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January 26, 2010
I’m still missing a B, V and a Y. Can’t even spell my own name yet. 🙁
A to L:
[and then suddenly…]
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January 17, 2010Oh hello. I’ve been up to no good, spending my time watching internet television and flipping around wordnik pages as I please.
First of all, I continue tagging more things in im-pure non-linguist approved format…. like vcvccv.
CH SOUNDS LIKE K
On my birthday, a great new game was invented because of conflicting pronunciation of the word chimera. Thus began a weeklong game of one-upmanship, trying to think of more new words that use ch in a word with a k sound. Most are Greek. In our game we could only use a root word once, so variations on ‘chronology’ did not count as new additions, unless they were really awesome. Loch is technically a different guttural sound, but for the purposes of a light-hearted list-based game, I hope I can be forgiven. Please add as you like. I tried to remember all the ones I could, but there were a lot. The list so far is HERE.
RH
When I ran out of “ch with a k sound” words, my mind looked for more fun letter combinations to play with, and I soon realized that there are not many words that have R and H next to each other. Rhino, rhythm, rhombus, rheumatoid, the list does not go on for very long. But then! An extension was made, realizing that R and H are often in the middle of words, at the junction between the two parts of a compound word. neighboRHood. supeRHero. waRHorse. Fun times, the list I started is HERE. You may notice Spiderham on the list, which was a children’s comic book series that my family owns and I read as a child. You can find him immediately on Google Images, so I think it’s pretty legit.
ONE-DOLLAR WORDS
Once upon a time in elementary school, I hated math. I still hate math. My math teacher said we could get a free pass on doing homework if we could bring in an example of a $1.00 word. The system is based off of A=1, B=2, J=10, T=20, Z=26. You add all the letters up and if they equal 100, that’s a dollar word. I super-sponge absorbed that system into my brain, and spent the next month of my life with a calculator at the ready, plugging in any and all words i could think of that might work. Pumpkin, elephant, wizards, hamburger, excellent. I loved them. It turns out the internet has taken the thinking out of the list, and you can find them all in one nice place called Math Lair. It lists 660 words, I entered in about a third of them while I was watching internet television this evening. It made me happy. Here’s the list so far.
BH
BH are my initials, and B next to an H is not common. And it looks weird, and so far I just have Clubhouse. There must be others. I found a lot of -house words by looking through the font catalog at House Industries. I got a catalog from them in the mail once, very well designed. I believe I had them address it to bOb fencepost, which was my nom de internet at the time. Brilliant.
DH
Another uncommon and strange looking letter order. This one I also found through hunting House’s fonts, but with a little more success. DHarma, maDHouse, roaDHouse, birDHouse.
Happy tagging, everybody. Please join in and play.
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January 15, 2010
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January 12, 2010
Find the revised list HERE or on the righthand column.
One time in high school, Mr. Fagiano had the whole class push all the desks to the side of the room, turned off the lights, and told us all to take a nap. He was my first philosophy teacher, and some philosopher (sorry un-named philosopher) said that he got his best ideas in the space between sleeping and waking. In our class, we laid on the ground for about 10 minutes, and then he woke us all up (I never slept) and told us to write down whatever we had just been thinking about. My mind had been wandering so I had something to write, but I always thought it was silly. BUT NOW. This new idea comes from that place. [and then suddenly…]
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January 10, 2010
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January 5, 2010
I haven’t done anything today, unless you count the hundreds of words I’ve tagged on Wordnik.com in an attempt to create a foundation for … something.
Basically, I go to an entry for a word. I look at how the word is spelled. I tag the word based on the pattern it has of consonants and vowels. Consonant is c, vowel is v. Panda is “cvccv“. Panther is “cvcccvc“. That’s it.
The beauty of is is when you spend your whole day doing this, your job is basically to ‘think of all the words in English” and then tag them with their consonant/vowel pattern. Some of the combinations point out obvious connections between fight, right, light, might, etc, but other words in the ‘cvccc‘ pattern include birth, waltz, world, and sixth. Unexpected, neh?
I’m sure that a program could be written fairly easily to accomplish this task in minutes, but I had kind of a blast doing it manually. Actually, this blog is taking forever because every word I type here I want to go and tag on wordnik.
As I said, I’m not sure of the practical application of this. Making the connections may be the entire purpose. I mean, you can deduce that ‘deer’ and bead’ have the same pattern of cvvc, (one of the most popular ones, and therefore one I have not been tagging as much). It’s the strange combinations that seem worth making, and I’m happy to make this strong foundation. My favorite series of words is ‘vccvcvcv‘ which currently has: advocate, antelope, envelope, escalate, and ominivore.
A while ago, I brainstormed about what online dictionaries could offer that paper ones cannot, specifically because of Erin McKean’s very smart but understandable TED Talk where she explains the “ham butt problem.” There could be so many more features than we are used to settling for. Wordnik already links to Flickr, and provides etymologies as well as popularity charts on the right side, explaining when a word has come in and out of the language. Pretty sweet stuff.
For some reason, I made an example page of what I thought an online definition page should look like, and included this function. In my example, it was apple, which it turns out has the very strange combination of ‘vcccv.’ It took a long time to match up any other words with that pattern but now there are 5.
Anyway… YOU TOO CAN ADD TO THIS NEW TAGGING EXPERIMENT!
Some caveats when tagging and searching for tagged words on Wordnik:
1. I spent a lot of time on this today but I’m only one person. Anyone can add tags by creating their own free little account. Please add them if you think they should be there.
2. I started out just doing 4, 5, and 6 letter words, eventually expanding out to 3-letter and 7-12 letter words. Therefore, if they are 4, 5, or 6 letters long, it’s more likely there will be a larger database of words to compare it to.
3. For some reason today I’m having trouble deciding whether the Y in KEY should be a vowel or a consonant, so I tagged it for both ‘cvv’ and ‘cvc.’
4. So far I haven’t done any hyphenated words, but I’m sure they will fall into place easily.
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January 3, 20101. March 3rd, 2009: A mysterious package arrived in my kitchen, turns out it was a carrier for EPIC PANDA also known as SUPERLATIVE PANDA!!
2. May 9th, 2009: I went to China. I held a panda. You didn’t. Deal with it.
3. July 25th, 2009: Marble gave me a panda necklace for my birthday. It has heart feet like Propaganda Panda does.
4. August 5th: Yun Zi born at San Diego Zoo. Thus creating endless pandacam footage I would not shut up about.
5. September 6th, 2009: I bought a ridiculous panda hat/scarf/gloves combo at PAX, a birthday present from Ty. As long as I don’t look in a mirror, I’m happy. I love everything about it.
5. December 25th, 2009: Ty visited San Diego and brought back 2 panda souvenirs for me. One, a child’s panda face mask, and the second a framed picture of EPIC PANDA in the wild, before he came to stay with me. Both from the zoo, both fantastic.
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January 2, 2010These are not necessarily albums created in 2009, but ones I found and heard and loved.
4. Paul and Storm
They opened up for Jonathan Coulton at PAX, and they won over the whole audience there, myself included. My favorite must be Live, their Coulton-esque reanimation love song, but their parodies are pretty spectacular. (See Domino’s, Pillsbury and Cheetos jingles, as well as Bob Dylan in a well, and James Taylor on fire on their website here) I’ve been listening their podcast “Paul and Storm Talk about Some Stuff for Five to Ten Minutes on Average” which runs 20-40 minutes. It’s cute, because they are internet almost famous but they need a little bit of editing. I joined their brigade of minions, so that is something that might be fun and or useful eventually.
[and then suddenly…]
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January 2, 2010