Ironick

WOA is Phony? Ouch!

Judith Hurwitz apparently doesn't like WOA. That's OK. To each their own. [BTW, I choose to use the ungrammatical their/they/them as a universal 3rd party pronoun to avoid having to use gender specific his/he/him or her/she/her.] I can't be too upset because her blog post turned me on to PollDaddy.com. Here is my first poll:

Follow Me on Twitter

I'm finally on twitter now, and I'm happy to report that it hasn't been the major time sink I feared it would be. I think in large part this is due to how simple the interface and functionality are. Contrast this with Facebook, which has infinite interface and functional (aka apps) knobs and levers to play with and is a huge time sink. I think it is FB that made me fear twitter.

My twitter handle is -- what else -- ironick!

What does one call the term that causes the emergence of a complementary retronym?

[This post was triggered by a fun discussion in the comments on the post Is ‘Wireless’ Anemic or Merely Retrospective?]

When the term "electric guitar" became nearly as popular as the original unmodified word "guitar", the term "acoustic guitar" emerged because "guitar" (unmodified) was considered ambiguous. "Acoustic guitar" is labeled the retronym. What is "electric guitar" labeled?

Certainly, both "electric guitar" and "acoustic guitar" are neologisms. But I think it would be useful to have a word to denote the neologism ("electric guitar") that caused the retronym neologism to come into being. I looked around and didn't find any such word. Before I coined one myself, I wanted to make sure that there wasn't one already out there. So I am asking here.

BTW, if there is nothing else out there, I'm thinking of coining the word "specinym" for "specialized term." Retronyms come into being when someone puts a specialized qualifier in front of a word denoting a concept that previously did not have any "species" and then the specialized term becomes popular.

Here's how I would use "specinym" in a sentence: "The popularization of a specinym like 'electric guitar' is what leads to the creation of a retronym like 'acoustic guitar'." Got any better proposals? How about "neonym"?

Less is More - The Comic

Technorati Tags: fun

Via a comment by Frank Hood on my less is more post, here is the perfect comic to illustrate my point. Be sure to read the comments to the comic...

Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

Via Ron Gordon. Abso-f'ing-lutely hysterical. At least for those who watched the debate:

I am so much BIGGER than the life I am leading

   

Another postsecret favorite. My feelings exactly -- especially now that my 50th birthday is just four months ahead.

wikis.sun.com

Coolest thing to come out of Sun in a long time. In the style of Web is us using us, shows the history of publishing at Sun -- from roff (?) to wikis. The only significant flaw is that the old markup-based publishing is described as having "started with text formatting accessible to a few highly technical people." But the wiki markup at the end looks pretty much the same. <grin>

Here's to the misfits -- except those crazy enough to write 3rd party apps for the iPhone

Great video scrolling through all the 3rd party apps that Apple has bricked with its iPhone "upgrade" while playing the Apple "Think Different" marketing campaign voiceover. Perhaps we should start calling the iPhone the iPown .

Gorilla Rock

Via AccMan Pro. Hilarious. And it rocks.

Here's the original.

Links are not good enough

Like any good RESTafarian, I believe that links (URLs, hyperlinks) are the most fundamental aspect of the Web. But as Leonard Richardson points out in his blog with a hilariously insightful example: Links are not enough. Here is an excerpt:

[L]inks are not good enough. They're not good enough for  the WWW. Lots of RESTful, resource-oriented websites make their clients do things other  than follow links. If links were good enough, Google would look like  this:

 

Hypermedia consists of links and forms.

Without forms or other mechanisms for dynamically composing links and representations to be POSTed or PUT to links, using the web would be tedious indeed. As the alt text for the image says: "The joke is, there's just a bunch of links to the first letter of your query."