Reading Ben Yagoda's latest book is like having a good friend analyze every word that comes out of your mouth. But it's not a book about Grammar Rules and Policies. I was relieved to find this sentence in the first dozen pages: "Ultimately, the issue of correctness just isn't very interesting." When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech for Better and/or Worse is more of a progress report on our English language. Each chapter covers a part of speech: Adjective, Adverb, Article, Conjunction, Interjection, Noun, Preposition, Pronoun, Verb. Yagoda spends an enjoyable 30 pages on just a, an, and the. I think of it as sort of reverse dissection, where the language becomes more alive as you pick at it.

Yagoda is not a real stickler for rules, per se, but certainly has a strong sense of taste. More than that, he shows a real appreciation for how we actually use our words. He pulls from a number of resources: famous authors, The New Yorker (particularly the Harold Ross era), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Bible, sports television, a variety of dictionaries & style guides both old and new, popular music, advertising, film, etc. I love the variety of research material. One chapter begins, "Any unified theory of interjections---the words that, all by themselves, express reactions or emotions or serve other purposes in discourse---would have to start, like much else, with The Simpsons."

Some miscellaneous trivia I enjoyed:

• The "&" symbol comes from the ligature of letters e and t in the Latin word "et" ("and"). That's not a huge surprise. But as recently as the 1800s, & was also the 27th letter of the alphabet!

When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words "and, per se [i.e., by itself], 'and'." This eventually became corrupted to "ampersand."

• The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer coined at least 55 -age words, such as "agreeage, kissage, and weirdage." Who knew there was one source for all that appendagage?
• Quoting some good advice from C.S. Lewis: "Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives---they should diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise)."
• The word ye comes from a misprinting of the word ?æe. The þ character is called thorn, and used for th sounds. Back in the day, when printers typically didn't always have the sorts for every symbol, "it was usually replaced by putting the letters t and h together, but sometimes y was used because it was felt to look similar."

Great book. I've really had fantastic luck with my recent readings.

This past weekend I went to a leatherbound bookbinding workshop. I spent 4 hours learning from the wise and affable Berwyn Hung of Praxium Press, which is just outside of Atlanta. Berwyn does workshops for a bunch of other book forms, as well as teaching letterpress and boxmaking. I'm absolutely going back as soon as I can fit it in. Here's a look at my finished product. It's about 6 inches on either side, bound in pigskin:

Here's a glimpse of the nifty blue endpapers:

So yeah, I had a blast. You can see the full documentary of the workshop process in my Flickr photo set.

Bruce Sterling thinks blogs will die out in another decade or so.

Web Typography Sucks, a pretty cool presentation at SXSW Interactive this week.

An essay on microtypography and dictionary design.

An interview with Jeff Smith, part one. Part two is coming soon, I hope. Smith is known best for his epic series of Bone comics:

Part of the plan was that I was going to reprint the collection in books, to always keep the story available. I always wanted to do the big one volume edition, too. One of the things that I wanted to do was change the model of comics and make them restockable, instead of comics just being up on stands for a month and then coming down and going back into the longbox, after getting marked up a bit.

A Flickr set comparing scenes from the movie 300 to the panels in the original book.

Tom Lutz reviews books about how to read, and inevitably, what to read.

Lots of good stuff in the Rare Book Room, with high-res photos of the old classics from Copernicus, Mercator, Galileo (like the Sidereus Nuncius that Edward Tufte gushes over), Bodoni's Manuale Tipografico, scores from Beethoven and Mozart, and a whole gaggle of Shakespeare.

"Software is a heap of trouble". That's the abridged version of this book. You'll find the full story in Scott Rosenberg's fantastic Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. One part of the tale follows the progress of the Open Source Applications Foundation project called Chandler; the other wends back through the history of computer science and software development. The story takes a good chunk of paper, around 350 pages + notes. None of it is terribly technical.

Chandler started with Mitch Kapor (known for Lotus 1-2-3, among other things) and the dream of the ultimate personal information organizer. E-mail, scheduling, calendars, notes, workgroup sharing & more, all in one cohesive and flexible system. In light of Rosenberg's Law and its corollary ("Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And the only software that's worth making is software that does something new."), Chandler has proven a daunting task. It's been over 4 years since Rosenberg started observing the OSAF team. As of this writing, Chandler is currently still only in version 0.7alpha4.

That creeping glacier of code raises the question: is it the team or just the nature of the job? Probably both. Rosenberg uses the hiccups and foibles of the OSAF team to explore some of the recurring issues of software development: the inherent mental difficulty of abstraction on a mass scale, the programmer's tendency to "glance at existing code and declare authoritatively that they could do it themselves, faster, easier, and better," the mythical man month, attempting progress without planning, the discouraging truth of Hofstadter's Law, and the need to reinvent the wheel (and fire and stonecutting and agriculture, etc.). Luckily, Rosenberg doesn't pose the Chandler team so much as the butt of the joke but the foil for the argument: software is hard.

One interesting thread in this book is the idea of programming as creative writing. Quoting Richard Gabriel:

We should train developers the way we train creative people like poets and artisits... What do people do when they're being trained, for example, to get a master of fine arts in poetry? They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in our software engineering disciplines? No. You don't look at the source code for great pieces of software. Or look at the architecture of great pieces of software. You don't look at their design. You don't study the lives of great software designers. So you don't study the literature of the thing you're trying to build.

The software industry doesn't have a strong sense of history. Part of that lack is cultural---many just don't care that much---and part of that is a necessary commercial evil whereby code is protected to protect profits. But I love that idea of the literature of software, the somewhat hidden heritage. This brings to mind the idea of artist qua collector and the idea of amassing influence. But for better or worse, there's already way too much to learn just to keep up with the present. So the programmers plug on "borne back ceaselessly into the past," if you'll pardon the drama.

Interview with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Interesting ideas there about being at the forefront of photojournalism, as the Flickr community can be much more agile than the press.

A list of famous teetotalers. I'm in good company: Gandhi, John Coltrane, Isaac Asimov, Richard Feynman, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel L. Jackson, Xeni Jardin, Penn Jillette, David Letterman, Donald Trump, H.P. Lovecraft, Frank Zappa, and Prince, among others. Fictional teetotalers include Batman and MacGyver. Um... Heinrich Himmler, Hitler, and Osama bin Laden are also on the list, but let's not get bogged down in details, okay?

January 31, 2007. Never forget.

Grid systems in web design is a pretty sweet collection of tools and and resources. I think this background grid image is really cool. [via joshua blankenship]

Scans of some absurdly complicated musical scores. Those bring back memories of a few marimba solos I've attempted. Composers can get a little carried away sometimes.

Here's the not-horrible music video for Midlake's song Roscoe, perhaps one of the most catchy tunes I've heard in a couple years.

Spreeder is another web speed-reading application. There's also ZAP Reader and the RSVP Reader extension for Firefox, which is pretty cool. I like that RSVP Reader works with what I already have on-screen. That way, I can still see the full body of text, rather than having to do a cut-and-paste maneuver and having the text come up from the depths and disappear again.

After Dolce & Gabbana decided to pull one of their recent ads, Mike Davidson tries to pinpoint precisely what elements make it offensive. Setting aside the inevitable offended reaction, there are some pretty good comments on the whole visual rhetoric. I think it's interesting that you can change the whole tone of the work by adjusting or tweaking a few parts of the whole.

An archive of celestial atlases.

A video with animated mechanical devices playing jazz/funk. I'd love to have a circular vibraphone or a conveyor marimba.