Jesse Sheidlower

News: the 4th edition of The F-Word is coming out in two weeks from Oxford UP! Everything you could want to know about the word _fuck_. This is a major revision: 500 pages with 150 new entries, 150 antedatings, & 2,500 new quotations. See link below for more info! jessesword.com/fword.html

@bbolander.bsky.social Island article for you: www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/w...

Nightmare: A friend published an academic book that I was in, but I couldn't find myself in the index. I was upset, & everyone thought it was my ego, but actually I was upset b/c the metadata was wrong. Information wants to be found! I woke up very stressed.

Nightmare: A friend published an academic book that I was in, but I couldn't find myself in the index. I was upset, & everyone thought it was my ego, but actually I was upset b/c the metadata was wrong. Information wants to be found! I woke up very stressed.

That thing where I'm visiting family outside of New York, and I'm _completely flabbergasted_ at how reliant everyone is on the horror of cars.

I picked a good day to not be running PHP on any of my systems.

I regularly report this when it comes up in class: 0% of my students this year have any idea what the "hopefully" usage controversy is. Have never even heard of it. These are MFA writing students.

If one more person joins us, then we’ll have 666 members, so… patreon.com/becauselangpod/ 🤘

I love this so much

Finally managed to get into Le Veau d'Or, to have their house martini. It was fantastic: extremely dry Old Raj (55%; incorrectly described as "Navy strength" which is minimum 57%) martini, with a sidecar of vermouth and soda to alternate with. Service was immaculate. Wish one could ever get in!

Celebrate #DictionaryDay with The Dictionary Wars by Peter Martin! Martin offers a compelling history of the national conflicts that resulted from efforts to produce the first definitive American dictionary of English. Save 30% with PUP30: buff.ly/hNQ9SLL

<take my money meme> www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDJ-...

For those who use Green's Dict. of Slang, the latest update #40 is now available on line. For more info and links to files of new terms and predated examples of current material, please check jonathongreen.substack.com/p/gdos-updat...

Spectacular NYT crossword today, really interesting, hard for a Wednesday. Was admiring it and then realized that it was from @benzimmer.bsky.social. Well done Ben!

I like to drink it, but hey, you do you

I like to drink it, but hey, you do you

Attn @tomtomorrow.bsky.social kottke.org/26/10/so-man...

Today in product-development weirdness: Came across a quirkily beautiful bar cart with a description "Maximum weight 10 pounds per shelf". E-mailed support to ask if this was a typo; they confirmed that, in fact, their "bar cart" was not strong enough to hold actual bottles of liquor.

the source appears to be MedievalistMatt (on FB and X)

Attention everyone I know! Perfectly accurate, no notes. (Forwarded to me; ultimate source unclear.)

Dear Stores: Please list a contact email on your "Contact" page, not just a too-small web form. This really shouldn't be that difficult. Sincerely, Someone Who Is Eager To Spend Money On Your Site, But Has A Question

I've been privileged to read parts of this, and it's outstanding and revelatory, and I cannot wait to have the rest of it in my hands.

Today's antedating for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: the rare "gravitically" ('by means of gravity'; 'with regard to gravity'), from 1958 to 1949. sfdictionary.com/view/1106/gr...

I do have to pay rent, but on the other hand.... www.swanngalleries.com/auction-lot/...

JohnsonsDictionaryOnline.com is back online! The lookups work. It will be a little while longer before the "about" and "how to" pages are back. Thanks for your patience!

NYC weather has some serious West-coast-of-Scotland vibes today

I finally got one of those scam book-club invites. I feel like a real writer now!

Today I listened to Fairport Convention's "Fotheringay" for the millionth time, & it occurred to me to wonder about _captive_ 'serving to confine', in "her captive walls". OED, in an early & unrevised entry, doesn't have this sense, so I found exx. from the 17th C. onwards and sent it in.

Today's antedating for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "farside", for the non-Earth-facing side of the Moon (often as a placename), from 1958 to 1949. Plus the usual cleanup. sfdictionary.com/view/1591/fa...

JohnsonsDictionaryOnline.com is currently offline following a malware attack. UCF's IT security team is working on remediation, but we don't yet know when the site will be restored. Updates will be posted here as we have them. Apologies for the inconvenience!

I guess it's time to dust this post off again. www.arrantpedantry.com/2021/11/08/i...

The NYT tells you why people shouldn't use a #dictionary to find out what words mean. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/m...

A Bluesky "autoplay" question, for anyone who can answer (perhaps @joshuajfriedman.com): Every time I log in anew, I have to go to Settings -> Content & Media -> Autoplay videos and GIFs, and disable it. Is there any way to make this sticky? It make no sense to have to do this every time.

Today's nice antedating for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "earthfall", for landing on Earth (after nautical "landfall"), from 1952 to 1943. A very recent example would be great: hard to search because of the videogame and the O.S. Card novel. sfdictionary.com/view/2297/ea...

New words just dropped. www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/new...

Have the rare good fortune to have access to a secondary space, which will have storage for books. So I'm initially bringing over everything so important that I have multiple copies. (Plus the original Century Dictionary, the 1911 (11th) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, &c.)

A few related antedatings for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "cyborged", from 1976 to 1968; "cyborging", a big 1989 to 1968; "cyborgized", 1989 to 1987. Also cleaned up nearby entries. sfdictionary.com/view/599/cyb... sfdictionary.com/view/1499/cy... sfdictionary.com/view/1479/cy...

Headline I will automatically click on: "Carolyn Forché Once Got the O.E.D. for Valentine’s Day". ("I haven’t finished it yet.") #dictionary @carolynforche.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/b...

The thing that I realized in passing from this excellent video: Robert Bringhurst's classic _Elements of Typographic Style_ is out of print? What? She waved it and I thought, "Oh, I need to buy this for a friend [which I've done before]," and then discovered…this won't be easy. How can this be?!

It's hard enough for me to deaccession books from my own collection. But now I'm "helping" a friend move, and the books on her giveaway pile, I'm either insisting that she keep, or taking for myself. This is not very effective.

It's hard enough for me to deaccession books from my own collection. But now I'm "helping" a friend move, and the books on her giveaway pile, I'm either insisting that she keep, or taking for myself. This is not very effective.

I've seen everyone sharing that US Dialect Quiz so I decided to make my own, much crappier, CANADIAN DIALECT QUIZ to guess where in Canada you're from

The incredible opening drum bit in Spin Doctors' 1993 "Two Princes" is always described as a "drum fill"; maybe "intro fill". All definitions/discussions of musical "fill" specify clearly that it's something between two sections. Yet this one is never "riff" or anything else. Just an observation.

Great news for the history of the #OED, from @stephenturton.bsky.social: www.english.ox.ac.uk/article/dr-s...

Student orientation today; successfully managed a 1m talk to convince them to take my class. Then met a former student, now faculty, who said my class was the best of her career, she still thinks about it when she writes/teaches. I thanked her, & excused myself to avoid sobbing to death in public.

Fascinating, detailed thread from @teorth.bsky.social (who has only a marginal presence here) about why AI-assisted solutions to even important problems in mathematics, would in fact usually be a net negative for the progress of math. mastodon.social/@tao@mathsto...