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?