When I play Quordy (and Boggle, but it’s been a while), I enjoy taking my time to spot long words for big points. I also value the strategy of finding many short words quickly. The shortest playable word has three letters, so I thought it’d be handy to compile a list of three-letter words that are also words when spelled backwards. Put more simply(?), I wanted a list combining palindromes with other “reversible words.”

I found a list that appeared satisfactory. But compared to the small handwritten one I’d been keeping, it missed some obvious words (HAY, NAW, MAY) and some not-as-obvious ones (AHS, TEW). So I developed my own master list, based on my research and that of others. It has156 words, which I’ve alphabetized and listed below.

The reference for these words, by the way, is the second edition of the Official Word List, used for North American tournament Scrabble. (Quordy’s dictionary is “based on” this list, according to the game’s instructions.) You can download the list as a nearly 2MB text file from the Internet Scrabble Club’s “Lists of Words” page.

ABA
AGA
AHA
AHS
AIR
ALA
AMA
ANA
ARB
ARE
ATE
AVA
AVO
AWA
BAD
BAG
BAL
BAN
BAS
BED
BEN
BIB
BIG
BIN
BIS
BOB
BOG
BOS
BOY
BUB
BUD
BUN
BUR
BUS
BUT
CAP
CIS
COD
COR
DAD
DAG
DAL
DAM
DAP
DEL
DEW
DID
DIG
DIM
DOG
DON
DOR
DOS
DOT
DUD
DUO
EAT
EEL
EKE
EME
ERE
EVE
EWE
EYE
FER
FIR
GAG
GAL
GAM
GAN
GAS
GAT
GEL
GET
GIG
GIP
GOT
GUM
GUT
GUV
HAH
HAY
HEH
HEP
HEY
HOP
HUH
KAY
LAP
LAS
LET
LIN
LIT
MAN
MAT
MAY
MEM
MHO
MIM
MIR
MIS
MOM
MON
MOP
MOR
MOT
MUM
MUS
NAP
NAW
NET
NEW
NIT
NOS
NOT
NOW
NUN
NUS
OHO
OOT
OXO
PAP
PAY
PEP
PER
PIP
PIS
PIT
POP
POT
PUP
PUS
PUT
RAT
RAY
ROT
SAT
SAW
SIS
SIT
SIX
SOS
SOW
TAT
TAV
TET
TEW
TIT
TOT
TOW
TUT
ULU
VAV
WAW
WOW
YAY

Streamline speech. Improve grammar and usage. Read more.

I enjoyed this story, posted on August 22nd to CNN.com.

Typo vigilantes banned from national parks

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP)—When it comes to marking up historic signs, good grammar is a bad defense.

Two self-styled vigilantes against typos who defaced a more than 60-year-old, hand-painted sign at Grand Canyon National Park were sentenced to probation and banned from national parks for a year.

Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson pleaded guilty August 11 for the damage done March 28 at the park's Desert View Watchtower. The sign was made by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, the architect who designed the rustic 1930s watchtower and other Grand Canyon-area landmarks.

Deck and Herson, both 28, toured the United States this spring, wiping out errors on government and private signs. They were interviewed by NPR and the Chicago Tribune, which called them "a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation."

An affidavit by National Park Service agent Christopher A. Smith said investigators learned of the vandalism from an Internet site operated by Deck on behalf of the Typo Eradication Advancement League.

Authorities said a diary written by Deck reported that while visiting the watchtower, he and Herson "discovered a hand-rendered sign inside that, I regret to report, contained a few errors."

The fiberboard sign has yellow lettering with a black background. Deck wrote that they used a marker to cover an erroneous apostrophe, put the apostrophe in its proper place with correction fluid and added a comma.

The misspelled word "emense" was not fixed, Deck wrote, because "I was reluctant to disfigure the sign any further. ... Still, I think I shall be haunted by that perversity, emense, in my train-whistle-blighted dreams tonight."

Deck and Herson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to vandalize government property.

They were sentenced to a year's probation, during which they cannot enter any national park or modify any public signs. They were also ordered to pay $3,035 to repair the watchtower sign.

The TEAL Web site now has only this message: "Statement on the signage of our National Parks and public lands to come."

I fancy certain French phrases more cleverly said in that language or for which there is no convenient English counterpart. Consider:

1. faire du lèche-vitrine. As Seth Sherwood writes in the New York Times (“Down Sybarites’ Alley,” December 23, 2007):

   Parisians don’t go window shopping. Rather, when the weekend arrives, the masses stroll past the boutiques and, as they put it, ‘faire du lèche-vitrine’ (go window licking).

2. jolie laide. Literally, “pretty-ugly.” From a long-ago Google-cached article I’ve lost the source for:

   The crumpled, melancholic Serge Gainsbourg even wrote a song about one such beauty: ‘Oh Jolie laide. Laide jolie. Souvent mignonne. Vilaine aussi ...tu es pile et tu es face...’ (‘Jolie laide, often cute, ugly too ...you are heads and tails.’) Gainsbourg and actress-singer Jane Birkin are the parents of French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, who might be this generation’s poster child for jolie laide.

   And from my own email archives:

   I’d never thought of myself being a jolie laide kind of guy, but you know what? That’s exactly right. (e.g. Charlotte Gainsbourg.) The average American guy’s idea of feminine physical perfection alternately disgusts or bores me. Now, when in the company of men, speaking of things men do, I’ll be able to admit that I have ‘a type.’

   ‘Jolie laide,’ I’ll say.

   And they’ll take a swig of beer and say, ‘Yeah, I think Angelina Jolie’s pretty hot, too.’

3. l’esprit d’escalier. Literally, “stairway wit.” It’s when you think of a comeback too late, as previously covered here.

If your ad is little more than nine giant handwritten words, take some extra time to copy edit.

I was wondering when some Lynne Truss type would add the missing comma to one of these ubiquitous Forgetting Sarah Marshall subway posters. It’s necessary because it sets off an expression of direct address, Universal Studios. The period’s still absent, though, and I’m not crazy about that capitalization.

Jason

All this chatter about vajayjay leads me to wonder whether an appropriate male-counterpart word should be panini.

O.

I always thought that was the plural form.

Jason

Panini is the plural of panino so if we're getting all William Safire, it should be the latter. But panini is better because: 1.) everyone calls the sandwich that, and 2.) it has that repeated syllable at the end like vajayjay.

O.

Then shouldn't it be penini?

Jason

Yeah, O.K., maybe.

May I confess something to you? I’ve always thought the word teetotaler referred to someone who drank a lot of alcohol, when in fact it means someone who abstains from it. My misunderstanding had been that I saw the word “totaled” there, which conjured images of “wrecked,” or quite drunk. I knew it had something to do with drinking but I was completely turned around about the word’s meaning.

This explains so much. And the revelation arrived justly, at like 3 a.m. today, after a bout of heavy drinking.

I haven’t been this linguistically pantsless since that day in the mid-’90s when I realized with a start that magnanimous doesn’t actually mean large.

William Safire brings up a question in his “On Language” column today that I’ve stewed over in the past: “Should writers show off their erudition by deliberately using unfamiliar words on occasion?”

Despite being unable to resist a quip that “you’ll always get a few easily annoyed souls who find the use of an unfamiliar locution rebarbative,” Safire agrees that, foremost, plain words communicate best.

On the other hand, he advocates “stretching a readership’s vocabulary” if the audience is “inquisitive” (although shouldn’t any reader be assumed inquisitive?), noting that it’s easy to look up words nowadays with these computers he’s heard so much about.

He also brings up the tired writers’ trick of using a “hard word” in context or near a synonym. That works, although the latter is repetitive and unnecessary; any savvy editor would recognize it as grandstanding on the author’s part and redline it for removal.

My take: Safire’s first point is the best. Cut the wishy-washy; most of the time a writer should keep it simple for the win. See here: the best writers use common, concrete words in uncommon combinations or contexts to create beautifully memorable phrases that remain clear. That’s the best single line of advice I can think to give anyone who wants to write well.

I could go on forever with favorite examples; libraries brim with them: “Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time.” (Herman Melville), “...still he kept up a flow of sarcastic talk, just to exercise his wits and to have the fun of disputing” (Aesop), “Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.” (Haruki Murakami), “The howl of clashing colors, the intertwining of all contradictions, grotesqueries, trivialities: LIFE” (Tristan Tzara) and a favorite lullaby, “Dream tonight of peacock tails/Diamond fields and spouter whales/Ills are many, blessing few,/But dreams tonight will shelter you.” (Thomas Pynchon).

And especially in light of yet more looming from that screenwriters’ strike, the classic brass nugget from 1930s studio executive Irving Thalberg: “What’s all this business about being a writer? It’s just putting one word after another.”

Vatican City, the only place on Earth where Latin is an official language, has published an English/Latin dictionary to keep up with words that might not have direct translations to Latin. “Many of them [are] compounds of existing Latin words,” noted an Associated Press article from 2003. “Dishwasher is escariorum lavator and disco is orbium phonographicorum theca.”

The Vatican recently issued a third volume of the dictionary, mainly to cover words borne from the sphere of computers and other technology, and a friend and I were guessing what sort of compound monstrosity would be the word for “blog.” We were thinking it’d be something literal, maybe based on “the web” (arachnoideum) or “cheap ‘n’ nasty” (the prefix vili- or vil-), but we were over-thinking it.

According to N.S. Gill, a “Latinist” and contributor to About.com, the word for blog is ephemeris, which means daybook or diary, or more tellingly, as suggested by the English word ephemera, short-lived bits of scrapbook stuff: notes, pictures, postcards, letters, ticket stubs, programs, menus, catalogs and the like.

Gill cites a quote from Juvenal’s Satires that serves nicely as a blogger’s credo: tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes, which can be translated as, “He has a compulsion for writing.”

That’s about right, I’d say.

I figure there are more, but if you can pronounce these five, you’re probably off to a good start as a valid New Yorker.

1. Fiorello
2. Gansevoort
3. Gowanus
4. Houston
5. Stuyvesant

Ginormous is among the nearly 100 new words and senses of existing words that will be included in the 2007 edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary this fall. It’s a portmanteau word, snapping-together giant and enormous to mean “extremely large.” Why either of those two words can’t suffice for this new Kindergarten construction is unclear to me.

In terms of new words for size, I will rejoice only when embiggen makes the cut for the dictionary. It’s on its way. Scientific American noted late last month that embiggen, a word that debuted in a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, appeared in a paper by Stanford University physicist Shamit Kachru, “the most prominent younger researchers working on string theory.” Kachru suggests he included the word, which he defines as “to enlarge or expand in size,” because The Simpsons is “a source of knowledge for all serious theoretical physicists.”

Go fake word, go!

In a press release promoting a book on the same topic, Houghton Mifflin lists an arbitrary, A-to-Z inclusive 100 words every high-school grad should know. Lists like these make me cringe (and not the least because lists are laaaazy excuses for writing). I do favor an expansive knowledge of vocabulary. But it’s one thing to know these words and another to know when to use them in speech or writing. And the general answer to that is never, unless you’re a lawyer, a tweed-suited intellectual or a dead author such as Jane Austen.

For instance, there is seldom an instance where loquacious works better than either talkative or something colloquial like windy or wordy. I could make a similar point with half the words on the list: haughty for supercilious, steep for precipitous and so on. Yes, yes: there are degrees of meaning among synonyms. But I say, in general, if it’s Latinate (look for that telltale rattail, ous), one should suspect there exists an Anglicized word that works more clearly than that multisyllabic 16th-century antique.

And words like infrastructure and paradigm are so misused and overused, they should be banned from the dictionary. Or lexicon, as Houghton Mifflin would say.

In short, keep it simple, stupid.

From the “Tables For Two” restaurant review of Boqueria by Leo Carey in the December 18th New Yorker:

The deep, vinegary tang of a lentil stew is heightened with ingeniously thin round crisps of Serrano ham—porcine Communion wafers—and poached egg.

The phrase is superfluous but “porcine Communion wafers” might be so bad it rounds the circle to goodness again.

I laughed at a quote by Taco Bell president Greg Creed in today’s New York Times (“E. Coli Sickens 39 in New Jersey and New York” by Robert D. McFadden). Addressing the E. coli outbreak of food poisoning traced to his company’s chain, he said, “Health officials have indicated that there is no immediate threat and whatever may have occurred has most likely passed through the system.”

Aside from the intense vagueness required by the corporate catastrophe first-response playbook (indicated, no immediate threat, whatever, may have and most likely), I was struck by the phrase passed through the system. Ha ha! When you’ve made your customers shit blood, you may want to watch your double entendres, Greg.

I’m back in New York from my Ohio Thanksgiving vacation and thinking about gluttony. According to Adam Jacot De Boinod, who wrote a book about non-English words that don’t have English counterparts, the Germans have a word, Kummerspeck, for the excess weight one gains from emotion-related overeating. It translates literally as “grief bacon.”

That is awesome.

I only today caught up on last Sunday’s New York Times Style Magazine, a seasonal supplement I read if I have time. Mainly I avoid it because it angers me that I will never have a salary large enough to be considered among the magazine’s demographic, people who can relate to articles with leads that begin like this: “When the architect Annabelle Selldorf designed her dream kitchen in her weekend home in East Hampton....”

I felt better reading a one-pager in it by Alexandra Jacobs, an editor for The New York Observer, who writes that she “abohor[s] music’s slow seepage into every nook and cranny of American life,” particularly when she’s dining. Aside from taking a position I disagree with, and it being a trend piece that seems to base its trend on something that happened only to the author and a few of her friends, her article contains the most winceworthy simile I’ve read recently:

While entertaining, he simply summons a station of streaming commercial-free indie rock through his computer, like a school of salmon over that great river of the Internet.

Like a school of salmon? This phrase brings the author’s whiny enterprise to a halt. It doesn’t seem to have been made in jest (although possibly ignorance, in that venerable mainstream media tradition of being five years behind on general knowledge of technology and pop culture).

It’s so bad, I’ll conclude with this photo of a salmon striving to justify its small existence, much like Alexandra Jacobs writing.

The editors at Webster’s New World College Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary have released partial lists of the hundred or so new words to be included in their dictionaries later this year.

They sure take their sweet time on some of these. Ethernet is one of ’em and it’s been around since at least 1976 and in popular use since the ’90s. Ollie, the skateboarding pop-move, was coined in ’77 and unibrow has been around since I was a kid (circa Bert) and likely before that. In addition to these too late words, there are the additions that aren’t even words, like mouse potato (one who spends too much time on the internet) and youse (plural of you).

The little televisions mounted in our office building elevators broadcast text news briefs all day and I just caught the announcement “Hurd to succeed Dunn at HP.” All I could think of was that word game where you transform one word to another by changing one letter each turn to form a new word, using as few turns as possible. By the time the elevator arrived at the 17th floor, I had:

1. DUNN
2. DUNK
3. HUNK
4. HUNT
5. HURT
6. HURD

I think I need help.

The New York Times printed the word shit today in a story about what President Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair after the Group of 8 summit, unaware his mic was live:

“I feel like telling [Secretary General Kofi Annan] to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen,” he said to Mr. Blair, referring to Syria’s president, Bashir Assad. “See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,” Mr. Bush said.

Gawker wonders if this little shit is a first for the language-conservative Times. It’s not, but it’s extremely rare. This is a paper, after all, that’s squeamish about printing hell or damn unless they’re used in combat reporting or similar “extreme circumstances.” As for stronger obscenities, the paper’s trusty Manual of Style and Usage notes that “[e]xceptions have been made only a handful of times” to the rule that “The Times virtually never prints obscene words.”

Short of a thorough LexisNexis search, one of the few instances of shit in the Times was in 1974, when it published transcripts of White House conversations that figured into the Watergate scandal. “Expressions highly objectionable by Times standards were printed because of the light they shed on a historic matter, the possibility of a presidential impeachment,” explains the style manual.

Plus, let’s face it, I don’t think The Times liked Nixon much. I don’t think it likes Bush much, either; but at any rate, the paper seems to have relaxed its shit standard, seeing as how the current president’s comment is nowhere near as damaging or inflammatory as the Watergate tapes.

New Yorkers have a tendency to abbreviate the names of sections of the city. The oldest abbreviated district is SoHo, which appears to have entered common speech in the late 1960s. A New Yorker Talk of the Town item from the summer of 1970 quotes an author living in a factory loft on Spring Street “in the section of town—bounded north and south by Houston and Canal Streets and east and west by Broadway and West Broadway—that is called the Factory District, or, alternatively, the Cast-Iron District, or, alternatively, SoHo.” The fellow is none too pleased over his part of town’s newfound popularity and commoditization. In particular, the name game galls him.

I live in the Factory District. I dislike the name SoHo, and I dislike the person who thought up the name, though I don’t know him. He must have been very pleased with himself when he thought the name up. The Factory District is south of Houston Street. Get it? South Houston. I bet he wrote a letter to the Village Voice when he thought it up.

But SoHo was only the beginning, followed necessarily at the close of the ’70s by NoHo (north of Houston). In the early ’80s, there was Tribeca (Triangle Below Canal Street) while the name-of-the-’90s was the dopey Dumbo (the District Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).

These abbreviations are about exclusivity and real estate, of course. Former industrial spaces become luxury lofts that draw artists, actors and models, then lawyers and investment bankers. Boutiques, clubs, bars, restaurants and art galleries pop up. Rents skyrocket.

New abbreviations are constantly in the works, striving to someday evolve to SoHo popularity. I was told this weekend with apparent seriousness that WeHa (West Harlem) and SpaHa (Spanish Harlem) are two nascent names making the rounds. It got me thinking that my neighborhood of Inwood could use an abbreviation upgrade to make gentrification more buzzworthy, something stupid like NoWaHi (North of Washington Heights) or SoBro (just South of the Bronx).

Reading antiquated dictionaries activates the same portion of my brain as reading poetry: it’s thinking about words in new ways. I considered this as I read A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, compiled by Francis Grose and published in 1811. Even if the defined words and phrases are unknown or obsolete, the descriptions are a language of freshness and economy. Here’s one:

Jibber the Kibber. A method of deceiving seamen, by fixing a candle and lanthorn round the neck of a horse, one of whose fore feet is tied up; this at night has the appearance of a ship’s light. Ships bearing towards it, run on shore, and being wrecked, are plundered by the inhabitants. This diabolical device is, it is said, practised by the inhabitants of our western coasts.

As for words active today, busy is exemplified as, “As busy as the devil in a high wind; as busy as a hen with one chick,” while gypsies get editorialized as:

A set of vagrants, who, to the great disgrace of our police, are suffered to wander about the country. They pretend that they derive their origin from the ancient Egyptians, who were famous for their knowledge in astronomy and other sciences; and, under the pretence of fortune-telling, find means to rob or defraud the ignorant and superstitious.

Why shouldn’t we revive words like snaggs to mean large teeth or nope to mean a punch? They seem to fit.

This particular dictionary features other entertainments for the reader today. Being British, it contains lots of snipes at the Scots and Irish, and being common it contains definitions that cannot compete with the OED in terms of sauciness, including a half-dozen synonyms for commodity (“the private parts of a modest woman, and the public parts of a prostitute”) and many variants on hump (“once a fashionable word for copulation”).

Simpletons and alcohol run through the book as well. Gin, which was apparently the Pabst Blue Ribbon of early Nineteenth Century Britain, boasts a bouquet of synonyms: blue tape, sky blue, blue/white ribband/ribbin, diddle, frog’s wine, heart’s ease, jackey, Lady Dacre’s wine, lightning (“a flash of lightning”), max, strip me naked and blue ruin, which was mentioned in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a good name for a hair dye.

For a nation obsessed with sex, only one grouping of the six pronouns in the English language identifies gender: it/she/he.

A problem with these third-person singular pronouns arises when you need to use one of them to refer back to an indefinite pronoun such as anyone, everybody, everyone, no one or someone. Are those words male or female? They could be one or the other or both, so the issue gets sidestepped and you hear or read sentences like:

Everyone knows they shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile.

Does that look correct to you? Yes? Well, slow down there, chief. According to tightly puckered sources like the The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, because everyone is singular, it requires the singular he or she:

Everyone knows he shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile.

The Times brings up a good point about not using a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent; strictly speaking, if that “Everyone knows they” sentence is correct, then so is this glue-sniffing Gollum construction:

As I write my blog, we cry sometimes.

Yet it’s not as easy a fix as the Gray Lady suggests. “What about me?” a woman may rightly ask. “I’m smart enough to let sleeping crocodiles lie!” It’s this cry that birthed the following construction, one “solution” to this debate that everyone agrees sucks:

Everyone knows he or she shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile.

It has the potential to worsen the longer the sentence gets:

Everyone knows he or she shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile because he or she could get his or her hand snapped clean off.

So what to do? On the far right, we have the possibly sexist but more likely ultra-parental it’s-correct-because-we-say-so solution of The New York Times. Remember too that this is a publication that continues to insist on printing “courtesy” titles with surnames after first references: “Ms. Goodall insisted chimpanzees are her specialty and could not offer advice on petting sleeping crocodiles.”

On the far left, we have folks like Richard Lederer, a learned and respected linguist who nonetheless appears on his website wearing a tuxedo and a jester’s hat. He would have no problem with that first crocodile sentence, arguing that we’ve been using the singular-pronoun-plus-they construction since at least Chaucer. And because most everyone still speaks that way, he adds, it’s grammatically correct.

This stance ignores some facts. In Chaucer’s day, there weren’t even commonly accepted rules for spelling much less grammar. Also, as you may have noticed, even people as important as our president seem to have a weak grasp of the English language. Perhaps we the people shouldn’t be considered automatic arbiters or experts of what’s grammatically correct.

A workaround suggested almost as an afterthought by both the Times and Lederer camps is my preferred way to resolve this problem: reword the sentence, you lazy bastard. In general, why not one of these:

Don’t pet sleeping crocodiles.
It’s unwise to pet sleeping crocodiles.
Everyone knows not to pet sleeping crocodiles.

Rewording doesn’t work in all cases, but I can live with that as long as I’m still doing my part to help prevent senseless lady-offendings and crocodile maulings.

Since I’ve read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I’ve been on the lookout for anguished English in Gotham. I’m just like Batman, except I’m seeking bad punctuation, grammar and spelling instead of crime, and I’m not so much fighting these errors as I am taking pictures of them for my own amusement and maybe yours.

Anyway, it comes as no surprise to me that much of the trouble is caused by ladies. Here we have a large incorrect sign overlooking West 34th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

Of course, the Tannery House could mean what it has written, but stocking shoes exclusively for one lady, even if she’s Imelda Marcos, is a waste of precious shelf space in the high rents of this city.

I hate to bring attention to this next one because it’s in the Village outside my favorite barber shop, staffed by friendly Russian guys who ask in a thick accent if I want my usual “business-style haircut.”

But it’s even worse than the Tannery House boo-boo and not just because the Russians recently raised their prices from $9.99. It starts out fine with Men’s Haircut, then your eye drops to the fanciful Ladie’s. Unlike Lady’s, Ladie’s isn’t even a word, and it’s at this point that an English teacher would drop to the sidewalk and writhe in pain.

Do you have trouble spelling? If so, you’ve got a friend in Daniel Webster, the father of the first popular American dictionary. Lately I’ve been reading bits of H.L. Mencken’s book from 1921, The American Language, and enjoyed the section on American spelling and Webster.

Already a superstar in lexicographical circles, Webster’s first dictionary in 1806 made him a household name. The most popular dictionary in the U.S. prior to his was published by an Englishman, Samuel Johnson, who made no secret of his disdain toward the new republic’s scrappy citizenry and its rowdy ways with the alphabet.

Americans took a near-patriotic stance in embracing the new book and its reforms, which were rooted in a quote by Benjamin Franklin that “those people spell best who do not know how to spell.” As such, Webster dropped silent letters and advocated phonetic spellings. Many characteristically direct American spellings exist thanks to him, including jail and wagon, instead of gaol and waggon.

Taking the opposite tack of Johnson’s directives, Webster removed the u from -our words such as colour and honour, flipflopped the ending of -re words including centre and theatre, and changed the c in words like defence to an s. Of course, Americans still adhere to these conventions of Webster’s today, while Brits have stuck with the “original” spellings.

But many of his proposals viewed now resemble an F-worthy fourth-grader’s spelling test. Webster listed tongue as tung, group as groop and women as wimmen, not to mention the appropriately heinous hainous. Across the board, he deflowered ph- words (such as phantom) to start with an f. He mercilessly muted silent letters: thumb was stubbed to thum, island became an iland and leopard lost a spot as leperd.

Many of these edits do make at least some practical sense, falling in line with those anti-British revisions that took root. However, later in life, Webster was dogged by his opponents for the arbitrariness of his reforms. One typical argument would ask, for instance, why he would change the c to an s in words like offense, but spell fence that way.

Time has been kinder to Webster, revealing that his spelling simplifications were a giant step forward for a country that had a very, shall we say, flexible orthography in its youth, one that allowed people to spell eternal as aetaernall, for example, and get away with it. On the other hand, bad spellers still aren’t helped much by a language that, despite Webster’s efforts, has more exceptions to its spelling than rules.

I’m gradually filing my blog entries into categories that make more sense. Right now, the organization is out of hand. I have the habit of throwing entries under the “NYC” category when I can’t think of what category the entry should actually be assigned to. I guess in the back of my head, I’m thinking, “Well, what I’m writing about happened here in New York. And I’m sitting here writing it in New York. Ergo: New York category.” Which is no good. If anything, a “NYC” categorization should be default and implicit, as I have “Brooklyn,” “Ohio” and “Ireland” categories for stuff that happens there.

One category I wanted to add was “Clothing.” But was this the precise, catch-all word I sought? My first thought was that “Fashion” would be more all-inclusive for my purposes, but let’s face it, nothing about me screams “fashion” unless I’m singing that David Bowie song. Perhaps “Apparel,” I thought. But what’s the difference between “clothing” and “apparel”?

Here’s the circuit I took in the dictionary that’s built into Microsoft Word X for Mac:

clothes npl 1. garments that cover the body

O.K., garments isn’t listed, but garment is:

gar·ment n a piece of clothing

Hmm. Let’s give clothing the old college try:

cloth·ing n 1. clothes collectively

Then, bringing it all back home:

ap·par·el n 1. clothing or garments, especially outer or decorative clothing

If I take this slithery tangle literally and factor out what I already know about clothes, I still have no idea what the hell clothes are. They could be flapjacks or lichens or good intentions, for all I know.

Anyway, for the purposes of category-naming, “Clothing” it is.

And what have I been working on all week at work? Well, lots of stuff, but since you asked, I’ve been working on something that’s simultaneously a pain in the ass and something I enjoy: editing.

In mid-December, I attended a symposium on pension funds, where a roundtable of seven experts discussed property fundamentals, cap rates, investing and other such topics. As my magazine does at all events like this, we had some guys there who recorded all that was said and later transcribed it verbatim to a Word document.

An 18,500 word Word document.

And guess whose job it is to boil that down to three to four pages for the magazine? You guessed it. (Me.) “Three to four pages,” you say. “That sounds like a lot of text.” Well, with the headline, deck, photos, captions and other graphical elements that will be added to distract people from the dry subject matter, it works out to only about 3,500 words.

Hiya! My editing skills are unstoppable! I grabbed my red pen (and yellow highlighter after it started getting nasty) and took it to that fatty text. It was easy going at first, summarizing the moderators’ often-rambling questions and taking out the unnecessary words and phrases we use when speaking (“well,” “I think,” “I mean,” “really,” “actually” and many more). Then there was removing repetition. Next came the heavy-duty condensing, which got to be a challenge because of my relative unfamiliarity with the subject matter.

I felt mighty after I got it down to 10,000 words. Sweating bullets, I smushed it down to 5,000 or so, and then it got really tough. In fact, I ended up pawning off the cursedly wordy thing to a coworker today to knock it down further—I’d read and re-read it so many times that I had memorized large chunks and none of it was sounding any more cuttable. But be cut it must. It’s a labor of love.