homophene
Everyone knows about homophones. But I only just learned about homophenes: different words that look the same to a lip-reader. See also A Lip Reader Deciphers The Umpire-Manager Arguments Of...
Dictionary of hobo slang
I recently read a novel set among Depression-era hoboes, which led me to look up some of the slang terms, which led me to an online dictionary of hobo slang....
Who’s On First, updated
Joe Posnanski recounts the dialogue that would ensue “if someone traded for Who and What and other players.” Funny for fans of Who's On First even if you're not a...
piggy bank
If you search the web to determine the etymology of the phrase piggy bank, you'll quickly conclude that there is little disagreement over its origin. Many web pages give the...
Best 20 web fonts
The AWWWARDS site has a list of best 20 web fonts. Web typography is a little far afield from this blog's usual topics, but I figure it's close enough....
Semi-finished casting products
In addition to being amused by the phrase “semi-finished casting products,“ I like (and hadn't encountered before) a couple of the specific names of such products: billet “a length of...
Typo generator
Researchers at U. Penn have created software that generates typos. Give it a phrase, and it will generate a list of variants on that phrase, featuring things like missing letters,...
Modes of persuasion
I have no training and but little skill in rhetoric, but I find the bits of it that I've seen fascinating, especially the names for things. I recently learned that...
Daisy: 50 years of song synthesis
I got curious about why HAL 9000 sings “Daisy” (actual song title: “Daisy Bell) in 2001. It turns out that it's because Arthur C. Clarke saw a 1962 Bell Labs...
Statistical wording analysis of political speeches
There's been some interesting work lately in analyzing documents and speeches in terms of statistics and word clouds and such. The most recent piece I've come across in this area...