If the Eskimos have 100 words for snow...

...Kentuckians surely must have just as many for snow on your car. My favorite type is the snowdrift that buries the car when it is so cold that brushing all the snow away leaves the windows clear. One of my less favorite types is the one I had this morning: the frozen dew as a foil-thin layer of ice on all the windows. If you are not already late for work, you can sit in the car and just let the defrost take care of it. If you are in a hurry however and choose to scrape, it generates a fine spray of snow at your face and down your shirt, regardless of the direction of the scrape or your position relative to the car. I noticed that some of my fellow drivers chose a third option: believing that the ice was transparent enough to use as a window and leaving it there for the drive to work. (!)

The first line of this post is an example of one of my favorite linguistic devices: a snowclone. It is a familiar phrase in which some words may be replaced to form a new similar phrase. The most general form can be written with variables in place of what you can reasonably replace. A few examples:

• If the Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have M words for Y. (the snowclone after which they are named)
  
• Sometimes a X is just a X. (Did Freud actually ever say that about the cigar?)
• What happens in X stays in X. (Vegas? The Mile?)
  
• My degree in X is pending. (Mary uses this one and it always makes me laugh!)
  

I like keeping an eye out for these, and learn about new ones from the Snowclones Database blog, which I watch with an RSS feed. Do let me know if you notice others!

collaborative cataloging and editing

del.icio.us

I made an account on del.icio.us with no problem -- I have often seen other people's bookmarks there but have never bothered to put my own up. The site addresses one reason that I don't keep bookmarks, which is that they don't follow you from machine to machine; that is, you must bookmark them at work, from home, on the laptop you travel with, etc. and hope they don't get mangled as they are migrated when you upgrade your browser(s). My tendency is just to make a web page to avoid all that.

I like the ability to tag links rather than organize them into directories or pages, though I don't have high hopes for my internal taxonomy melding well with the existing "folksonomy" of del.icio.us. The site suggests commonly assigned tags, but should i assign "funny" or "humor"? How about "humour"? All of the above? I expect it doesn't matter, since 5627 people have already bookmarked icanhascheezburger.com. I'll try bookmarking things this way for a while and see how it works out.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing appears much easier to use now than last time I looked at it. Last time, my husband and I chose to write our own catalog instead! I added a few of my books to my account, and put a widget on my blog. Let me know if you want to borrow any books!

Google Docs

I didn't know you could compose documents with Google Docs and post them to blogger -- very cool! My favorite part of Google Docs is its automatic version control. Rather than just saving the most recent draft, it saves periodically so you are likely to have a revision saved for major revisions. That way, if I am writing a blog entry and get up to check on laundry and the cat lies on the keyboard (which she frequently does) I don't just have her version as a draft.

Google Docs is very good for community editing of a document: on the Institutional Repository Task Force, we copied a paper we were discussing into a Google Document, and each made notes and highlighted interesting passages in our respective colors. I have also used Google Docs with a friend to hash out the spec for a program we were writing. While chatting on Skype, we both typed into the document and could see the changes as the other typed them. Very handy! Prior to that we application-shared a word processor, which was slow and only allowed one of us to type at a time. So I am a big fan of this program.

Questions about blogging with Google Docs:

• Can you add a subject line to your blog post? I thought I clicked the option in my blog settings to do this if it was supported. (I manually added the title to the blog post using blogger)
  
• Can you tag documents in Google Docs and have those tags? The blog site settings screen indicates that you can do this, though I do not see a way to tag Google Documents. A brief search indicates that maybe this feature has been broken or missing for a while.
  

del.icio.us

My del.icio.us bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/zemkat/. More in my next post (from Google Docs).