I spent some time today doing a bit of research on various tools for self-publishing. The reason: My thirty-seventh New Year's Resolution of 02009: I resolve to get around to formatting and self-publishing my 02005 novella, in hopes that it might find an audience. I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 02005. I was not a "winner" because instead of ending up with a 50,000 word "short novel", I only managed to write a 40,000 word novella. I suppose it's fair to say that I didn't really fully embrace the "reckless abandon" aspect of the activity. Instead of throwing in a random plot line to continue my story (and thus increase my word count) beyond what felt like a reasonable stopping point, I stopped typing. The result was a cohesive piece of fiction that I am proud to have written. Had I gone the other route, I might've gotten a certain satisfaction from "winning" NaNoWriMo, but I am sure that it would not ...

I'm currently in the middle of reading The Troll Circle , By Sigurd Hoel. I have multiple Hoel books in my collection, but I haven't yet read them all. Despite not having read The Troll Circle or Meeting at the Milestone or Sinners in Summertime all the way through even once, I did get around to reading The Road to the World's End for a second time recently. It's really a beautiful book. Beautiful in the way I think of poetry in its most idealized state. Maybe the most beautiful book I've ever read. If you can get your hands on a copy, I highly recommend it. Anyway, as the receipt that's tucked in the book can attest, I have been in possession of The Troll Circle for over 12 years. I bought it as a special order (with a fairly steep $35 price) on January 13, 01997. And I'm just now getting around to reading it. I am also rereading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time since high school. On top of that, I am very lazily making my way through my hard...

Well, I must admit, I was fairly crushed by what the Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire did. Michigan was an aberration (thanks to Obama and Edwards and others choosing to stay off the ballot). Nevada was surprising, inasmuch as Edwards got such a teensy slice of the pie--but at least Obama likely came away with more delegates than Clinton. I'm still supporting Edwards, in principle. However, it's become quite apparent that his chance of getting the nomination is approximately as good as is my chance of winning the general election. Which is to say, approximately nil. So, I've got to say that my political spirits are greatly buoyed by yesterday's results from South Carolina. Why? Because my preference for Edwards over Obama is only about the width of a dime. Whereas my preference for either over Hillary is as vast as the Pacific Ocean. I am unaffiliated with any political party, and yes, I do consider myself to be a true political independent. Nonetheless, it...

A few weeks ago, we were watching Jeopardy , and one of the questions was about George Orwell's 1984 . I said, "I really should read that one of these days." A few days later, we were at a tag sale and Beth spotted a paperback of the book for a buck. So she bought it for me. Now I've read it, finally, quite a lot of years after I should have done. I had read Animal Farm a long time ago, but I had just never gotten around to reading 1984 . Now I'm sad that I let it wait for so long. So I provided one of my little capsule reviews to the book store on Wednesday. But since the blog allows me to spend as many words as I want, I'm going to publish a somewhat longer review here: Stylistically and structurally, Orwell's 1984 is a masterpiece. In addition, it is a triumph of imagination. Orwell imagined a world so thoroughly as to make it seem less a fictional setting than an alternate reality. His book, while fairly short, is as complete as could be hoped for. T...

This morning, I invited most of the authors of the Language Log blog to take a look at my last blog entry. (Most, not all, only because there were a few whose e-mail addresses I was unable to locate.) Anyway, what has ensued is a fairly fascinating discussion that's been carried on via an e-mail thread rather than as comments to my blog. Oh well. At least they all included me in the e-mails, which have been most edifying. (They're a bunch of professional linguists, and I certainly am not.) So here's the gist of what seems to be the consensus: Both usages are in common parlance. This does cause confusion when people of one camp converse with people of the other camp (especially when scheduling, as the "next Wednesday" issue is just as much a problem as is the "last Wednesday" issue). The rift does not seem to be a recent development. This has been previously studied from a linguistic perspective. Such divergent dialectical usages are probably more common...

According to Samuel Johnson, the pun is "the lowest form of humour". I've always been inclined to agree. To me, the pun has always seemed like a character type. A Lyle Lovett lyric goes like this: You are a lonely, weak, pathetic man.* My favorite lyric from any Smiths song goes like this: So you go and you stand on your own And you leave on your own And you go home and you cry and you want to die.** If puns were people, these are the kind of passages that would seem entirely appropriate for describing them. I have no real pity for the pun, no matter how much disrespect is thrown at it. The pun seems desperate, but not especially pitiable. I'm not saying that there aren't clever puns out there. Surely, there must be. But on the whole, as a class, puns are insipid. Is there a better word to describe them? I doubt it. However , there is one area of human endeavor where I truly believe the pun has been raised to an art form: The mystery novel title. There seems to be...

I know that I haven't been the most regular blogger. I would like to do something about that. I doubt that I'll get to the point where I'm posting something new on a daily basis. But I would like to post something new at least a few times a week. So, I've devised a new strategy. While I certainly don't want to turn this into a photo blog, I have come to realise that my photography is what's getting me more hits than anything else. (Why doesn't my dictionary project seem to capture anyone's attention? I don't know. I've found it absolutely fascinating!) So what I'm going to start doing is posting photographs more regularly, particularly when I don't have anything else to contribute for a few days. Some of these will be old photos that I haven't previously posted, but that I happen to like a lot. Some will be new photos. For today, an old picture of Newton, from when he was still a little baby, 4 1/3 years ago. Strategy shift number 2:...

It occurred to me recently that some of the dictionaries in my testing are out of print. For example, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary , Second Edition is no longer available. So I checked the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary , Second Edition, which I believe is just a slightly updated version of the same dictionary, with a name change stemming from a merger. The results of that test: the same. So #15 is basically just #2, renamed. I've gone back and color coded the titles in previous blog entries to indicate which are currently in print and which are not. Blue indicates in print . Dark red indicates out of print . I've also checked a few more dictionaries in the last couple of weeks. A couple are "on the record", meaning that I had my list with me and was therefore able to take an official count. Others are "off the record", meaning I worked from memory and don't have official tallies. In all cases, I have been satisfied that the...

It's been an extraordinarily long time since I last posted. Let's just say work has been hell and has sapped me of what energy I would have invested in blogging. I hope things will be improving soon. Good news: I made a pledge to New Hampshire Public Radio, which earned me entry into a drawing to win some fabulous prizes. Lucky me! I was the grand prize winner. The prize: A vacation to Moab, Utah (airfare and fancy lodging included). We were just in Utah last year. From what we saw, it's a stunningly beautiful place. We didn't go to Moab, though, so this will be a different experience. We're looking forward to it. We'll probably go a bit later in the year, so it's not quite so warm during the days. On the Dictionary Project front, we have a clear winner now. The New Oxford American Dictionary (which I had previously reported having high hopes for) managed to include all 26 of the non-bonus words. From what I've seen, it's a spectacular piece of wor...

1) I discovered the other day that the car dictionary does not include another of my favorite words: Luddite . Beth was unfamiliar with this word. (She claimed it was a fake word, just as I claimed that bumf was a fake word when she first introduced me to it. I have since come to greatly appreciate it.) 2) Part of me wonders whether I should provide definitions for the words in question here in my blog. More of me thinks: (a) You're reading this blog on the internet, where information is always available to you. You can find it yourself with a few mouse clicks and keystrokes. (b) Maybe if you don't know any of my test words, you'll check your own dictionary (or dictionaries, if you have multiple). Maybe you'll get your own ire up if you discover that the dictionary you've trusted for years is really quite inadequate. I'll admit that there may be nothing terribly outrageous about a dictionary's editors choosing to omit anhedonia . On the other hand, I can...

Well, it's been a while, but I have now added dictionaries 9 and 10 to the table. Number 10 is Beth's hardcover dictionary that I had previously mentioned as being misplaced. Beth unearthed it while cleaning in preparation for a small party to celebrate her birthday. Note: It's not the current edition (third has now been updated to fourth). I do intend to check the fourth edition one of these days. For now, this will serve just fine. I was quite impressed by how well it performed on my little test. More impressive still is number 9, which I would rank as my current top pick. It is the new leader in the hit count, and the color illustrations are quite nice. Number 9 missed on ninjutsu and Scientology , but it was the first to hit on habanero ! I've copied the table to this entry so that you don't have to scroll down to the previous entry if you've been following the progress of the project. If you haven't been following the progress, I would certainly encour...

I added two more mass market paperback dictionaries tonight (numbers 7 and 8) to the table below. They both outperformed the previous mass market dictionaries, but neither was able to reach 10 hits in 26 tries. Early indications suggest that I'm just not going to be able to recommend any small dictionaries. They all seem to be pretty lousy, in my view.

Just in case anyone is tracking my progress on the dictionary comparison project, you might be interested in knowing that I have added two more mass market paperback dictionaries to the table: numbers 5 and 6. As might be expected, they both fall short of any of the hardcovers I've checked so far. Nevertheless, they are both far superior to the original dictionary that sparked this little endeavor. I've also started checking two additional mass market paperbacks, both of which show early promise of ending up with higher hit counts than the two I've added to the table today. Stay tuned.

We own multiple dictionaries. I wouldn't say it's a collection, as such, but we're in possession of at least 5 different dictionaries, and we actually have two copies of two of them. One of those that we have two copies of is a miserable mass market paperback with a cover that brags: The #1 New York Times Bestseller Over 25,000,000 Copies in Print! This is, of course, Webster's New World Dictionary , Fourth Edition. I'm a bit fuzzy on why we landed on this particular dictionary the first time. All I recall is that we wanted a dictionary in the car. I suspect that very little thought went into a selection process at the time. The second copy was purchased in an airport, and despite my knowledge that it's so pathetically lacking, I bought it because it was the only dictionary available at said airport. I was recently dismayed to discover that this dictionary does not include the word curmudgeon . It may not be the most frequently used word in the English language...

Last year, probably around this time, a couple of sentences popped into my head, and I knew that these would form the opening lines of my first attempt at National Novel Writing Month . The sentences were as follows: Angelique was thin in a way that resembled tall. Her husband, Laszlo, was short in a way that resembled broad. I had no title in mind, nor did I have a premise. All I had was two sentences. I was confident that they constituted a fine start. True to the spirit of the exercise, I did not commit those sentences to paper (nor did I type them into a computer, nor did I utter them aloud) until November 1. And that's where my journey began. I am plagued by a terrible memory, and so I knew that there was a high likelihood that by the time November 1 rolled around, I might well forget those sentences. They might be superseded by something better (or by something worse). Or I might just start NaNoWriMo with a blank mind, having to manufacture a whole new start when November beg...

Well, of course it's been a lot longer since my last post than I ever intended. In case you were on the edge of your seat, you have my apologies. I think what I need to do is to start actually making time to blog instead of what I've been doing: merely hoping to find time to blog. If I wait for the time to arrive, it slips by, as there's always something that seems more pressing (even if that "something" amounts to nothing more than trying to reduce my sleep debt). The day after my last post, the new issue of Make magazine arrived in my mailbox. This, of course, thwarted my efforts to quickly get through that Scientific American special issue that I mentioned in my last post. I highly recommend picking up the Scientific American issue, as it's fascinating. But I recommend taking a look at Make , even more strongly. When the fourth issue came out, I didn't think it was possible to produce a better issue of a magazine. Since then, I've been astonish...