weirdy
From Claws of Steel over there, Wordy No, I meant : Wordy, ah for heaven’s sake Wordie. That’s right. I only fixed it at the third time of asking.
Which is rather nice, even if they don’t have any photos like Flickr. In my particular line of work, I’m always hunting for more language resources and this might actually help. Right now, it’s all about xWn and its forebears but who knows… a project like this might just be that viable replacement that we’re all looking for. It’s silly really, but linguistics (and I’m just confining myself to English) may be a field with rich resources but the computational branch is very much the red headed stepchild of the lot. Out of the estimated 600,000 words in the English language, a mere 150,000 have been catalogued and classified by Wordnet. And quite a few of those catalogued words are genus/species names of plants and animals. Useful, yes but not exactly the sort of thing that you’d encounter in the mundane workaday sentence.
And this leads me seamlessly to 33 names of things that you never knew had names. I tried chanking (spat out food) on Wordie and three people had listed the word already. Unfortunately, all the linked resources weren’t quite so helpful in figuring out the etymology of the word.
And not about linguistics per se, but lists of all sorts… Including one of my favourites, potato crisp flavours from around the world.
On 14-Dec-06 at 6:40 pm,
SpectralCentroid wrote:
I knew what ‘HEMIDEMISEMIQUAVER’ was! One outta thirty three. Hah!
On 15-Dec-06 at 10:38 am,
drac wrote:
That’s the only word used in a sense I recognized as well
On 17-Dec-06 at 6:45 am,
Tez wrote:
Didn’t get that one. Got instead phosphene, aglet, rowel and ferrule. Actually, I never considered the first one obscure. (And rowel - heh, that would be my twelve-year-old cowboy phase… Never had boots with rowels but I did have a hat. I think.)
And ‘peen’ should have been obvious to anybody who’s used a ball-peen hammer and knew what’s called, but for some reason that didn’t occur to me till I saw it on the list. “Ball-peen” is distractingly funny.
On 17-Dec-06 at 7:08 am,
Tez wrote:
Oh, good. Comments are fixed. Also, dude, “wordy.org” is the wrong link: it’s wordie.org.
On 18-Dec-06 at 2:43 pm,
drac wrote:
Link fixed, thanks
Turns out that Bad Behaviour doesn’t really like non-standard user agents and your choice of OS is not popular enough to qualify as “standard”. Or something. I’ll file a bug report and see what happens, but the plugin has been disabled for now.
I always went “spurs and jangly bits” and that sounded quite acceptable. What the hell is a “ball peen” hammer? No, I fail at carpentry. Sorry.