The Lexicographer's Rules

William Safire writes in his “On Language” column in the New York Times this week:

“You can find a variety of senses for the word bump in our leading dictionaries.…But the sense that lexicographers are slow in recording is racing through our vocabulary, filling a word void. What term do we use today for the visible manifestation of pregnancy?“

Dude, I know it’s not a print dictionary, but I recorded a citation for that term last fall. Booya!

Here’s a real howler: The word “booze” comes from the Nubian “boosa,“ a type of strong beer. No, it doesn’t, no matter how many unreliable sources perpetuate it.

The Middle English Dictionary dates the verb booze to ca1325. The Oxford English Dictionary concurs and marks it as apparently from Middle Dutch. There’s a German verb, bausen, with the same meaning. OED ultimately suggests booze is “directly related to buise a large drinking-vessel.“

Rule: Never attribute to exotics what is best credited to your neighbors.

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Alright, you jackasses can stop trying to perpetrate that lame-ass supposed hipster slang that was shat out in the shape of the Hipster Handbook a couple of years ago. It’s not particularly clever, funny, or likely to catch on. It’s not ironic, either. Irony has a pointy end. This hoax is dull and rusted. (Source Link)

Nicolai Ouroussoff may think Renzo Piano’s addition to the Morgan Library and Museum is “dazzling,“ but from the outside it looks to me like the shop class entrance of a prefab suburban high school. Like temporary shelter thrown down by the only bidder to make it through onerous bureaucratic paperwork. What kind of ego takes one of the last brownstones left on Madison Avenue and glue-guns up two storeys of barn siding right next to it? Mere feet away?

Can you tell I hate it?

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The New York Times did a redesign. They write, in part,

We have expanded the page to take advantage of the larger monitors now used by the vast majority of our readers.

My response: “Hey, who said we read (or want to read) ANY web site with the browser window filling the whole screen? The only people I know who do that are n00b Windows users.“

Just because most of your visitors have a screen that size doesn’t mean they don’t have 28 other programs open also taking screen real estate, like I do now.

Their choice of window size is a stupid assumption, which is, in turn, an amateur mistake. I’d expect better.

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