The Lexicographer's Rules

I am consolidating all of the feeds for this site into one. That’s why you might be seeing more material than before.

Because the citations feed was added to the site well after the entries-only feed, thousands of subscribers were not aware that the citations exist. They’re often as interesting and as valuable as the full entries, so I consider it best to merge the feeds, so that everyone is receiving the same content: full entries, unresearched citations, and blog entries like this one.

Update: A sufficient number of people have expressed regret over these changes that I am compelled by the unavoidable desire to please to revert the feeds to their previous form. This should happen within the next couple of days. 

I’ll carry on reading the feed, but my personal preference is for them to remain seperate. I was well aware of the unresearched catchword citations and of their feed, but can see how others might not have been.

Sheer volume of citations, coupled with the fact that I’d say most citations are one-off, off-the-cuff bon mots never destined to become researched entries, means I’m not nearly as interested in citations as I am about entries. Indeed many citations, particularly those exclusive to web content, are concerted efforts by authors to forcibly create words, rather than examples of fringe words on the precipice of popularity. They are memes in their own lunchtime.

Plus the entries are much more wooyay than the citations.

You might be surprised about the citations: many of them never get made into full entries because I simply don’t have the time, but they are indeed popular enough to go down in the historical record. In fact, for the the most part, only cites marked with “new or nonce” are probably not going to be suitable for a full entry. There are, of course, many jargon terms that are well-established that I would never do as full entries even if I had the time because they are very, very boring.

But I appreciate that the volume of citations might be more than a person would want to read.

Couldn’t you just provide more than one feed and just point the default to the combined one you’re trying to promote? The cites/definitions combination is overwhelming, and noting something new in this feed is no longer a welcome experience. 

I don’t want to sound like one of those “world revolves around me” ninnies, but I don’t think I’ll keep this subscription if it’s going to continue in this form.  More clutter than I want.

Well. Okay. I think these comments plus the email I’ve received amount to a mandate. I’ll restore the feeds to their original form and just promote each feed within the others.

Give me a day or two and everything should be back as it was.