The Merriams and the Madman
Ammon Shea looks at Merriam’s madman.
Ammon Shea looks at Merriam’s madman.
An excerpt from Ammon Shea’s Reading The OED.
Ammon Shea ponders the word “bailout”.
Ammon Shea wonders what makes a dictionary “hardcore”.
Ammon Shea looks at the word “make.”
Noa Wheeler responds to Ammon Shea’s column on Petrichor.
Ammon Shea, an expert dictionary reader, reflects on rain.
Ammon Shea explains an alternative use for dictionaries.
Ammon Shea on reading the OED.
Ammon Shea wonders who wrote the first English dictionary.
Ammon Shea shares a pet peeve.
Ammon Shea explains how dictionaries ruined his Scrabble game.
Ammon Shea shares some advice for beginning dictionary readers.
Ammon Shea explores cheating in the OED.
Yesterday we shared 34 selections of the OUPblog’s best work as judged by sharp editorial eyes and author favorites. However, only one of those selections coincides with the most popular posts according to pageviews. Does Google Analytics know something that our editors do not? Do these articles simply “pop” (and promptly deflate)? Or are there certain questions to which people always demand an answer?
By Dennis Baron
Last Spring the New York Times reported that more and more grammar vigilantes are showing up on Twitter to police the typos and grammar mistakes that they find on users’ tweets. According to the Times, the tweet police “see themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette,” and some of them go so far as to write algorithms that seek out tweets gone wrong (John Metcalfe, “The Self-Appointed Twitter Scolds,” April 28, 2010).
Twitter users post “tweets,” short messages no longer than 140 characters (spaces included). That length restriction can lead to beautifully-crafted, allusive, high-compression tweets where every word counts, a sort of digital haiku. But most tweets are not art. Instead, most users use Twitter to tell friends what they’re up to, send notes, and make offhand comments, so they squeeze as much text as possible into that limited space by resorting to abbreviations, acronyms, symbols, and numbers for letters, the kind of shorthand also found, and often criticized, in texting on a mobile phone.