Hermenautic Circle blog

chrisspurgeon has added a photo to the pool:

The tiny messy space where I do my writing and electronics hacking. The rocket assembly takes place in the garage or in my son's room.

This slideshow of photographs from 1989 is offered in solidarity with the people of Burma — as they again confront one of the most brutal regimes in the world.

VERBATIM has moved, and despite our renewing the forwarding request several times, the Chicago Post Office has decided it would be easier to pretend we don’t exist. So if your letter is returned, our new address is:

PO Box 597302
Chicago IL 60659

Our old address may be lingering (in fact, the business reply mail cards went in with the wrong one this last time) but we’re trying to find all the instances of “4907 N. Washtenaw” and expunge them.

I am so sorry for the inconvenience …

My kids haven't quite gotten the hang of board games yet: They find them enticing, but the cherries from "Hi Ho Cherry-O" were quickly scattered throughout our apartment; the "Candyland" board got ripped in half.

The lesson, for me? Simplify.

So we've been playing little games with dominoes and dice. My kids are both growing more interested in counting and pattern recognition, and these are simple, fun ways to nurture these interests. Our games are non-competitive, because my kids remain happily ignorant of the concepts of "winning" and "losing." (They'll have far too many opportunities in life to learn these things.)

The domino game, for us, is a simple matching game; with dice, they roll and count out small objects, like mini poker chips. My daughter tends to modify the activities: She quickly decided that the dominoes were "butter," and got engrossed in building butter stacks; having recently attended the Little Red Lighthouse Festival, she stopped rolling the dice after a few minutes and started building little red lighthouses with the poker chips instead.

My son, on the other hand, is very intent on the ordering and counting and organizing. Both of them are increasing their facility with numbers and counting and patterns, in a low-key, low-budget, non-pressured way.

Your question is answered here, and it’s (most likely) coming to a bookstore near you.

So if you want to walk away with a prize from the American Heritage Dictionaries (and have the vocabulary-chops to do so) I’d call your favorite local bookstore and ask them to participate sometime during National American Heritage Dictionary Define-a-Thon Week. It has to happen during the official week for you to get a prize … otherwise you’ll just get a certificate [PDF] and the joy of winning.

Has anyone participated in one of these yet? I really want to see one. I guess I’d be disqualified from entering, though.

One day you find yourself searching for something to make for dinner and the next thing you know you're whipping up some one-dish quick-fix meal that requires fish, condiments, ginger, snow pees, mushrooms and grated carrots...and a microwave oven.

You once thought microwaves were for losers. At one time not so long ago, you hardly ever used your stove, save for storing plates and other unused items.

There was a time you never took short cuts. Never fell asleep at 9:00. A time when you went out more than you stayed in.

Then you had two kids, credit card debt, New York City preschool tuition and Television became your friend. Next thing you know, you are cooking a recipe found on the Internet which calls for 6 minutes of high-powered nuking and a bunch of that brown sauce Chinese restaurants use for Moo Shui Pork.

And the worst part is: you like it.

R. Walker posted a photo:

Back in 1956, The Times promotion department provided a viable answer in the form of its 65 Ways to Decorate with Books in Your Home, a book/zine with a reasonable $1 cover price. Steven Heller looks here for answers to repurpose of these venerable materials into useful life-enhancing goods.

I tried to post this all day yesterday and was THWARTED by Blogger, so it’s hardly an alert by now, but I’m guestblogging all this week at The Volokh Conspiracy (only their style is to hyphenate, so there I am guest-blogging).

Check it out if you are so inclined; I’m discussing Dictionary Myths. Yesterday’s myth is that lexicographers are word-judging super-aesthetes. Today I talked about why the word inartful isn’t in dictionaries.

My art school portfolio has sat in a box, largely untouched, in the closets and basements of the three places I’ve lived in the last 27 years, sort of like a slowly decaying design time capsule. A few weeks ago, I opened it up for the first time in a long time.

The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has just been published today, which reminded me of this great bit of future-osity in William Gibson’s Count Zero:

She watched Andrea prop up the kitchen window with a frayed, blue-backed copy of the second volume of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition.

Now that’s some good futurizing: a character is propping up a window with the sixth edition of a book that at the time Count Zero was first published, back in 1986, was still in its third edition.

Of course now that we do have the sixth edition of the Shorter, can we hope that real cyberspace, autonomous, slightly creepy AIs, and the rise of the corporation-state are not far behind? (Perhaps “hope” is not the word I’m looking for here.)

If you want more on the actual release of this edition of the Shorter and much, much less on dictionary cameos in science-fiction novels, then you probably want to check out this post by Ben Zimmer over at the OUP Blog.

[Disclaimer: I did not have anything to do with the editing of the Shorter, although I did help a tiny bit in putting together some publicity materials for today's launch.]

Dmitri Siegel discusses graphic design authorship and the impending release of Elliott Earls’ new film, The Sarany Motel.

But this AP article about new words in Merriam-Webster is not all it could be.

The year was 1989, and “snitty” started off strong. The word popped up in the Los Angeles Times in January, then appeared in the March and August editions of People magazine.

It was one of hundreds of words being tracked by editors at Merriam-Webster who are always searching for new terms to enter into the Collegiate Dictionary.

But something went wrong. The editors, who were eager to define snitty as “disagreeably agitated,” no longer saw the word in national newspapers and magazines. Snitty fizzled. Although it was commonly used in conversation, Merriam-Webster’s editors could only find three examples of its use in print. They had no choice but to reject it.

They began noticing it again 2005, first in Entertainment Weekly and then in several newspapers. With about a dozen examples of snitty being published, the term is now a likely shoo-in for next year’s Collegiate.

When it comes to making it into Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, spoken word isn’t enough.

“We need evidence that it’s being used in print,” said senior editor Jim Lowe, who is at a loss to explain snitty’s six-year publication gap.

Well, it would be difficult to explain a gap that’s not there. Lexis-Nexis shows 232 instances of snitty in newspapers before 2005, going back as far as 1978. There are seven instances of its use in the New York Times, 1984–2005. Google Book Search also shows pre-2005 examples, including one from Lucky by Jackie Collins (what, nobody at M-W ever reads beach books?) and a reference in John Ayto’s 1992 Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang. It’s also in the OED, with four citations from 1978–1987.

The thing is, though, that anyone who relies primarily on eyeballs-to-the-page reading (and the article states “The editors spend hours reading everything from science and medical journals to entertainment and fashion magazines. … New-looking words are highlighted, and the passage in which they are discovered is typed onto an index card and entered into a computer database.”) is going to have this same problem.

Leaving aside the boggling “typed onto an index card” (!!! — why not enter it directly into the database and then print out index cards if you want them?) this process is a misuse of editorial time.

Instead of having editors read print magazines, why not dump the magazines into a large digital database and use simple sorting and search to find new words? People, even lexicographers, are notoriously inattentive when asked to perform visual tasks. Let the computer, which never sleeps (we’re assuming it’s not running Vista) do the watching, and let the lexicographers do the analysis.

I’m not saying a database will find ALL the new words — or that if a lexicographer sees a new word ‘in the wild’ that he or she shouldn’t make a quick note — but, as fun as it may be to get paid to read Entertainment Weekly, it’s not very efficient. I’d rather get paid to suss out how words are being used, not to find them in the first place. Doing new-word-finding by reading, instead of databasing, is like finding underground water by dowsing when you have access to a ground-penetrating-radar satellite.

I should also point out that, despite the inclusion of snitty in the OED, none of the current-English dictionaries has included it yet, as far as I can tell. Of course, none of them have started adding large-circulation popular magazines to their databases yet, either. So it’s not like Merriam-Webster is really falling behind … it’s just that they’re not as far out in front as they could be. Think of what those 40 lexicographers (which is what the article says M-W has devoted to their reading program) could define with all that extra time!

The article also talks about the Seinfeldian regift, and says that other dictionaries, including the New Oxford American Dictionary, don’t yet include it. NOAD actually does include regift … Orin Hargraves (who I think was the first person to define regift in his 2004 book New Words) has already pointed this out, though, so all you NOAD partisans don’t need to email Adam Gorlick at the AP to correct him.

The afternoon unfolds like this: finish up any freelance work I’ve been writing all morning in bed. Eat lunch (cold-cuts and a large salad), consider, then decline, taking a shower, change out of pajamas, make a list of things to do, half of which will never get done. Wait for bus on Housten while putting fingers in ears to block out the noise of workers tearing up the streets. Figure I have enough time to buy a coffee. Run back to bus stop just in time for the 2:29 bus. Fold stroller, struggle onto bus, spill coffee, get yelled at by bus driver. Fifteen minutes later, enter preschool where Sebastien is still asleep and Sydney is showing me the “house” they painted out of boxes.

Put kids in stroller and sing songs as we walk to Whole Foods to search for lavender and flax seed to make eye pillows for the school’s yoga classes. Don’t find lavender and only buy half the seed I need (too expensive), but kids convince me that we need two boxes of cereal, fruits bars and a couple of apples.

Walk home with groceries, lunchboxes, jackets and stroller for fifteen more blocks. Have a picnic with the boys on the living room carpet. Laugh and cuddle and try to get stories of their day from them. Give into endless begging for TV. Turn on Tivo’d episode of Scooby Doo and retreat to my bed to finish a pitch to O Magazine.

At 5:20, Steve comes home and we start our evening. I make Picadillo (a Cuban version of sloppy joes, without the bun) served with white rice and broccoli. Manage to feel guilt pangs that we are not eating brown rice. We sit down to dinner. Sebastien screams at us. We “excuse” him from the table. Time to make a collage about our family for school. We cut and paste words and photos and images from magazines. Steve and I make sure Sydney includes a bottle of wine on his portrait. Glue and tiny scraps of paper litter the floor. I leave it to put the kids in the bath while Steve does dishes. Sebastien and Sydney fight and scream over who gets to sit in the front.

I leave kids in bath to clean up the collage mess (I know, I should watch them, but who has time?) while Steve measures and cuts the fabric for the eye-pillows I signed us up to make. Both of us curse me for volunteering to do this.

Drink a half glass of wine, while reading to Sebastien in his bed. He starts yelling at me. I say, “Good night Seb. I love you but you may not scream at me.” Hand him a bottle of milk before running out the door. One down.

Sydney wants a bagel after he gets his pajamas on.

Set up sewing machine and sew eye pillows, leaving an opening for filling. Drink another half glass of wine. The thread doesn’t exactly match the bright orange poly-blend fabric donated by the school, but by now, I don’t care. Sydney and Steve fill eye pillows with flax seed infused with lavender oil. When we run out of flax seed, we use sushi rice. It smells nice but I hope it doesn’t sprout. The end product feels nice. But boy is it ugly.

Put Sydney to bed, after cajoling him to brush his teeth and take a pee.

Clean up flax and rice mess. Feel good about making something and contributing to preschool community. Go to bed. Start a New Yorker article, fall asleep after one paragraph.

Wake up and do it all again.

Today I got my contributor's copy of Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects With Unexpected Significance, by Joshua Glen & Carol Hayes. It's a collection of essays about and photographs of objects imbued with personal meaning by their owners: a stick chewed by beavers, a tiny little pinecone, a box of nail clippings. The items are tangible yet mysterious, and the book itself is absolutely gorgeous. I'm so happy to have been part of this project.

P.S. My contribution is a scrapbook. It's on page 154.

I'm not very big on schedules or routines. So when I first left my job to home/un preschool my twins full-time, the days just tumbled one after the other in chaotic succession. We did a ton of traveling, went on a ton of outings, did lots of activities. But there was no particular rhythm to any of it ... and I felt pretty overwhelmed and exhausted most of the time.

Worse, I'd find I couldn't begin to remember what I done the week or month before; the days all seemed the same, and I could sense I would soon be feeling lost.

My first step in getting a better handle on my time was setting up a big dry-erase calendar, partly to keep track of upcoming events, from playdates to nights out, but just as importantly to keep track of what we had done. I jot down a few things about each day -- "playdough, car painting, Camel Playground, pizza with Amy and Efrem" -- just enough to fix each day in memory. It helped immensely: I no longer seemed to be drifting from one undifferentiated day to another, and I could look back over what we had done with much more clarity.

This fall I'm going two steps farther. I'm building a few regular weekly activities into our schedule, and I'm sketching out more ideas in advance of what else to do each week. We're still very loose by anyone's standards, but suddenly both I and my kids have much more of a mental road map to go by: Tuesdays are when a whole passel of kids and parents come over to play; Wednesdays we go to music class in the morning; Thursdays we generally take a day trip somewhere. Perhaps the key to the whole set-up is the regular event I've scheduled for Mondays: a babysitter, to give me a chance to get organized, catch my breath, and have some precious chunks of time to myself.

Spending the preschool years with your kid(s) full-time can be delightful and transformative for everyone involved; it's also grueling. Giving a bit more form to the days and weeks, I've found, makes it all a crucial bit easier.

From Fred:
Carrie and I wanted to come up with a short theme for the titles. She booked some time with Radio Sloan and I flew up from LA for a night to record. Radio set up a guitar, drum kit and keyboard. We started out with me on drums and Carrie on guitar but ended up switching instruments while Radio kept on recording. Carrie started playing on this organ setting on the keyboard and we liked that the most. It’s easy when we don’t need vocals or endings or choruses.

From Carrie:
We picked out so many outfits for this skit. We went to a thrift store a few days before the shoot and combed through the aisles looking for anything lavender. I think we purchased even larger, browner, sweaters than what Fred ends up wearing on screen. Fred found the wigs at a local wig shop. The fact that I would be wearing a long black wig was news to me, he picked it out. I don’t think I could have done the skit without the wig, I was using it like a life preserver. I laughed during most of the shoot; I couldn’t take Fred seriously with that hair. Chloe from Reading Frenzy helped us out last minute and let us film there. Emily, who plays the customer, let us into the store after-hours and was kind enough to wait around until we were done. Patrick Stanton shot this and Doug Lussenhop edited it.

From Fred:
There’s a thrift store near Carrie’s house that has some amazing stuff and has become kind of our wardrobe department. Also, the flyers in the video are real. We were going to make up our own, but when we went to a local bulletin board to get some ideas, we found everything we were looking for. We don’t actually know any of the people we are describing. We just kept trying to come up with stuff. Great editing Doug!

From Carrie:
When we came up for this idea, we actually had four lines, all of which were the most cliche and annoying things that people say on dates (and ones that we’re probably guilty of saying ourselves). Our friend Patrick Stanton shot and edited this. We went to a downtown Portland restaurant and Fred tried to order using only those four lines. It worked. Overall, we found we could express just about everything we were feeling within the perimeters of the dialog. I don’t know what that says about dating. During the edit, we decided to stick with one line.

From Fred:
I think the only other lines we said were “Look”, “I Get Scared”, and “Let me look at you.” Let me look at you = yuck!
I liked driving around Portland for this. What a great city.

If you were missing the answers to Crossword #104 in XXXI/1, you’re not the only one! Click here for them, which I know you’re only using to check your own answers, right?

patrick_cates has added a photo to the pool:

From Carrie:
We filmed Boink one day during the summer in 2004. Fred flew out to Portland and we hung out for a few days coming up with ideas and shooting many sketches as we could. We used Corin and Lance’s basement for the set. Our friend Jeff Buchanan shot and edited it. I think Corin did some of the shooting as well. Fred had done a Saddam Hussein skit before and wanted to work with it further. I decided to be a hapless yet earnest host of a cable access music show. We wanted the pairing to be preposterous yet to not ever acknowledge the fact that it is.

From Fred:
At the time Saddam Hussein was on trial and I was obsessed with how he looked and acted. Very much like an aging rock star. He reminded me of a combination of Pete Townshend and Joe Strummer. I just pictured him playing guitar in that nice suit jacket. I wanted to do something where he was being interviewed about music. Carrie just came up with the name of the show and host as we were shooting it. Jeff Buchanan did a great job in editing it and doing all the effects and titles. Thank you Jeff!

Before long, many designers burn out by promising unrealistic turnaround on projects, working at levels that don’t accommodate a balanced life, and closing down any time for reflection on the work they’re doing and on the world around them. I believe as educators, we need to consider how we introduce students to reflective practice, how we actually slow down and pace the physical execution of work in order to design smart.

In my last post I offered a prize to anyone who left a poem rhyming rynt and pint in the comments, and, since we had four entries, that makes it easy to award first place, second place, and two honorable mentions.

First prize was a copy of More Weird and Wonderful Words (but I didn’t mention what the other prizes would be, as I didn’t think I’d award any others at that point). But since I hate to pass up a chance to Make Everyone A Winner, I am, and they are, as follows:

Second prize: a schwa t-shirt:

Honorable mention: the latest issue of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly.

I think GarbageDonkey wins first prize by sheer volume; Jonathan Caws-Elwitt second, and Taylor McKnight and Adjal honorable mentions. Email me your addresses and I’ll get them sent off right away.

Congratulations to all the winners! You may now put “Winner, 2007 Dictionary Evangelist Poetry Contest” on your cvs.

Feeling like the ever-bitter writer these days. Having the defeated-what’s-the-point-want-to-quit-and-get-a-day-job-moment. Of course this is after day one of working on my novel, the one I started this summer and have been talking about for four years. Read over the chapter I worked on when we were in the Northwest. I go back and forth between feeling brilliant and worthless about the work, even though I’ve only completed thirteen pages and I have yet to see where the story takes me. But instead of writing, I piddled with it a bit—then start thinking about how messy the house is and whether or not I should take the fiction workshop or start a writing group and the next thing I knew I was skimming the fat off the chicken broth I made on Monday and pouring it into small containers to freeze. Somehow I always end up back in the kitchen.

The kids are at preschool and now I have to figure out what to do with my life, other than be a mom, throw ruckus dinner parties and get fat and into more debt than we already are ––start a small business? get a job? continue freelancing with evil and demeaning creative director at the beauty corporation? Said beauty corporation has offered me two days a week writing for the online division, but working from home, which is brilliant, except.. I’m not sure that being alone all day with my computer is a good idea, given that I’m prone to excessive brain picking and solipsistic over-thinking. My shrink says I should take the job and figure out how to see people more. Maybe I’ll join a gym! Teach a class! Start a meditation group! Go running with friends!

My weight since having kids, and then even more since I started cooking all the time, has ballooned. Mostly I've been feeling sorry for myself and looking at pictures of me as a skinny 20-year-old. With this as my torture, er, inspiration, I have signed up for a 5k in central park. I’ve got 5 weeks to train. And I’ll do more pilates! I’ll eat less fat! More fish! And more low-fat yogurt! And I’ll drink less wine! Even though I just want to go get a massage, then drown my sorrows in a bunch of $12 cocktails and eat grilled chicken livers over at Savoy. Instead I’ve got a one pm Pilates class and then I’ve got to pick up the boys from school and entertain them until daddy gets home. Usually their kooky sweetness breaks me out of whatever ails me. It’s hard being depressed around preschoolers, unless they are beating each other up or throwing a fit, which of course, my my two, is always a possibility.

In 1961, Wallace Berman, a California-based artist, publisher of the proto-zine, Semina, gallerist, and photographer, too a picture of his landlady while he was living in Larkspur, California. We see her (the landlady!) sprawled across a bed dressed in a bra and skirt, casually holding a pistol…

One of the new favorite activities around here is dismantling old, broken machines. Armed with screwdrivers and pliers, the kids have taken apart a tape deck, a turntable, and a fan, all scavenged curbside in Brooklyn, and are eagerly clamoring for more.

My kids were already in a phase of being extra fascinated with electricity, thanks to a book on the topic my husband saved from the rubbish heap at the town dump near our upstate cabin. So taking apart actual machines could hardly be more satisfying to them. It's at once a treasure hunt ("I found the motor!") and an outlet for kids' more destructive impulses; it allows them to use grown-up tools, which is always exciting; it helps impart an intuitive sense of how things actually work.

For me, this pursuit has had a considerable fringe benefit, in that it has gotten my kids enthused about garage sales and thrift stores. We happily roamed the Catskills over Labor Day weekend, finding old Walkmans for 25 cents, blenders for 50 cents, and toasters for a buck. We assembled quite a stockpile of cool junk, which we can look forward to disassembling during the fast-approaching housebound days of winter.

Kimberly is pregnant and living in a sweet West Village apartment with her dog Fanny. And brilliant for me, she's allowing me to be her labor coach instead of Luis, her personal trainer-cum-baby-daddy. It's probably a wise choice, although Luis might think otherwise––the first time he met me was the one night in the past four years that I've been out past 9:00 (it was Kimberly's 41st birthday)––and I drank one too many glasses of champagne and while dancing in my very tall heels in small apartment packed with people ala Breakfast at Tiffany's and, well, let's just say I had a rather large fall into the coffee table, knocking over at least twenty-five champagne glasses and causing quite a stir.

Labor coach may be too narrow of a term. I consider myself an all-around pregnancy-new mom-gestation advisor, consulting on things like whether or not she should drink a glass of wine (of course) and how not to get caught up in all the craziness surrounding baby-growing. Hint Number One: Don't read What to Expect When You're Expectingg. Hate that book; it's an anxiety-laden medical freak-out, detailing every single thing that could go wrong.

My other job, is to cook for her and keep her feeling loved. Saturday she came to dinner. Since tomato season is almost over, I bought a big bag of them from the farmer's market to enjoy before they're gone. With tomatoes as my starting point, I made whole wheat pasta with a sauce recipe from the patron saint of pasta, Marcella Hazen's. There's a lovely crunch to this sauce with the addition of little bits of carrots and celery that are simply simmered and finished with a bunch of super-fruity olive oil.

Tomato Sauce with Olive Oil & Chopped Vegetables
Adapted from Marcella Hazan

2 pounds fresh, ripe tomatoes, skins removed and hand-chopped
2/3 cup chopped carrots
2/3 cup chopped celery
2/3 cup chopped onion
Salt
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 to 1 1/2 pounds whole wheat spaghetti

Place vegetables in a sauce pan and simmer gently for twenty minutes without the top on. Add olive oil and cook for another fifteen. Toss with cooked pasta and Parmesan cheese.

Delicious.

In 2004, the paper targets at the Coney Island shooting gallery featured a hand-drawn Osama Bin Laden.

Snail mail and the internets crossed recently when shortly after I posted the previous entry, an envelope arrived from my friend Brian in London. In it were clippings about the very same British study purporting to show—scientifically, mind you—that girls prefer pink and boys blue. (Do my friends know me or what?)

One of the news stories Brian sent contained an interesting detail. “The participants in the study were both Chinese and British. The Chinese students showed a marked preference for red. As red symbolises luck and happiness in China, this indicates that cultural norms are also involved.” (Mark Henderson, “At last, science discovers why blue is for boys but girls really do prefer pink,” The Times, Tuesday, August 21, 2007, 5.) So the researchers took into consideration that a cultural norm existed where the color red was concerned, but not pink and blue? Seems like sloppy research to me, but I’m sure there’s a study explaining why my pink-addled brain was not cut out for hard science or math.

Another item of pink-and-blue history comes from a reader. In French-speaking countries during the 19th and early 20th centuries, pink was for boys and blue was for girls—“the virgin's color, dontcha know,” says Luc. This tidbit sent me back to my copy of Little Women—just to make sure Louisa May Alcott did indeed associate “French fashion” with girly pink and boyish blue. She did. Which makes me wonder, based on this very limited information, if WASP-y Americans inverted the color scheme, the less to be associated with wicked papist idolatry?

Anyway, enough about pink and blue. Next post, something different.

Yet once Graphic Design is introduced in the classroom, how do educational offerings differ? Herewith — and in the spirit of “la rentrée” — is an extremely random sampling.

Wanting to be taken seriously, designers yearn to be respected for their minds. Yet they take their real gifts — a miraculous fluency with beauty, an ability to manipulate form in a way that can touch people’s hearts — for granted.

For a while I’ve been worrying, in a desultory way, about how to find out, computationally, how many words in English (how many already-dictionaried words, that is) don’t have rhymes. By computationally, I mean “lazily, and in a way that doesn’t involve muttering under my breath.”

I’ve been thinking what one could do (if one were slightly more motivated than I have been to date) is sort all the pronunciation transcriptions in a largish dictionary in reverse order (that is, sort them from the final character to the first character) and then look for unique strings in the final syllables. I’m sure this is probably something one (again, one slightly more ept than I) could do completely in the Terminal window with *nix tools and the right text file.

I was reminded of this nebulous maybe-someday plan yesterday while getting my son some ice cream after dinner. It was rock-hard, so we put the container in the microwave, which has a handy “soften pint” setting. “Soften /pint/,” my son read, as I pushed the button. “No, it’s /paInt/,” I told him, and we quickly discussed (the ice cream was melting, after all) that yes, it’s /mint/ and /hint/ and /flint/ and so on, but /paInt/.

Today I remembered (while looking up something completely different) to do a quick search in the OED for the string /*aInt/ in pronunciations, and hey! There is a rhyme for pint! It’s rynt, a word marked “north.” in the OED. One of the citations, from 1820, is “Rynt thee, is an expression used by milk-maids to a cow when she has been milked, to bid her get out of the way,” and so, in less cow-specific contexts, rynt means to stand aside.

But — does rynt really rhyme with pint, in use? Rynt is also marked “refl.” in the OED, which means that it’s reflexive — that is, it has a reflexive pronoun as its object. You can’t just rynt; you have to rynt YOURSELF, which moves the rhyme back a bit from the end of the line, unless you invert the usual order and do object-verb. I suppose a good poet could make it work; I’m not going to try … (but if anyone feels like composing a poem rhyming pint and rynt and posting it in the comments, I promise to send the best effort a copy of More Weird and Wonderful Words).

But the point of this blog post was to point out that if you have a sufficiently well-structured database, such as is available to most lexicographers (and to the paying subscribers of the OED*), you can do this kind of specific search pretty easily, and then go off and edit Wikipedia.

[*note: if you do not subscribe to the OED.com site, check your local library, which may, and which, furthermore, may let you access it through their website with your library card!]

Today, the comparatively prehistoric graphic vocabulary of the early web has either been forgotten, or is simply regarded with the facile mockery that comes of 20/20 hindsight. Instead, they are an important part of internet history, and have, intended or not, a strange beauty.