Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

• BookMooch: exchange books and trade them, like a book swap or book barter

I’ve joined Bookmooch, an interesting book-trading social site. You join, add books you’re willing to give away to your inventory, and when somebody else wants to “mooch” the book you mail it to them (you pay the postage). Doing so accumulates points that you can then use to mooch books off of others. Economically, it probably works out to your advantage…it costs about $2.13 to send most paperbacks anywhere in the US, but since you need a 2:1 ratio of books sent to books received, that’ll be about $4.50-$5.00 including packing materials. Oddly, you get 1 point per book mailed, plus additional fractional points just for listing books, and it only costs 1 point to mooch a book; the 2:1 rule is separate from the points accounting, so it seems like over time you’ll accumulate more points than you can possibly use unless you’re mooching books from overseas (which cost extra points).

So far, I have sent out about eight books, and haven’t mooched any myself since I haven’t really dug through what’s available or bothered to enter a wish-list of books I know I’d like to mooch if they were available. On the other hand, since I’m mostly doing this because I can’t stand the idea of throwing out books even if I’ll never read them again, but pretty much every other way of disposing of books has gotten to be too much of a hassle (local libraries won’t even take paperbacks any more, used bookstores cherry-pick one or two titles, etc), I’m not too concerned. Eventually I’m sure I’ll mooch something…or, you know, get tired of it.

I got this a little while back, and while it was enjoyable enough, I found it a bit repetitive. If you know anything about linguistics (even as little as I know), there’s not a lot here that will be new to you…I’d guess that you’d be able to outline the main argument of each essay if not all the details just from the title. Possibly the most surprising thing to me was encountering a myth that I’d never even heard before, that “In Appalachia They Speak Like Shakespeare.”

Possibly the most eye-rolling bit is treating all black people regardless of time or geography as belonging to the same culture in “Black Children are Verbally Deprived” (so the oratorical traditions that gave rise to Kwame Nkrumah, Odumegwu Ojukwu, or Desmond Tutu, or even Frederick Douglass are somehow supposed to count as part of the culture of African-American inner-city children); it would have been better to stick to Jesse Jackson, Barbara Jordan, and Martin Luther King as examples of the richness of at least semi-current African-American oration. But, beyond the question of whether the examples are actually relevant, the structure of the argument is off. Nobody would accept that inner-city African-American children aren’t economically deprived just because they’ve come from a culture that’s given rise to the multi-millionaires Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and so forth. The rest of the essay goes on to do a much better job, but it’s a really weak opening.

I’d say my favorite essay was “English Spelling Is Kattastroffik.” I think it’s the juiciest, with the most concrete examples, and so probably the only one I would have referred back to later.

I passed this book along yesterday via Bookmooch, so even though I wasn’t blown away by it, I hope its new owner finds it informative and useful.

I’ve started using this for all my personal note-taking projects; the ability to just copy a page and have a new wiki that you can carry around on a thumb drive is nifty^2.

• TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

  • Welcome to TiddlyWiki, a popular free MicroContent WikiWikiWeb created by JeremyRuston and a busy Community of independent developers. It’s written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to a WebServer, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive to make a WikiOnAStick.