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The Friday Fillip: Word Up
Herewith half a metric dozen sites that deal in words, those pesky bits we use to build and navigate our worlds. (FYI, in Japan sets of objects come in fives, which makes a whole lot more base ten sense, when you come to think of it, than our duodecimal dozen, even though the latter is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, and pretty much maps onto the lunar months and… Onward. Sorry about that.)
- Let’s start off easy, with a little quiz. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary is 100 years old this year and is throwing a party of the sort you’d imagine: they’ve got ten word questions for you. All you word mongers should blow through this challenge without shifting out of second gear. Right?
- Then there’s a challenge of a different sort. David Meerman Scott has a Gobbledygook Grader that offers to analyse the content of something you’ve written to ensure that you’re not slipping in those meaningless, abstract terms that infest much professional writing. The gobbledygook was taken from a report by Dow Jones on 711,123 press releases from 2008 and a couple of other sources, including Seth Godin’s Encyclopedia of Business Cliches. You know, devalued terms like leverage, outcomes, win-win, low-hanging fruit… (And all I can say is that I hope Scott has updated his data to include “going forward” right at the very top of his list of uglies.)
- On to the phrase that dances on the tip of your tongue (or Wernicke’s area) but will not condescend to become conscious. You young people who simply cannot stop remembering in great detail every single thing that’s ever happened near you may move on directly to item number four in this fillip. The rest of us can put our half-formed phrases into phraseup* and hope that the word we’re looking for pops up. So, for example, you enter “we have performed a * review of” into the machine, press the button, and thirty or so suggestions appear for how to replace the asterisk wildcard.
- Ũbersuggest is something similar, but rather more freeform. Here you insert a term and the program turns to Google Suggest to offer up what must be damn near all the phrases using that term that have ever been entered into Google. Thus entering [defenestration] results in perhaps 200 phrases in which that word comes first, all arranged in neat alphabetical order. You can search the web this way or Google News, and you can download the results as a text file if you wish, and, if the initial hoard is not enough for you, you can click on a result to see if further, elaborated phrases are suggested. This might be helpful not only to find that elusive phrase but also to get a sense of what searchers have associated with your lead word or phrase. It’s also harmless fun for a minute or so.
- I’ve saved the hardest for last — hardest in the sense of most serious and scientific. Neal Whitman is into linguistics on his blog, Literal-Minded. Last month he did a piece titled Ordering Your Adjectives, in which he summarized the scholarship that looks at how we string together our adjectives in English. Yes, Virginia, there is an order. Of sorts. Apparently adjectives come in two flavours: (1) coordinate, each of which modifies its noun separately and are typically separated by commas or “and”; thus, courtesy of Weird Al Yankovic, “a low-down, beer-bellied, bone-headed, pigeon-toed, turkey-necked, weasel-faced, worthless hunk of slime”; the point here being that these could be arranged in any order you wished; (2) cumulative, which gather their force, as it were, before hitting the noun; example: “little green Italian handbag.”
For this second class, there is rough order in English: evaluation / size /shape / condition / human propensity / age / color / origin / material / attributive. Who knew? It’s all very Monsieur Jordain.
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