Sunday, November 1, 2009
Erin McKean's Wordnik
I just want to start this post by saying, I'm now totally into TED. I watch every TED video that I come across now because it's just so fascinating. There really are people out there with incredible ideas and it's great to find that they're all getting together to cheer each other on. Erin was a great TED presenter, and she gave a great argument for the importance of a better system of dictionaries. It's something that no one ever thinks to improve upon because, as she said, everyone has this awful connotation of the dictionary. I keep thinking about times when I was really young and any time I asked my parents what a word meant I had to look it up in the dictionary (all while my dad claimed that he once read the dictionary back to front...there's no way) and how grateful I was when we finally got the Internet and I could just type it into Google. The interesting thing about that is, it really was better to type it into Google, other than it being faster and more convenient, because I would end up with more results from various sources, and sometimes even a Wikipedia page to give the word some context. This is why I love Wordnik so much, because it compiles all those results for you and gives you the context you need to actually understand a word aside from a stiff, unrelatable definition (as I'm typing, blogger is telling me unrelatable is not a word, but I'm going to throw caution to the wind and use it anyway because Erin said I could...)
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