My review essay honing in on William Safire's Political Dictionary also showed up on Sunday in the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

It begins like this:

Words are the most familiar part of language, because it's words we're most conscious of learning and forgetting. Only certain words, though. Your word-of-the-day calendar will never list "the" or "but." You boast about knowing French numbers, not the pronouns. What draws our fascination is the words for things, actions, properties and the other stuff of the world, not archaic prepositions.

The writer's life today (or, why I want to write for video games):

Instead of accepting the industry’s turmoil as a given, then, some young writers and editors are just shrugging their shoulders and giving up on it before it gives up on them.

Like horses.

The archive of almost everything I've written for the Texas Observer is here.

As you might be able to tell from today's slew of nostalgic posts, I'm waiting on some answers, directions, and permissions, and there's nothing more pathetically sentimental than a writer stewed in his own juice.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is a serious, thoughtful guy -- which is probably why the blooper and outtake reel from TPMtv is one of the more popular ever. Maybe it's wouldn't be so funny if he didn't look like a slim Ricky Gervais.

This is the fourth piece I've published since 1996 about Joe, a friend I made during the summer I lived in Alpine, Texas. It begins like this:

Remember Joe, my old friend from Alpine? He would be 80 years old this year, but he’s long gone. Survived cancer long enough to see the truth of God—he’d finally asked to see a priest after a lifetime of avowed atheism—and watch the twin towers fall. A month later I was driving to Midland for a burial in a place he never wanted. But Joe haunts me still. Especially when the economic news gets bad. I can hear his voice: Do you know what a derivative is, Michael? A liquidity put? Phantom envelopes mailed from Alpine arrived filled with clipped newspaper articles and forecasts of human greed highlighted with yellow marker. The words in my ears: Michael, you need a gun, and cash, small bills.

A spelling and grammar-obsessed guy travels across the country, searching out typos and correcting them. Here's the blog.

One of the books I love the most is Toolbox by a Mexican poet, Fabio Morábito, which was translated from Cajas de herramientas by Geoff Hargreaves. This is the first paragraph of chapter about "oil":

Oil is water that has lost its get up and go, its cheeky forward drive. Having exhausted all its routes, it's discovered treading over ground it trod before. It is water that has turned its back on the world. It is de trop. It has forfeited its old rights of way across the floor and now has to step to one side of favor of fluids younger and grander. It is luxury water, which after so much flowing has felt the weight of experience, maybe bitter experience. it's as if it had other water at its service; hence its sumptuousness, not far from prostration, for where there is sumptuousness, there's always somebody on his knees, tied with bonds.

The Globe & Mail apparently published my piece about Ed Vajda's "discovery" of a new language family, though they not only keep most of their content behind a wall but evidently hide everything from Google crawlers. Searches on google.com and google.ca turned up no sign of the piece. Even the search function of their own site turns up nothing! I can barely understand protecting content (I'm coming around); intelligent people can disagree over the best business model for online newspapers. Not having search that actually works on your own site? That's really retarded. Providing search and making sure it works isn't arguable. It's a basic tool. Of course, this is the website -- for Canada's newspaper of record! -- that doesn't link to a major section (Focus, the Saturday special section) off the main page. I thought a newspaper of this caliber would be smarter than this.

UPDATE: The story never showed up because it hadn't been posted online yet (even though it was in print on Saturday?!?!). Anyway, the long version -- with lots of detail -- is here.
There's one thing I'd like to correct: Ed Vajda isn't and wasn't a "long ranger," as the subtitle says (read the story to find out what a long ranger is).

The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Globe & Mail, New Scientist, and The Texas Observer were all graced with my work in the last two weeks. There are links to it all off the "current" button above.

Also, unfortunately, the Globe & Mail designers had no way (or so they claimed) of representing the IPA symbol for "schwa," so it ran with my note, "schwa," in what should be a phonemic transcription of a Ket and ancestral Athabaskan word.

Embarrassing.

Geoff Nunberg talked about "um" -- and mentioned my book, Um... -- on Fresh Air yesterday; the text of his piece is here.

He invents a term that I particular like: the "umological paradox," which is that why is a word that's communicatively so useful routinely so criticized and battered? I think I provided the answer in the book: a changing technological and media landscape in the early 20th century, as well as new ideals about the presentation of self, more widespread opportunities to speak in public, and the commercializing of broadcast media changed how we judged others' speaking and regulated our own. It's true that some mention against "urs" (as by Oliver Wendell Holmes) appears earlier, but the prescription against "um" just wasn't as widespread then as it is now. Now everybody thinks that umlessness is godliness -- or, at least, the mark of eloquence (or a piece of it).

I know this shift occurred because for the book I looked through as many 18th and 19th books as I thought would contain such finger-shaking. They didn't. That's not to say that people were more lax then. They had plenty of rules about how language should be used, but it was mainly about dialect and pronunciation, not about making uninterrupted utterances.

Somebody once asked me, "How will Um... make me play poker?" Here's one answer: if "um" can be used deliberately (as Geoff points out) as well as unintentionally, then the simple presence of "um" (or some other pause filler) isn't as telling as you might like. Here a tell isn't always a tell.

Yes, yes, yes: Um... has the answers (and more!), if you're asking questions about these topics:

born malapropisms 1844 william spooner
brain lesions what do they mean
bush bloopers speach only a mother would give
Bush's verbal and grammatical lapses 2001
calvin coolidge speaking mannerism
calvin coolidge speech impediment
calvin coolidge verbal
biography of rev. dr. william archibald spooner
biography of reverend william spooner
biography of william a spooner
biography rev w a spooner teacher
blair french language blunder
bloopers born 1844
blubters
blunders
blunders by tv commentators
average verbal fillers used a day attitudes towards filled pauses
anxiety disorder saying um
abnormal use of the word "um"
1844 born spoken bloopers
"um" and other verbal miscues
"self-repair" "slips of the tongue
reverend william spooner
speaking voice ronald reagan
spoken bloopers
the um book
william archibald spooner
"public speaking" misspeaking
why we use um speaking
why do speech slips happen?
words instead of um
weird psycholinguistics phenomena
what causes a rambling verbal style in an interview
what do slips of the tongue mean
what do you call misspeaking, switching first letters of two words
use of the word um when nervous
verbal blundering is integral to language
verbal filler
verbal fillers
verbal leakage and speech codes
verbal placeholders and do you know what i mean
verbal reversals consonant mixup
vocabulary bloopers president bush
um well uh are examples of linguistics
the psychology and power of silence in communication
sources about verbal fillers
speakers chooses the wrong word
speech blunders and the brain
speech errors linguistic transcript
speech listen um
signs of redundancy and verbal clutter
public speaking blunders
public speaking speech cognitive load
my husband says i verbally attack him out of the blue but i can't see it
how to avoid like and um when speaking
how to avoid verbal gaffes
how to stop using words such as "like" and "you know" and "um"
how to transcribe stuttering sentence
how to write ums in verbatim transcription interview
i keep mixing up my words is this early alzheimer's spoonerisms
hesitations, tip-of-the-tongue
history of the english language and using verbal fillers
feldman mannerisms etiquette
elocution lessons in massachusetts
disfluency by deborah tannen
disfluency disorders
download tracy chapman "london 1988"
dubya's linguistic blunders
eliminating the word "um" in speech exercises

(culled from the search terms by which people have arrived at umthebook.com.

I am obliged to quote from today's NYT report from the Harry Potter lexicon trial:

It was an emotional culmination to three hours of testimony in which Mr. Vander Ark gushed over Ms. Rowling and her work like the devoted fan that he claimed to be, and disarmingly preceded almost every answer to a question with an “Um.”

Thanks for plugging my book, Steven! The check's in the mail.

“If I was a fish and there was bisphenol-a in the water, I’d be concerned,” he said. “If I was a fetus and my mother was using a plastic water bottle, I wouldn’t be bothered.”

Don't panic.

My essay on "so" for April's Seed just came online. But do see the print version if you can: the graphics, a spill of 70's style loop-de-loops in black and white, is gorgeous.

Misty, meaning to say "rural or urban," instead saying "url and -- " and stopping short of "url and burban."

The pressing question is, what did people sing on birthdays before the Happy Birthday song was written? The answer: nothing.

According to scholar Elizabeth Pleck, birthday parties did not become common even among wealthy Americans until the late 1830s; modern birthday cakes emerged after 1850; and peer-culture birthday parties, involving children of the same age as the child whose birthday was being celebrated, emerged between 1870 and 1920, after American urban public schools became age-graded. Thus, the prerequisites for the development of a standard birthday song – the proliferation of birthday celebrations that involved a dramatic moment at which a group of invitees, often children, addressed the honoree -- may not have been in place until shortly before “Happy Birthday to You” started to become popular.

From an interesting article about the copyright history of the Happy Birthday song.

I need an emoticon that means, I bow respectfully to you. Blogger friend says his mother's just died. I don't want to send words. Oh, words. Words, you words. I need gestures, postures.