The Adventure for Amazingly August Adjectives

Also, amorous assonance. *heart* Although I actually do enjoy the majuscule A from a typographical point of view (and therefore from a calligraphic view as well), it's strangely not my favourite letter of the alphabet. (Naturally, of course, this worldview changes when I'm getting letter grades on my essays and assignments. Then I want all A's, baby!) Anyway. I'm sitting in the reading room (or quiet study room) in the Student Life Centre on campus, trying to think up a slightly less homophilic title for a friend's photo album (working title: "Boys of Summer"), and this naturally led to the desire to form an adjective for "summer". Summery? summerly? summerian? The first two are actually words that pertain to summer, but it's still not what I wanted. And here is where OED fails again. I've mentioned it before, so I don't see the need to expand on it again. But basically, I needed to look elsewhere for a list of season-related adjectives. And thus, I chanced upon a site that offered them. And so, the four adjectives for the four seasons!

• Spring = Vernal
• Summer = Estival
• Autumn = Autumnal
• Winter = Hibernal

"autumnal" is perhaps the most transparent of the four, and also the best known for its collocation "equinox," whence one might also find "vernal." However, given the relative obscurity of both terms, I suppose they're still only known by about 5% of the English-speaking population. (NB: "5%" is not a statistically researched number; it is based on the extremely volatile intuition of the former honours mathematics student) As for "Æstival" and "Hibernal," I think the salience is even weaker.
Yay! As any good poet or wordsmith knows, there are also adjectives that describe colours (which are already adjectives). That's why we have crimson, scarlet, vermilion and sanguine to describe 'red' without having to resort to fruits (unlike, say, "pomegranate red," or "lemon yellow," etc...) Personally, I think that resorting to precious gems is sorta pushing it as well (ie emerald green, ruby red, sapphire blue, etc.)
Just a quick post for now; more serious post to come soon! :D

Dictionary Usability II

More beef with electronic dictionaries. Well, more accurately, more features that I think would benefit its users.

So, traditionally, dictionaries are sorted alphabetically, which works because it's an order that doesn't discriminate words. But with the advent of the computer and cross-listing, it's so easy to create different types of indexing. Say, for example, that I knew that "octogenarian" meant "someone in their eighties". How would I look up the word that meant "someone in their nineties"? Well, there is a wildcard search, so I could look for {*genarian}, and click through the resulting list:

nonagenarian
octogenarian
quadragenarian
quinquagenarian
quintagenarian
septuagenarian
sexagenarian
super-septuagenarian

And that could be great, if you have some Latin training, 'cause then it'd be a quick inspection of the prefixes to figure out which one you want.

But what if I wanted to know the adjective for "liver" and only knew that "renal" was an adj. that pertained to the organ "kidney"? Well, there is a round-about way under "advanced search", where you can look for words in the definition, as well as specifying the part of speech (in this case, to narrow searches for adjectives only). But that's still a bit clumsy.

Now, say I knew that the adj. for hedgehog was "erinaceous", only because I saw a lexicographical online lecture on the TED website. how would I look up the adjectives of other animals? OED doesn't really offer anything, and of course you could do the backward "advanced" search, but it still doesn't organise your searches in an intelligent manner.

So, I think that with the definitions should be a list of related terms that aren't lexically similar, for easy clicking. So under liver would be its definitions, and then "related terms: renal, "

Dictionary Usability

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to a TED talk by a lexicographer. Now I'll follow up with a tangential response (which is to say, some of the ideas in this post are inspired by her talk).

The definition of a dictionary isn't as simple as people might think. We often think of dictionaries as those books that have an alphabetical list of words, each word (or entry) followed by an explanation. But what about "rhyming dictionaries" that don't define anything at all? Those are merely lists of words grouped by similar sounds. And of course, "translation dictionaries" which usually do little more than list the most likely synonyms in the target language. When you think about it, the term "dictionary" isn't well-defined at all.

But moving on to the classical notion of dictionaries. We're progressing towards a digital era, in which (we hope) the power necessary to support computers and servers are less harmful to the environment than the deforestation necessary to produce physical-book dictionaries. The electronic "search" function is certainly handier than physically having to flip through pages of other words. And the current OED online has a menu on the left that lists lexically similar entries, just like a real dictionary.

One area that it fails in, however, is in its ability to guess the word you intended to search, if you mistyped or misspelt it. Google does this pretty well though. Searching {"fedutiary"} will get you to "the nearest alphabetical match-point is displayed in the side-frame", which in this case was pretty useless. (The side-frame gets set at "fay", which is pretty far from "fedutiary".) Google is equally useless for searches containing "fedutiary", but will give a suggestion if "feduciary" is entered. ("Did you mean fiduciary?") Despite its relatively lower prestige, dictionary.com is even better, suggesting "fiduciary" for both searches {"feduciary"} and {"fedutiary"}.

My knowledge of programming is pretty limited, but even in turing, it'd be pretty easy to at least generate common alternatives to sound clusters. (eg. {"-ciary", "-tiary", "-siary"}, {"-e-", "-i-", "-ei-", etc.}). And yet, OED hasn't bothered. I wonder what's holding them up.

Double Dactyls

Even if you can't define it, if you're able to spell it from hearing it once in conversation, you're doing pretty good.

Found a lexicographical talk on TED, and thought I'd share. Most of the room laughed less than I did. :(

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/erin_mckean_redefines_the_dictionary.html