Sunday, January 30, 2022

Words on Thinking about Wordle

Turns out there’s some flex in this number
An Atlantic article on Wordle, everyone’s current word obsession (except mine) reminded me of a conversation I had about 40 years ago. I think it was late 1981 (as opposed to early 1982) when a friend found that the average adult English speaker knew about 20,000 words. That number struck him as way too high. How could he possibly know 20,00 words?[1] I, on the other hand, totally believed this. Even then, still in my teens, I knew so many words that you just couldn’t fit into everyday conversation, no
matter how hard you tried.[2] The problem is really knowing how many words you know. While everyone else I know has been obsessing over Wordle,[3] I’ve been playing the NYT’s Spelling Bee game, where you make words from a set of seven letters, with one letter needing to be in every word. I’m always amazed at the words I miss. In one recent game, I failed to play the word “ninth.”[4] But let’s get back to my friend’s dorm room in 1981.

I miss the simplest
words in these.
(Not today's either.)
I realized there was a way we could test this. His desk dictionary [5] promised 250,000 entries. I am rarely the most mathematically inclined person in the room[6], and in this situation I was most definitely not the most mathematically inclined person in the room, but I realized that we could come up with a random sample of words, test each other’s knowledge, and then do the math. I do not remember how many words we settled on or whether it would be a statistical sample, but let’s say it was twenty-five each.

We set it up like this: We took turns as Questioner and Responder. The questioner would open the book at random and that’s where his choice ended. The other one would specify a column (out of the four) and a word, counting either from the top or the bottom. (so, third column, fifth from the bottom.) We figured this would stop the questioner from choosing the most obscure word on the page. [7]

Just in case you haven’t
seen one of these recently (though
this is a hardback).
In one round, I simply said, “You know this one, you get the point.” He asked for the word anyway. “Jockstrap.”[8] He confirmed that he knew what that was. Through the game there were plenty of words that he did know and plenty that he didn’t. And the same was true for me. When we did the math.[9] He averaged out to 20,000 words. I had done slightly better. This was no shock. I suspect forty years on, he has learned words the meanings of which are obscure to me, but I suspect in the aggregate I still know more words. Not bragging.[10]

See, I have played.
That brings me back to Wordle and Spelling Bee. Neither of these games require a particularly large vocabulary. I keep finding that words I think perfectly acceptable aren’t listed (presumably because they’re considered obscure), yet one Spelling Bee had épée (though without the accents) on its word list. I was a little irked because even though the word shows up in English-language dictionaries,[11] it’s clearly a French word.[12] In all these games, it’s not so much a question of how big your vocabulary is, it’s how well you can access it. Now I just need a word that uses all seven letters in today’s Spelling Bee.[13]


  1. Spoiler alert: he did, and has certainly learned words since that hadn’t been coined in 1981.  ↩

  2. Of course I tried.  ↩

  3. I’ve played it and keep meaning to go back to it.  ↩

  4. An obscure word like that? Who can blame me?  ↩

  5. If memory serves, he had the paperback edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, if memory plays false, something else.  ↩

  6. Often the least.  ↩

  7. You don’t know what “squamous” means?  ↩

  8. I don’t need to define this, do I? I'm not providing an illustration either.  ↩

  9. By which I mean he did, but we were in his room and I probably didn’t have my calculator with me.  ↩

  10. Okay, totally bragging. Can’t do math, but at least I do words. That said, after taking the picture of a dictionary spread, I looked at the third word from the bottom of the second column. Totally obscure to me.  ↩

  11. Webster’s Ninth Collegiate has it, complete with acute accents.  ↩

  12. In one puzzled with a center M, I was peeved that neither “milt” nor “muntin” were permitted.  ↩

  13. No hints. Early on, I stumbled on a tweet where someone had posted the whole list. I stopped playing that one.  ↩


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Monday, January 24, 2022

To an Absent Friend

Yeah, I still have this stuff.
Yeah, that done was on a
manual typewriter.

I was going through some old zines (in the 80s and 90s I was in some amateur press associations) as I was wondering if had I written about a particular science fiction convention. The ones I was looking at were written at time when (over a few months) a friendship had gone from close, to fractious, to sundered. One of the zines noted the moment when the ashes of the friendship were kicked over.

In the subsequent zine, a month later, I was responding to what someone else must have said about this once close friend. I wrote an entire page about him, explaining how close we had been, and looking back with regret on what had been lost. There was one line that really got me:

Once, when our friendship was still healthy, he told me that he could not converse for more than an hour without mentioning me at least once. With me, I admitted, it was somewhat less frequent, but still common enough that friends considered him to be an extension of me. I have often wondered if he still mentions me, and if so how.

That was thirty-eight years ago. The feelings still hit. I’ve lost contact with just about everyone who were my friends way back then. Most of the friendships just withered away, and their names no longer come easily to mind. This is the one I remember and regret.


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Sunday, January 23, 2022

Some Thoughts on a Thousand Days of Journal Writing

It's a milestone
with more milestones to hit in the future.
To be clear, it’s not that I started my journal one thousand days ago. I started my journal 15,960 days ago,[1] during which time (by one means or another), I have written 6,301 entries covering 4,607 days, which means the lifetime average for my journal is 29%. It would probably go up a little if I separated out a few of the entries in which I caught up on my journal after a few days of not writing any entries. The number would be much higher if I had written more frequently,[2] and a bit smaller if I didn’t re-create an entry from time to time.[3]

I must have done
something, but what?

All that to say that I may not be the best person to be a guide to diligent journaling, something I’ve only accomplished since about July 2018.[4] On the other hand, as I look at my journal, I have nothing from July 11, 1999 and July 22, 2000. It’s worse than that. Every entry in my journal from May 11, 1998 to August 31, 2000 (843 days) is a re-creation, cobbled from photos, calendar entries, or whatever else I could get to show what I was doing on a certain day.

And yet, I’ve kept at it for the last thousand days. It was an evolving process, from missing years to that period between July 2019 and April 2019 where I missed a total of six days out of 303. Not too shabby. How did I get there?

For me, the big answer was going digital. No longer was it a question of finding pen and paper. No longer was it a problem that it was too dark to write. One of the major aspects of getting this done is that my digital journal[5] keeps track of how many consecutive day on which I’ve written a journal entry. With that kind of monitoring, you just don’t want to see that go back to zero. Writing in your journal daily can become a habit, but I can’t tell you how many days it takes to establish that habit. When Day One introduced streaks, I didn’t think it was going to be my favorite feature.

Not only can you see how many
consecutive days you've written,
you also can look back. 

Daily writing was the habit I wanted to establish. There are so many entries in my journal where I apologize to myself for missing some days, weeks, or months. (The year-long gaps start with a resolution to keep a journal, not to keep one on a regular basis.) If only that lovely blank book could have reminded me to it (apps can, of course). Besides having an app nag you about this (I could set a reminder), the other valuable thing I’ve found is having a certain mindset about my journal. What is this for? I have a few answers.

Well, that doesn't look like
a busy month.

I do value my journal as a chronicle of what I’ve done over the years. What did I do on January 23, 1982? I know, though the day (according to my entry) was pretty unmemorable.[6] How about March 23, 1982. No idea. I don’t have an entry. I wish I had, but I can’t go back in time and get myself to do better at journaling.[7]

It’s also a handy space in which to write, knowing that no one else is going to see it. I can explore narrative in it, wondering how describe things so that they’ll make sense to me later, especially when there are things that overlap. How do you write about that?

In one of the many books I have on writing, one of them says that unless you’re planning on writing a memoir keeping a journal is useless. I’m not the expert on being a financially successful writer. I still feel that writers should keep journal. First, there’s the awareness that many good writers who kept journal extensively. If it’s a bad idea, why did Christopher Isherwood turn out three volumes of published journals? It gives something to write. When you’re not up for writing a poem, a story, a novel[8], you can always get those words moving with a journal entry. You may not know what the characters are going to do next, but you might have an idea what you did last.

So you want to be a consistent journal writer? The best I can suggest is that you identify whatever obstacles there are to you getting a journal entry written and that you set aside time every day to work on your journal. This is not a “find time” sort of thing,[9] but a “make time” sort of thing. You have to make time for the things that are important or they will get squeezed out. Prioritize, find some, time, and best of luck in getting to a thousand consecutive days.


  1. Specifically, May 14, 1978.  ↩

  2. There is a lost volume, but the last time I saw it, it noted in my journal that it had only three entries in it.  ↩

  3. As in “while composing this entry,” which means some of the numbers are already out of date.  ↩

  4. Yes, July 2018 is more than one thousand days before this post was written. In 2018, I finally managed the trick of missing no more than a single day in a month. My entries are pretty regular from 2014 onward.  ↩

  5. I have been using Day One for more than a decade.  ↩

  6. January 23 has been memorable in some years, but 1982 was not one of them.  ↩

  7. If they invent time travel, I have a list ready of advice for younger me, some of which is “don’t have sex with that guy or that guy either,” but also “please write in your journal daily.”  ↩

  8. Should I add “blog post”? Yeah, let’s add blog post.  ↩

  9. Time is never found.  ↩


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Respect Your Local Copy Editor

Don’t do this. I beg you.
I’ve recently been engaged in a couple of discussions in which people talked about their idiosyncratic views on punctuation. I have to start by admitting that unless you’re a publisher (or a copyeditor working for a publisher) I don’t actually care what your views on punctuation are. This might be harsh, but it’s true. It’s like if you decided that epitome ought to be spelled phonetically and damn what dictionary said, you were going to do it.[1] If you want to have people care about your views on punctuation, then become a publisher (or the head of a publisher’s copy editing department). Then you’ll have a real opinion. An enforceable opinion.[2] Other than that well, you’re just someone who makes trouble for copy editors. And I’m telling you not to do that.

When someone asks my opinion of how something should be punctuated, I typically go for finding out what the general practice is. In other words, I look at some major style guides and do exactly what they says. If I disagree with that style guide, I’ll do exactly what it says. Again, if you’re publishing your own stuff you can do whatever you damn well please, but if you want someone else to publish your stuff you’d better follow how they want it formatted. Let me give a couple examples:

Some noted authorities.

Should there be one or two spaces after at the end of a sentence?
(Spoiler alert: it’s one.[3]) The choice of one or two spaces represents two separate attempts to emulate typeset material while using a typewriter. When the typewriter was introduced, most books published in English used what is called loose spacing, there’s a lot of space after the end of a sentence. An em space, which is — wide. Books in that era often had generous margins and gutters too. Beautiful pages that really don’t have a lot of type on them. To emulate this on a typewriter, typists hit an additional space after the end of each sentence.

The French style was for tight spacing. They formatted their pages without a lot of space after a sentence. More than an en space –, but less than an em.[4] The idea was to create a page of uniform text color. And text color adds up to gray. Think of it as how a page would look if you took a badly focused photo of it. The French wanted it uniform, the English and Americans wanted it non-uniform, with little holes in their text. Then came World War II.[5]

With paper shortages due to the war, there was a desire to cram as many words onto the page as possible. Goodbye gutters. Goodbye margins. Goodbye extra space after sentence. They were probably people who wanted to go to the old style of page design after the war. The answer to them was no. The war had come, the war had gone, but French spacing was here to stay.[6]

In the late 80s came the desktop publishing revolution. I was in that revolution. In the mid–1980s I was doing desktop publishing. I have produced camera ready copy. In order to make the camera-ready copy look like something that was set in physical type, I needed to emulate tight spacing. When I learn to type, I learned two spaces after the end of each sentence. Only a few years later I was retraining myself to type on the single space after each sentence. But it’s just a convention.

A few years ago I took an extension class for which the professor insisted that all papers needed to have two spaces after each period. Her class, her rules. That said, I had to retrain myself (again) to be able to type that way.[7] She admitted that her own editor chided her for sending in manuscripts with two spaces after a period, though in these days of digital submission, at least that’s an easy find and replace. Find all double spaces and convert them to a single space. But the question still occurs to me that if you want to have your stuff published why would you make them do this extra step? For those who say they can’t this do, I wonder what they when typing abbreviations. Do they type an extra space after Dr., Mr., or oz.?

Onward to one of the other type of graphic conundrums, the quotation mark. Should commas and periods go inside or outside quotation marks? We return to our noted authorities and the rules are pretty clear. Generally. The American convention is that all the small punctuation (commas and periods) slide in under the closing quotation mark. It’s tidier. The British convention is to place punctuation outside the closing quotation mark. They also use single quotation marks where American use double.

Like Benjamin Dreyer, I agree there’s a certain sense to British practice, but there’s also a certain sense to American practice. To quote Dryer: “I find the sight of those periods and commas hanging outside tuition marks saddening.”[8] It creates this ugly little notch of white space, between the last word and the punctuation mark. To me it makes the punctuation a bit unconnected from its sentence. There’s not a lot of visual difference between a comma after a quotation mark (word”,) and one with an extra space before it (word ,). In The Elements of Style we find: Typographical usage dictates that the comma be inside the marks, though logically it often seems not to belong there.[9] This is likely one of E. B. White’s additions, as it does not appear in Strunk’s edition of 1917.[10]

You (who do this: ”.) are here.
If you’re an American putting your commas and periods outside double quotation marks, you’re using neither system. It puts you in the middle, I guess, south of Greenland and bit east of St. Pierre and Miquelon.[11] If that leaves you all wet, it’s not my fault.


If you’re an American using British punctuation convention,[12] are you also using British spellings? I thought not. I have not checked with any copyeditor on this question, but I suspect that if you’re an American who is submitting to an American publication using own version of quotation marks and end punctuation, the copy editor will hate you. Treat the copyeditor right. Do you really want someone to go through your entire manuscript marking a circled tr every time you have a quotation mark with a comma or a period?

All this said, all other punctuation stays on one side or the other of a quotation mark, depending on its source.

“Edward E. Tanner III (Patrick Dennis), better known for Auntie Mame, collaborated on the memoir Guestward Ho!” The exclamation mark is from Tanner and Barbara Hooton, not me.

Be good to your copy editor. If you want to break out of the herd, do it with your writing, not your arrangement of spaces or quotation marks.

A final thought on citation formats. While there clear practices on spaces after sentences (one) and periods and commas with closing quotation marks (the quotation mark goes last) when I worked for a researcher it seemed almost that every journal had its own house citation format, none of which agreed with the MLA style I learned in college. No one ever debates these. Those who are writing for publications with house guidelines for citations just follow them. Do as they do. Follow the rules.

[Post in haste, edit later. I've given this post a bit of copy editing. It could probably use more.]


  1. Would that be “aypitomee”? I’m not sure.  ↩

  2. Please—I beg you—do not make “aypitomee” part of your house style guide.  ↩

  3. Why do I say “one”? I checked submission guides. Editors have the issue that if all submissions are produced under the same guidelines, they can figure out how things will go on a page before they get there. Two spaces mess this up. And they have to go through and take them out.  ↩

  4. The em space and dash get their name from being the width of a M. The en space and dash get their name from being the width of an N. (But it’s usually half an em.) While you’re down here, the em dash, en dash, and hyphens (the narrowest of them) have specific uses. En dashes are good to separate dates, so 1708–1742, not 1708–1742.  ↩

  5. WWII was not fought over typographic standards, though prior to WWII, the Nazi Party had banned blackletter types (which Hitler thought Jewish) going for more modern typefaces, particularly san-serifs. The Fraktur types were the typographic continuation of textura, which Renaissance scribes called “Gothic,” because they thought it came from Germany (it developed in Italy). “Roman” hands were from the Carolingian Empire, that is, they came from Germany.  ↩

  6. Seriously. Page margins you could put a thumb into and never worry that you were going to cover the text.  ↩

  7. Any typing I did that wasn’t for class had one space after each sentence (well, not at the end of paragraphs, of course), so retraining to never again type two spaces after a sentence was easy.  ↩

  8. Dryer, Benjamin. Dryer’s English (New York: Random House, 2019), 83.  ↩

  9. Strunk, Willam F., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style, 3rd ed.(New York: Macmillan, 1979), 36. Repeated in the 4th edition (Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn & Bacon, 2000) with an update in the examples, still on page 36.  ↩

  10. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134  ↩

  11. I chose midway between New York and London. I’m not trying to claim that these are the two poles of the English language, although they are two major centers (centres if you’re British) of publishing in the English-speaking world. (No disrespect intended to Toronto or Sydney.)  ↩

  12. Let’s dismiss the perception that British English is somehow “more correct” than American English. Not only is “more correct” not really a thing, British claims of American linguistic novelty are usually unsupported by history. The spellings “color” and “honor” were perfectly acceptable to the typesetters of the First Folio (Shakespeare’s collected plays, 1623), at which point there was no United States.  ↩


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