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Monday, June 04, 2007

The brick-wall approach to getting a word in a dictionary

More new words (most of which we could do without). “They’re not new words exactly; rather, they’re words that have been flung at the proverbial brick wall so often over the last 10 years or so that they’ve stuck.”

Otherwise, it’s the same-old lame article in which a dispirited journalist tries to cobble together reasonable sentences out of otherwise unrelated words. These sorts of articles have been appearing in newspapers since at least the 1930s. I imagine that when journalists see they’ve been assigned yet another rewrite of a dictionary publisher’s press release their furtive searches of job listings at Poynter Online take on new vigor.

Saturday, June 02, 2007

Third Anniversary of Double-Tongued Dictionary

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the launch of Double-Tongued Dictionary, then called Double-Tongued Word Wrester. The site has seen four redesigns, includes 13191 citations not assigned to a full entry and 1168 full entries, and spawned a book. Thanks to my regular contributors and commenters, to my advertisers, and to you, too.

This is the personal weblog of Grant Barrett, editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, a collection of words from the fringes of English. More about this site...

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