Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Foreword: A Book Design Blog. This looks like it might be interesting.

hat tip: Language Hat

Seriously. The OED software gives a word of the day when you start it up. Today’s word is *inconsciently*, which the OED defines as unknowningly. I’m pretty sure from the context sentences that should read unknowingly. Just in case, I looked up unknowningly, and as I expected, there wasn’t any listing for it.

OUP: The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) on CD-ROM version 3.1

The full content of the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), the three Additions volumes, and now almost 2,000 new words and phrases from the OED’s ongoing research programme.

This just arrived today, and I couldn’t be happier. Yeah, it don’t take much, do it?

Unfortunately, it’s not available for the Mac, so I had to install it on my Windows box, even though I do almost all my writing on my cute little Powerbook. I plannned for this eventuality, though, and last week I installed some remote desktop software on my Windows system so that I could control it and use my lovely new dictionary from afar. I just tested that, and it works perfectly.

Also unfortunate is that, although you can load the whole dictionary onto your hard drive (requires 1.7 gigs free), their software protection scheme requires that you reinstall the software every 90 days. That’s what it says anyway, although I’m hoping they mean you have to demonstrate that you still have the install disk every 90 days, not that you have to go through the whole installation process. I mean, granted that the Oxford University Press probably has good reason to suspect that their primary customers, mostly academics I imagine, can’t be trusted, what about us honest blokes who just happen to like a good dictionary now and then?

Update: After about the third 90-day reinstall, the damn thing just stopped working and no amount of uninstalling, scrubbing the registry, and reinstalling managed to fix it.  I do not recommend this product, not matter how nifty it would be if it worked.

By a startling coincidence, Miyazaki has made a movie that happens to have the same name as one of my favorite YA novels. Even some of the characters have the same names.

It wasn’t bad, exactly, although it was trite, but it does really raise the question of why Miyazaki even bothered to base it on the book if all he was going to use was a couple of chapters near the beginning. Not even the themes survived (Spirited Away was much closer to the themes of the Diana Wynne Jones book than the movie of Howl is). I guess he really liked the image of the castle that moves about under its own power, and the fire-demon that lives in the hearth.

It’s entirely possible that if you’ve never read the book, you’ll really enjoy the movie. But as hard as I tried to put aside my knowledge of the book, I just couldn’t get swept up in it, and the absurdly pat ending just left a sour taste in my mouth.

Got it yesterday, read the first five or so stories, went to bed, and regretted it.

Over at Tenser, said the Tensor an interesting post about Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao:

Unlike some other stories I’ve written about in which the linguistics is secondary, The Language of Pao is first and foremost about a particular idea from linguistic theory–it’s a novel-length exploration of a particularly strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (hereafter SWH), the idea that our patterns of thought are affected by the features of the language we speak.

Old English in the OED - June 2002 Newsletter - Oxford English Dictionary

The revision of Old English material in the Third Edition will be thoroughgoing. Every single Old English quotation, whether already in OED or newly added, is being checked against the most recent reliable edition of the text, with new bibliographical details and additional context being given where appropriate. Dating of quotations has been radically revised, with NED’s assumed composition dates replaced by a simple threefold division of all pre-1150 quotations into ‘early OE’ (up to 950), ‘OE’ (950-1100), and ‘late OE’ (1100-1150), based firmly on manuscript dates as agreed by the most recent scholarship.

I’m thinking of ponying up for an individual subscription to the online edition as my holiday present to me this year. It’s spendy ($295), but oh-so-tempting.