican, starling and stork.

Source:  Orion  (article not yet available online)

Image by  YoungLadAustin , licensed under Creative Commons.  

For most of us, Gary Busey brings to mind big teeth and smaller roles in movies like “Black Sheep” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” But for Amelia Fedo, the actor’s name floods her mouth with tastes of cranberry and string cheese.

According to maisonneuve, “Fedo has lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, a rare condition that causes units of speech to trigger involuntary sensations of taste.” This explains why she has such a potent reaction to Mr. Busey and other proper nouns—bringing new meaning to the old idiom about leaving a bad taste in one’s mouth. But Fedo’s experience is just one type of the neurological condition:

Neuroscientists have identified more than one hundred synaesthetic variations, and the sensory combinations appear infinite. In the most common, called grapheme-color synaesthesia, numbers and letters are transformed into brilliant colors (Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman claimed to encounter equations as “light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s”). With sound-color synaesthesia (or chromesthesia), certain sounds—a doorbell, a barking dog, a guitar chord—elicit powerful visual episodes. Other synaesthetes see their orgasms. Some can hear fabrics, taste shapes, and smell their pain.

Despite what must surely be an inconvenience, Fedo takes great care to use specific descriptions for what she is hearing…err, tasting. Here's a sampling of her flavored names:

Roy: unseasoned kidney beans straight from the can

Derek: raw fennel cut into flat slices, with hints of cucumber

Vivian: vinyl records, coarse nylon or denim, with a faint hint of perfume

Danielle: the rind around the edge of a bologna slice

And she’ll taste your name too, if you like.

Source: maisonneuve

J.R. Carpenter has assembled a charming canine lexicon for the Winter issue of Geist. Carpenter’s “Words Dogs Know” are on the sophisticated side: phenomenology, conquest, corruption; they’re probably pretty representative of the average Geist-reading dog’s vocabulary. My favorite:

trust:  When they say: "We’ll be right back," they may not come right back, but they always do come back eventually. When they say: "It’s all right," it may not be all right yet, but it will be soon. When they say: "Stay," for no apparent reason, it’s best to just do it. Who knows, maybe there’s a car coming.

Source: Geist

Image by rgdaniel, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Visual learners can thank Wordle, a site that creates word clouds from text or RSS inputs, for making the printed word a little more palatable. The images made by Wordle are part mutated magnetic poetry, part narcissistic blogger temptation (see Utne Reader Wordles below!).

Here's a Wordle image made from the article "It's Not a Gay Thing..." from the July-August issue of Utne Reader.

And here's Albert Einstein's book, Relativity: The Special and General Theory:

More practical Wordle users could get news updates, suggests Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com, with word clouds created from an entire edition of a newspaper to show readers the day's top stories. The website Capitol Words provides a similar word watch for the U.S. government, highlighting the top term discussed in Congress each day. According to the site, Congressional conversations this month focused on “energy” (July 8), “Bosnian” (July 11), and “intelligence” (July 16).

(Thanks, 3 Quarks Daily.)

If, like me, you tend to obfuscate the meaning of your sentences using abstruse yet mellifluous words, or if you have a penchant for going all sesquipedalian on your interlocutors, have I got a social networking site for you. It’s called Wordie.

On Wordie, which is “like Flickr, but without the photos,” lovers of the English language can list their favorite words and share their lists with other linguaphiles in a supreme act of literary didacticism. Just don’t get wordasphyxia.

—Brendan Mackie