The Lexicographer's Rules

My coworker Scott Gold is leaving Oxford University Press to write a book about meat. Some people get the best deals, don’t they? He’s started a blog on the subject, Shameless Carnivore. (Source Link)

Fascinating article on the market for human hair, until it turns wishy-washy—the reporter was on the hunt for a hot scoop, found shrugs instead, but tacked on the dead leads anyway. (Source Link)

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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The funniest thing I’ve seen in ages: Slides from a caveman PowerPoint presentation about “fire." (Source Link)

This article is still entirely too kind to Paul J.J. Payack who talks more twaddle about language than I can keep up with. Where other people publish papers, he publishes press releases. Where other people explain their methodology, he waves his hands. Where other people have a point, he has nothing. Bollocks. Rubbish. Squat. Sweet F.A. Jack.

It’s not even a David-vs.-Goliath issue, as he tries to make it out and as the reporter has positioned it. It’s not even an amateur vs. the professionals. Amateurs have always been welcomed in the American language trades and professions. Hell, that’s how I started. That’s how a lot of people I know started: they began as dilettantes and enthusiasts, made tentative contributions and developed bona fides, and the next thing you know, they’re editing a dictionary, teaching a linguistics class, writing up their theories for a journal, or writing a book on cool words (and not a book they paid to have published).

But this guy? He’s got little but claptrap.

Here’s what I had to say about some of his bunk before.

(Source Link)