Oliver Steele

What is a “hexangle”?

pneu·mo·co·coa (‘nū.mə’koʊ.koʊ): A condition wherein the presence of the patient in a room vacuums all the chocolate out of it.

Jim Grandy wrote:

From: jgrandy

Subject: stupid Google game

Date: January 7, 2006 6:17:58 PM EST

Google for "unfortunately, yournamehere":

Lots of fun hits for "unfortunately, jim":

• unfortunately Jim’s orange dry suit made him look like a carrot
  
• Unfortunately Jim is no longer with us as he died of a brain tumor in 1993.
  
• Unfortunately, Jim did not respond. He disbelieved that it was an angel.
  
• Unfortunately, Jim is only one person with a limited amount of time available to

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“Aargh!” But how do you spell it?

(Click here to skip straight to the visualization.)

In the late nineties, I tried using internet search as a spelling corrector. (I think I was using AltaVista at the time. It was the latest and greatest search engine, supplanting — was it Lycos?)

At the time, for the words I tried, there were about two orders of magnitude between a misspelling and the correct word. A spelling variant, such as “color” and “colour”, were typically less than one order of magnitude.

(For Miles.)

Read across the rows to see words that are easily confused with each other. Read down the columns to see the patterns.

Things to note:

• All of the contractions have apostrophes ’.

After a spate of requests and a contribution from Wei-Hao Lin, I’ve finally gotten around to releasing an update of PyWordNet that works with the WordNet 2.0 database files. (WordNet 2.0 adds lexical links for derivational morphology and topical classification. This broke the PyWordNet 1.4 dictionary file parser.)

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This release also adds a module, contributed by Des Berry, for reading the concordance data; and an implementation of Lexname by Klaus Reis. I don’t know how these work, so ask for help on the PyWordNet discussion group, or from the authors.

Now that product ingredient lists have become marketing bullets, here are two terms that I’ve found useful for thinking about them:

Ingrediant (with an ‘a’)

An item added to an ingredient list purely for its marketing effect, as opposed to any material qualities that it adds to the product. For example, the vitamins that are added to shampoos. (By analogy with surfactant, flavorant, colorant.)

Isochem

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A wedding is a coercion operator from a state, to an event that marks the beginning of the state. (The English word “marriage” denotes either.) The advantage of an event over a state, is that it can be used as a reference for other events, symbolizing happiness, community, fertility, ,etc., by placing these other events at the same time and location. This is analogous to time binding in linguistics.

I used to be an unrepetant nineteenth century grammarian. I never used a preposition to end a sentence; I took care to never never to split an infinitive; I knew “who” from “whom”; and I never, ever, used “they” for “he or she”.
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