More on Scrabble scoring
I've been playing Words With Friends, and it's helping me further shape my ideas of what I want Scrabble to... (More...)
I've been playing Words With Friends, and it's helping me further shape my ideas of what I want Scrabble to... (More...)
Mary Anne decided to learn “Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella,” and it's one of my favorite Christmas songs (though I... (More...)
Something in email a couple of weeks ago indirectly reminded me of an incident from long ago: I used to... (More...)
Just posted a new entry in my words-and-wordplay blog that I thought some of y'all might enjoy: Boggle poetry. Embed... (More...)
I still haven't figured out how best to connect my word blog with this blog. For now, I'll keep linking... (More...)
Over at my words-and-wordplay blog, Shmuel has joined me as a guest blogger. In his first entry, he discusses the... (More...)
Can you tell I don't speak German? I started out wanting to say "time flies," and picked German more or... (More...)
When you're playing an abstract computer game against one or more computerized opponents (chess, say, or checkers, or Dicewar--any game... (More...)
I still haven't figured out the right way to balance my language blog with my main blog. Whenever I post... (More...)
Amazingly cool: the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project has put together something called the Rosetta disk. (Official page.) It's three... (More...)
I'm playing Scrabulous again with Mary Anne. Good words so far: she led with TILDE, I countered with PORCINI, she... (More...)
At some point I'll post more about Facebook. But for now, having fallen into two Scrabulous games almost immediately upon... (More...)
Tonight I learned a new word: "gayelle." It's trying to be the new word for "lesbian"; it's a feminine form... (More...)
Got home late last night, should've gone to bed, but instead decided to write some code. The following will probably... (More...)
As you probably all know by now, Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President today. I just watched the announcement... (More...)
Sometimes people complain that the word polyamory is a mix of Latin and Greek roots. I've been known to make... (More...)
Arr, me hearties! Today was, of course, Talk Like a Pirate Day, as I'm sure you all knew. One of... (More...)
I am not a patriot in the usual sense of the term. Humanity and the world are generally more important... (More...)
In case anyone's interested but missed it, Irilyth has kindly set up a LiveJournal feed for my Neology wordblog. At... (More...)
I've started a new mini-blog: Neology, in which I post words I encounter that I don't know the meanings of,... (More...)
The morning's just barely begun, and already two things have made me laugh: (More...)
And since I'm apparently being Writing Curmudgeon Guy lately, I think it's time for another installment of "words easily confused."... (More...)
Time for another installment. (To see previous editions, search my journal for the phrase "words easily" (no quotes)—that'll show the... (More...)
Feeling a little better than yesterday, but still not up to going to work. Yesterday I didn't do nearly enough... (More...)
Geoff's Gender Guesser attempts to determine whether a given name is more likely a male name or a female name,... (More...)
Time for another installment. (To see previous editions, search my journal for the phrase "words easily" (no quotes)—that'll show the... (More...)
I know it's only been a few weeks since the last list, but shortly after I posted the last one... (More...)
I've been saving these up 'til there were enough of them to post: As Heather noted in a comment to... (More...)
Someone's mention of Gormenghast reminded me that I didn't especially like Titus Groan (the first book) but that it did... (More...)
A friend of mine used to do something interesting when running roleplaying games: he'd use real-world historical names for famous... (More...)
I've seen two different journalers use the term potboiler correctly this morning, but I've also talked with a lot of... (More...)
Half a dozen times in the last week, I've seen a reference to someone racking their brains. Each time, I've... (More...)
Jean pointed to The Gender Genie, where you enter some text and it applies the Koppel-Argamon algorithm (or perhaps that... (More...)
And then there are the words that I think are different but turn out to be acceptable variants of each... (More...)
We get an awful lot of stories in which fluorescent is misspelled florescent. Presumably partly because it's another one of... (More...)
Interesting item in Nature: "Computer program detects author gender." Claim is that "[the] simple scan of key words and syntax... (More...)
Another entry in an irregular series. skirl and swirl. Possibly because it sounds a little like swirl and a little... (More...)
Only one item this time, but it's a remarkably common one: lightning and lightening. I suppose this should really go... (More...)
Another entry in an irregular series. past and passed. In the context in which they're often confused, past means "beyond"... (More...)
Only one word-pair today: The correct spelling of cell phone uses two Ls, just like a cell of the body.... (More...)
More words easily confused: rein and reign. I see these confused so often that I've sometimes gotten confused about them... (More...)
One last thing for tonight: in my peregrinations earlier, I chanced across the Samizdata blog glossary. I went there to... (More...)
We've had half a dozen submissions in the past couple years that include phrases of the form "[person] slunk down... (More...)
Warning: grammar rant. Nothing to see; move along. I've seen this at least half a dozen times in stories... (More...)
I think most Americans are unaware of the existing limitations on freedom of speech. I used to think that freedom... (More...)