The Lexicographer's Rules

It’s gladdening to see they’re making a movie of The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy. It’s the best noir novel I’ve ever read—and I’ve read oodles of them, many in French. Even a book set in a ramp-and-bypass town like Los Angeles becomes darker and crackling when written in a grotto-and-bistro French more guttural than liquid. The typical sparse writing style of noir novels makes for easy translation and French’s various argots map very well to American cop-speak and thug cant. Plus, it’s noir. Duh. (Source Link)

Ben Han, who I know through the Internet, just let me know that his translation of Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works into Chinese is now out. I gave Ben a hand with some of the cultural references. Ben is Taiwanese, so he’s not necessarily going to know what happens to Anna Karenina at the end of Tolstoy’s novel, you know? He was kind enough to mention me in the preface. He also did a transliteration of my name into Chinese: 葛培瑞. It roughly means “hung like a bear.“

His translation is available at Books.com.tw. Ben has a big image of the cover on his site.

I met Ben because he’s also the creator of JunkMatcher, the anti-spam add-on for Apple’s Mail.app. JunkMatcher catches 99.999% of my spam—908 spam messages in the last seven days alone.

(Kidding about the meaning of my name in Chinese. Ben says it means something like “cultivate good things” and sounds like grr-pei-rre.)

This isn’t a prompt for anyone to buy me anything, but I started adding to my Amazon wishlist.

Sometime in the last 10 years I became a list-maker. It surprised me when I realized it. I’ve thought of myself as a bit too carefree for that and I thought I had my mild obsessiveness for order under control. The list-making, I think, comes of my harried days in tech support, when I was so busy I’d forget even crucial things. Like the time I forgot a friend’s party, eventually remembered the date wrong, and showed up 24 hours too late after a 90-minute subway ride from Greenpoint to Harlem. And then wondered why the apartment windows were dark.

To keep the lists, I use Xcode, a program that comes with Apple’s developer kit. It’s intended for programmers to, uh, program with but it’s just right for what I need. (I picked up the tip on Mac OS X Hints ages go.) Xcode works kind of like Microsoft Excel, in that you have one project—like an Excel workbook—that contains a bunch of files—like Excel spreadsheets. Except there are no cells, rows, columns, or bloat. It’s strictly text-based, squeezes very narrowly on the right of my screen, has a drop-menu to access all the different files that belong to the project, it’s searchable across all files, and it’s free.

Anyway, I have lots of lists in my “Notes” project in Xcode. The “books” list contains titles I’d love to own but can’t really justify in my personal budget, or, for that matter, in my budget at work. It’s growing unwieldy, so I figured I’d do something about organizing it and making it real. Some of the items on my Xcode list are merely an author’s or editor’s name and some approximation of the title—I have to look them up in Amazon to determine why I added them to the list in the first place.

Other lists, incidentally, are;

Funny lines I heard or read (before I started blogging again).

Media contacts I’ve made over the past few years.

Drugs claimed to boost mental acuity legally (Ha! I’m nobody’s lab rat.)

Why Firefox blows.

Music to add to iTunes.

Music to remove from iTunes.

Music that comes recommended but I know nothing about.

Various command line stuff in OS X.

Passwords for all the full-text databases I access daily.

Nuggets that might inspire fiction stories.

Words to recommend being added to OUP-USA’s mainstream dictionary.

Words for the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a.k.a HDAS (the second edition will appear, oh, approximately in the year 2020).

Words to use in conversation and writing.

Life-enhancing to-dos, like “bike to work,“ “Swedish lessons,“ “update family tree.“

Big project-wide tasks to be done on HDAS.

Books to read while looking for new words, especially when searching for slang.

Grand blue-sky plans for various dictionaries and dictionary projects.

An enormous list of tweaks and changes to make on the DTWW site, which are slowly being done a half-hour at a time and will be finished by the time I die.

Last Saturday the gal and I went to the sold out M. Ward show at Warsaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Great stuff. He has a voice like a field of green tobacco. Rating: A-. The minus is because I totally thought that was a steel guitar at the front of the stage, but when he finally played it—for one song, I believe—it was just an electric keyboard. How can you dash a man’s hopes like that? Update: I forgot to mention there was a woman playing drums. Chicks who play drums are automatically enshrined on my list of “Rock and Roll Crushes I’ve Had Since I Stopped Believing in Girl Cooties.“

The opening band, Pagoda, was a gigantic waste of ear cilia. Who saddled M. Ward with that crap? First, if your bassist is wearing a polo shirt, you don’t rock. Second, you can’t rock out on the FIRST song, dipshits. You’ve got to build to it. Earn it. Third, put away the Led Zeppelin box set. I can just hear them now, stoned with their feet up on a plywood and milk crate coffee table, “Dude. Check this out. Stole it from my brother’s Camaro. Nobody’s ever heard of ’em, but you’re never gonna believe how good this Led band is. We could use, like, half this stuff.“ Fourth, people were destroying their gear on stage about ten minutes after electricity and guitars got together to make one delicious treat. So played. And don’t think we all didn’t notice how you destroyed the guitar case and not the guitar. Rating: F, for “Fucking retards.“

Sports by Brooks linked to the entry for slump buster today. I’m getting a fair number of click-throughs.

I didn’t think anyone even read Sports by Brooks. It’s all about the pictures of the buxom, wholesome girls, isn’t it?