[Steve Hall] Tophat and a Tale

A guest post by the illustrious editor Mr. Steve Hall, who loves me even though I persist in using multiple punctuation when communicating with him!!!! *wink*

Here, he describes a new tool of great use to writers and editors alike.

* * * * *

I’m about to make a short story long, so you may want to brew another cuppa before you continue reading.

I am, to use Tami’s term, a word nerd. I love learning about words, their etymology (that is, their history and evolution), and how they are changing, even today. So before we really get started, a little quiz.

Without typing them or looking them up, guess which of the following words is not/are not found in Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary: spellcheck, tophat, commenter, trenchcoat. I’ll supply the answers later in this article.

Because I am a word nerd, I follow a lot of blogs about words. No surprise there, eh? One of the blogs I follow is Fritinancy, by Nancy Friedman. Nancy is in the business of naming: she creates brand names. She also writes about (mostly unfortunate choices in) brand names.

But this article isn’t about Nancy, or Fritinancy, per se. Instead, it’s about serendipity. On Friday, she blogged about the name change of the company previously known as Wordnik, to Reverb, and linked to the Reverb blog article about the process of rebranding the company. Originally, I wasn’t going to read it, but clicked anyway—because marketing interests me almost as much as words do.* So, I read the blog article. And then I got intrigued about one of Reverb’s products, Wordnik. I’d heard of Wordnik before, but had never visited the site, and I doubt I could have told you what Wordnik is (I might have guessed that it’s a crowd-sourced dictionary, but I’d have been wrong: that would be Wiktionary).

So there I was, having found myself at Wordnik’s login page. It resembles google.com to the extent that there is a block to enter a word to search for, so I searched my brain for a word to enter, and tophat flashed into my mind.

Why “tophat”? Because, in editing Choose, Volume III, Tami had used the word (several times). However, Word was flagging it as misspelled. So I called up my trusty Merriam-Webster site and discovered that, indeed, “tophat” is not an alternative spelling for “top hat.” I was merely surprised; Tami was shocked. Or dumbfounded. Or flabbergasted. (Pick one.)

I typed in “tophat,” hit Enter, et voilá: I was staring at a whole litany of sources in which the word “tophat” appeared, together with a Wiktionary definition: n. alternative spelling of top hat. Excitedly, I immediately emailed Tami and told her I’d change all the occurrences of “top hat” back to “tophat.”

Her response? “Also, trenchcoat.” Um, yeah . . . and trenchcoat. As you may have guessed, Bones’s preferred article of dress, “trenchcoat,” is not, according to Merriam-Webster (and American Heritage, if you’re so inclined), an alternative spelling of “trench coat.” However, Wordnik likes it. And I had to laugh at the first citation for “trenchcoat”: “P.S. wearing shorts with a trenchcoat is almost as stupid as white guys with dreadlocks”.

Then I scrolled down a little further, and found this:

‘trenchcoat’ has been looked up 523 times, added to 5 lists, commented on 1 time, and is not a valid Scrabble word. [my emphasis]

Dammit!

My reply to Tami re: trenchcoat. “Actually, I agree on trenchcoat, too. Even if Windows/Google spellcheck objects. (It objects to “spellcheck,” too.)” So does Merriam-Webster. Wordnik, on the other hand, has a ton of citations for spellcheck. Eventually, it will pass muster with Kory Stamper** and her cohorts.

More from Tami: “And ‘commenters’ !!!” [sic] (How many times have I harped on multiple end punctuation, anyway?) To which I responded, “It’s 2013: we’re all commenters!” Even if M-W objects, Wordnik approves.

It was at this point I had an epiphany: for writers of fiction (and editors of same), Wordnik should be added to your short list of “indispensable resources.” Not just for the basic definition or citations, but for its “related words” feature as well:

I especially like the reverse dictionary (words that contain this word in their definition): in some cases, that can be more useful than synonyms.

You may use Wordnik simply by going to the homepage and entering your word to look up. You may also create an account, which will let you create personalized word lists and discuss the words you find.

You may be sure I’ll be using it going forward, as I continue to edit Choose, as well as the next volume of the Saucy Chronicles. So put on your tophat and trenchcoat, join the commenters here—and spellcheck be damned!

____________

* My favorite classes in my MBA program were the two semesters of Marketing. (My least favorite were calculus and statistics.)

** Kory Stamper is a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, and another whose blog I follow. I guess you could say Kory is the ultimate word nerd! The name of her blog is “harm•less drudg•ery.”

Related posts:

A Tale of Two Notebooks
Witchy Chicks Faery Tale
What E-Readers SHOULD Be