May Linkfest

Fun with Words is nirvana for wilfers: lists of anagrams, palindromes, spoonerisms, oxymorons, redundancies, rhyming slang, and nym words--not just the familiar homonyms and eponyms, but also autoantonyms (words that are their own opposites, like cleave), heteronyms (words with the same spelling and different pronunciations, like excuse), and tautonyms (words composed of two equal parts, such as tutu and bye-bye).

At Creative Bits, a splendid collection of business-card designs.

Gender Genie will analyze your writing and tell you whether you're an XX or an XY. According to the algorithm mavens, words like if, with, we, and your are feminine; a, is, and, and to are masculine. Works best, if at all, on passages of more than 500 words. Gender Genie went all fluttery over my own two-fisted, hairy-chested prose.

If I was born on May 18 (hold the flowers; I wasn't), I must be Erik: the Swedish name day list told me so. Created by the Swedish Academy in 2001, the name day list instructs parents on correct nomenclature. No name is assigned to January 1; I guess that's the day the Swedes reserve for Madicynn or Kameron. (Via Name of the Year blog, which is worth a long post of its own. Suffice it to say that Name of the Year, "founded on an Ivy League campus in 1983," specializes in unearthing odd personal names from the wide world of sports--names like Weekendfer Saurit, Assumption Bulltron, and Nimrod Weiselfish.)

And speaking of sports names, how 'bout those roller derby gals? Mark Gunnion forwarded this link to the Atlanta Rollergirls roster, which includes Bea Ligerent, Reba Smackentire, Takillya Sunrise, and Forniskate. But it's not just an Atlanta thang: the gals of Tucson's Iron Curtain team (Paris Troika, Bolshe Vixen, Knuckle Sandovitch, et al.) also rock (and roll) the names.

Let's end on an elevated note with the Grandiloquent Dictionary, "the result of an ongoing project to collect and distribute the most obscure and rare words in the English language. It also contains a few words which do not have equivalent words in English." Excellent preparation for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, coming to Washington, DC, May 30 and 31.

Comments

[brad shorr]

Now that you've introduced me to Fun with Words, I'll never get any work done! :)

[evvance]

I didn't think it could happen, but --
"If I was born on May 18..."? You must be on vacation to miss the correct usage of the subjunctive mood.

[Nancy]

Evvance--As Roy Jacobsen points out much more eloquently than I could, the subjunctive has been on its deathbed for at least 150 years. Or longer: "[W]e have evidence that was often took the place of were in 'I wish' phrases going back to the 16th century (and probably earlier)." I considered writing "If I were born..." but it sounded unecessarily stuffy, so I didn't. (And no, I'm not on vacation. Alas.)

(Jacobsen's post is at http://rmjacobsen.squarespace.com/articles/2006/9/13/the-persistence-of-the-subjunctive.html.)