waderoush has adopted no words, looked up 0 words, created 1 list, listed 5 words, written 3 comments, added 0 tags, and loved 0 words.

Comments by waderoush

  • Wow, I hadn't heard that one. Sounds like wilding and rumspringa are exact synonyms.

    How did you link to the definition page in your comment?

    October 22, 2011

  • There's another definition not reflected in Wordnik's sources. Amish and Mennonite groups use "wilding" to refer to a period when a (usually) young member leaves the community to experience outside culture. The young person may or may not return to the community. Jane Hirshfield, in "The Heart of Haiku," defines it as "a period of sampling everything the sensual world has to offer" and suggests that the poet Basho went through a wilding of sorts in his mid-20s.

    October 22, 2011

  • The Wiktionary definition here suggests that camel case is confined to programming, but clearly it is not. There are all too many examples of camel case (camelCase?) sneaking into everyday language, especially in the world of branding. "iPhone" is probably the most famous example right now, but any random survey of Silicon Valley startups will turn up a passel of other offenders (e.g. VeriSign, MoneyTree, NextBio, PowerReviews, and NitroSecurity, just to name examples from this week's pages at my publication, Xconomy). In fact, it's getting so bad that as a journalist, I sometimes reflexively put a name into camel case even when it's not officially spelled that way (e.g., Dropbox is not DropBox). Caleb Crain offered an interesting history of (and plea against) camel case in a 2009 On Language column in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/magazine/29FOB-onlanguage-t.html

    October 21, 2011

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