(Roughly) Daily

In these times of proliferating online reference resources, what’s a poor scholar to do?  Dictionaries can be a particular problem: duelling definitions, eccentric enunciations…  all against a backdrop of a language that’s evolving, in both vocabulary and usage, even as we speak…

Enter Wordnik:

Wordnik is a new way to discover meaning…  Wordnik shows definitions from multiple sources, so you can see as many different takes on a word’s meaning as possible… We try to show as many real examples as possible for each word. These examples are ranked by how useful we think they are in helping you understand the meaning of a particular word, especially words that may not have traditional dictionary definitions… [Wordnik lists related words.]  Our word relationships include synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, words used in the same context, a reverse dictionary, and tags…

All this– plus lists, images illustrating entries, recorded pronunciations, and a word-of-the-day at Wordnik.

As we choose our words both more carefully and more confidently, we might fling a fistful of rice in celebration of the nuptials of Sadye Marks (better known as Mary Livingstone) and Benjamin Kubelsky (or Jack Benny, as audiences knew him); they were married on this date in 1927.

Mary co-starred in Benny’s fabulously-successful radio series, and became famous for her occasional flubbed lines, many ultimately as legendary as the deliberately-crafted “illogical logic” of Gracie Allen or the carefully-scripted malapropisms of Jane Ace and (as Molly in The Goldbergs) Gertrude Berg.  (Visit here for downloadable examples.)

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