As promised, here is a list of links to the sites and books that Wendi and I discussed yesterday. If I missed one, leave a comment and I'll add it.

You may also be interested in this list of (mostly little-known) reference books for writers that I talked about at the Smithsonian last November.

Sites:

• Michael Quinion's World Wide Words.


• Dave Wilton's WordOrigins.com. Great for debunking ("No, something is bunk, and then you debunk it") too-good-to-be-true etymologies.


• The Alt.Usage.English Index Site. See what AUE said about something. Then go double-check it somewhere else, just to be sure ...


• American Dialect Society. The links to the archive searches are in the upper right corner.


• Language Log. Lots of brilliant linguists posting about language observations. Data-based. They tend to be hard on copyeditors, but as long as you don't change any of their 'thats' to 'whiches' (or vice-versa) you should be okay.


• Languagehat. I don't think we mentioned Language Hat, but we should have.


• Anatoly Liberman, AKA the Oxford Etymologist. A link to his book is below.
  

Books:

• Word Origins (and how we know them) by Anatoly Liberman. The working title for this was "Etymology for Everyone," and that pretty much sums up the book!


• The New Oxford American Dictionary


• The Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus


• The Warden of English This is the biography of H. W. Fowler, of Fowler's Modern English Usage.


• Garner's Modern American Usage I forgot to bring up something interesting about this book --it's based on evidence but is very prescriptivist. He asks the question "Do people really write X?" and answers it "Yes, but they shouldn't."


• Word Myths The book by David Wilton (site above) that collects the most egregiously bad etymologies and shows how and why they can't be true.


• Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage


• The Oxford Dictionary of Difficult Words This is a good companion if you have a smaller college or desk dictionary ...


• Slayer Slang: The Slang of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Michael Adams. Just in case any of you thought I was joking! The essay on ephemeral language is worth reading even if you've never seen an episode of Buffy.


• Woe is I Patricia T. O'Conner's usage book.


• Lapsing into a Comma and Elephants of Style, Bill Walsh's excellent usage books.

If I remember (that is, if enough people nag me) I will try to scan and post the DoD dictionary entry counting paper next week.

Thanks again for your attention and excellent questions yesterday!

Okay, Drew (from Toothpaste for Dinner) is a genius, but this post is genius-er, if at all possible. (It's okay, I can use words like genius-er, I'm a trained professional.)

Check out That is just how the Scrabble club rolls.

Needless to say, the subject line above is the one that cracked me all the way up.

Finally motivated to put up a couple pictures of one of the two walls of books in my office. This way if the whole place burns down (don't laugh, the place next door has caught fire twice!) the forensic insurance people can reconstruct my whole library. Or at least the upper five shelves. Right? Right.



Here's another view:



The giant stack of toppling bankers boxes is my own personal Leaning Tower of Pisa. It hasn't shifted since the day I heaved them up there. They're full of foul ms so they could probably be trashed at this point.

The thing that looks like a Dalek reimagined by Whirlpool is a portable air conditioner. It gets pretty hot in a basement in Chicago in the summertime. It has an exhaust tube that goes out the window, held in place by duct tape and folded cardboard. We are nothing if not ingenious here.

Here's a closeup that will confirm that the only organization I have is disorganization. Yet I can lay my hand on any book you ask me for! Ha.

We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other. If we had time and if impatient curiosity were to prick us, we would always end up finding out exactly what a monkfish was.

Many thanks to Matthew Perry for sending this one to me.

I'm thinking of using this blog as more of a "commonplace book" -- where you keep interesting things you've read for reference later, blogs having it all over notebooks, even the lovely fancy-pants moleskine ones, in that they're searchable. So this is a poem I love and am always trying to remember to recite at people, and now I can say "oh, nevermind, it's on my blog."

The Inevitability of Redneck Literacy
by Jim Hayes

An infinite number of boozing rednecks
riding an infinite number of wrecks
firing an infinite number of shots
at high-way signs in infinite lots
will write inevitably without fail
all the world's great books in Braille.

There. ::dusts hands:: Didn't I say it was a great poem?

Okay, everyone who reads this knows I'm not dead. I'm also not caught up with anything and have not been blogging my ridiculous magazine consumption. So there.

I have read this and it totally f'ing rocks, ALSO so there. Who really needs an exhaustive list of my New Scientist habit when there are books like this in the world?

I'm in the middle of this and the characters are just incredibly compelling and real ...

Maybe I'll catch up on the magazines this week. Maybe not.