The Lexicographer's Rules

The Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) was launched by the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin this week. I've yet to see spend a lot of time with it, but it looks promising.

For Acadians, History Speaks in Accents Disconsolate. "Over time some parents stopped insisting their children speak French, and schoolteachers shushed the sons and daughters named Fournier and Cyr. Now many adults in their 30s and 40s cannot speak Valley French, the Acadian patois that is more drawn out than crisp Parisian French."

A friend’s email reminds me that her husband, Jim Gorant, has a new book out: Fanatic: 10 Things All Sports Fans Should Do Before They Die. Jim’s a senior editor for Sports Illustrated and a funny guy who seems to me to be well poised to capture that sliver of the Venn diagram where readers and sports freaks overlap.

Jim will be one of several people reading from his work at the Varsity Letters reading series July 5 at the bar Happy Ending, 302 Broome St., New York City.

Gelf Magazine has an interview with Jim, there’s a nice review of the book in the Rocky Mountain News, and Jim’s also blogging about the book.

Check out his powers of observation as he writes about the Kentucky Derby.

And look how close he and David Sabino are to coming up with sabrmetrics for golf.

Today Ben Zimmer joins Anatoly Liberman in writing about language for the Oxford University Press blog. Ben’s a colleague in more way than one (we were, for a time, at OUP together and we are co-members of a couple of societies). Ben’s first column is online today.

If you keep track of your online reading using a feed collator, RSS reader, or some other blog-subscribing tool, then you might be interested in the the trimmed down OUP blog feed I created using Yahoo Pipes.

A while back I realized I needed to cut down my feed subscriptions. There were too many sources, there were too many that had dozens of posts a day, and there were too many that were were more distracting from my pastimes and professions than they were supplemental to them. The OUP blog, for example, has a lot of great content, but so much of it was just extra for me. I wanted to get down to the core. That meant only reading Anatoly’s etymology column, and now, Ben’s language column.

Yahoo Pipes let you filter feeds, so that’s what I did. This feed pipe filters the OUP RSS feed so that all you’ll get from the OUP blog are Anatoly and Ben. You can clone the pipe and work with it yourself here.

(Incidentally, I also made this Yahoo Pipe that filters the Boston Globe Ideas blog so that you only get Jan Freeman’s column. You can clone the pipe and work with it yourself here.)

Jerry V. Haines has come up with what he calls the worst phonetic alphabet ever. There's a thread at uk.radio.amateur that did something similar in 1996.