Category Archives: Verbalistics

Word of the year

By Frank Paynter | Published: November 16, 2009

“Unfriend” The slackers at the Oxford University Press USA, they who prepare the superfluous New Oxford American Dictionary have chosen “unfriend,” a louche locution from the world of social media, as the word of the year. I had occasion to unfriend a Quaker this year. Unfriending a Quaker is unfriending a Friend who may or [...]

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National Poetry Slam #NPS2009

By Frank Paynter | Published: August 4, 2009

The twentieth National Poetry Slam, the Super Bowl of the Spoken Word, gets under way tonight at seven pm in West Palm Beach, Florida. In a sort of bus man’s holiday, the Orlando Sentinel’s Tod Caviness will blog the event live from West Palm. Of local interest: el guante will be slamming for the St. [...]

Also posted in Creative Arts, Hep jive, Writing | Comments closed

The power of tweet

By Frank Paynter | Published: July 2, 2009

“Does Twitter dumb us down or simply reveal our innate goofiness?” asks Nick Carr this week at his blog, Rough Type. In partial answer he points us to Gideon Rachman’s column in the Financial Times. Mr. Rachman says, “Twitter is a compendium of banalities. But in Iran, the medium’s terseness and immediacy came into its [...]

Also posted in Blogging and Flogging, Democracy, Networks, Tools | Comments closed

Jennifer Balderama

By Frank Paynter | Published: June 29, 2009

[Wordnik is] “A crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, its goal is to gather as much information about a word as possible — not its mere definition, but also in-sentence examples, semantic ‘neighborhoods’ of related words, images, statistics about usage, and more. And it’s all compiled via user [...]

Also posted in Bloggers 'n blogs, People, Writing | Comments closed

Super Eco

By Frank Paynter | Published: January 21, 2009

It’s my privilege to be working on a new “green” blog called Super Eco. We just went live this morning! Here’s some info about the effort… Today marks the official launch of a new Crowd Fusion property: Super Eco. The Super Eco team has been working  for several months building a site dedicated to addressing [...]

Also posted in Bloggers 'n blogs, Blogging and Flogging, Environment, Farm Almanac, Writing | Comments closed

Praise song for the day:

By Frank Paynter | Published: January 20, 2009

A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration By Elizabeth Alexander Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. [...]

Also posted in Arts and Literature, Creative Arts, Writing | Comments closed

PALIN dromes

By Frank Paynter | Published: October 27, 2008

WASILLA’S ALL I SAW PEEVE VEEP HARASS SARAH Thanks to whoever-it-was for sharing these on twitter…

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Maverick – an honored name sullied by McCain/Palin

By Frank Paynter | Published: October 8, 2008

The New York Times reported this weekend, … But to those who know the history of the word [maverick], applying it to Mr. McCain is a bit of a stretch — and to one Texas family in particular it is even a bit offensive. “I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita [...]

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