A New York Times article from 1977 article rolled across my screen recently (courtesy of Mark Harris). It concerns language change and boy is it a doozy. The article asked members of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel to give their comments on some recent developments in English. Let’s take a look.
Continue reading “How NOT to talk about language change”Tag: American Heritage Dictionary
You Are Your Words
The American Heritage Dictionary has a very cool site which “invites you to create a self-portrait using your words.” It’s called You Are Your Words and what you do is upload a picture, then a document (or link to Twitter or Facebook), and the site will turn your picture in something like this:
Pretty cool, huh? I am totes setting this as my new gravatar (I was getting tired of that stuffed horse anyways.*)
Before you get started, a few words to the wise. First, the final step allows you to choose a color, font, and contrast. These things matter in making your picture look right, so take your time playing around with them. I could only get the black text on white background to work, but maybe that was because of the photo. Also, for me, the texts that worked best were Marker and One Days.
Second, this site is kind of addictive, so have fun not getting any work done today.
By the way, the text I used was my earlier post, “Introducing the Ancient Healing Art of Japanese Eyeball Poking.” It was my wife’s suggestion. She said it reflects who I am because I’m stupid. So I added that to the text. Thanks, honey.