Are you a wordsmith?

Me, I am not a wordsmith, yet. I would however like to think of myself as an aspiring wordsmith, if you will. I enjoy increasing my vocabulary when possible. I recently came across a couple of sites recently that I wanted to share with you. The first one is Wordsmith.org. There are several useful things that this website provides. They have services that are available for free via e-mail. This page has a list of all of the commands that are accepted by the wordsmith server.

So if you need to know the definition of a word simply send an e-mail to the address wsmith@wordsmith.org with a subject line of "define XXXX" where XXXX is your word and make sure to remove the quotess. Also you can find an anagram in a similar way.

I decided to try out the anagram service and found that an anagram for the word "insolence" is "no silence". Who knows what else you will find by using this service. I have also subscribed to the word-a-day list that is offered. Hopefully this will help you, as it has me, on the never ending quest to be educated.

There is also a book put out by the author of wordsmith which can be purchased here.

Does anyone know what sextumvirate means? Well I had to look it up. Except that turned out to be more of a problem than I would have imagined. I tried my normal online dictionary.com which could not find a link for it. I then searched the Noah Webster's 1828 online dictionary to no avail. I then searched for the word in Google and was able to find a dictionary with my word.
I found a difficult word dictionary that was able to inform me of what my word meant.

sextumvirate

n. government by six men.

© From the Hutchinsonencyclopediaa.
Helicon Publishing LTD 2006.
All rights reserved.



Online Dictionaries
My Normal Dictionary
1828 Noah Webster's Dictionary
Difficult Word Dictionary

This page has quite a few links with refference resources on it

• Electronic Resources Index
  There is one more site that I wanted to share with you Today. Or more correctly one more book. The Wrong Word Dictionary is a book that can help you if you mix words up sometimes. This would have been useful when I tried using the word 'defecate' when I meant to use 'defenestrate'. Wow was that a fun conversation!
  
  

US English Foundation

Well I have added my affiliation with a new group called US English Foundation. I did this yesterday during my daily web browsing session. I will let the foundation explain what it's goals are. This is taken from their website:

The Foundation has several missions:

• To help improve the teaching of English to immigrants, to allow them to enjoy the economic opportunities available in this country.

• To study language policy and its effects around the world, so we can apply the lessons learned through the experiences of other countries to the United States.

• To raise public awareness through the media about the importance of our common language.

There is a required donation to join. The foundation would prefer a minimum of $10 however they have a box where you can enter any amount. I signed up with $1 and that seemed to work. I know what you're thinking, why didn't you enter $0 in the box? Well I did and no it doesn't work. If you think that there is not really a need for the United States to have a formally recognized official language, think again. According to this there are over 329 languages spoken in the United States. In my opinion there is definitely a need for a common language. However I am not going to take this time to argue my point of view. The arguments laid forth on the US English Foundations page, are going to be more in depth and more complete than my arguments, and I would encourage you to read them if you think this issue is not of importance.

For those of you who are living in Colorado as I am, you would probably like to know how your representatives voted on the latest bill concerning making English the official language in the United States. Well Salazar voted no and Allard voted yes. Well at least the measure was passed 63-34. I am glad that Salazar was not able to foul this up.

Apparently his dotage is growing on him. If you would like to send Mr. Salazar an e-mail expressing how you feel about him voting in opposition to this, the page for that can be found here

You can read all about this bill here.

While browsing there was a quote that I agreed with which I desired to share with you.

“A country has to have only one official language, if men are to

understand one another... It is eminently fair that a country's official

language should be the language of the majority.”

---Ayn Rand

Also I found this article at wikipedia useful for expanding my understanding of languages in the United States. According to the article English is the de facto language of the United States. Some states have adopted it as the official language for the state. There are also some states that are bilingual with one state being trilingual. Considering that wikipedia is always changing the date that I look at the following page was on 06/07/06.

So if the page has changed since then, well I can't really help that.

Wikipedia Article

Futuristic Water

Is normal looking water starting to bore you? Would you like your water to look futuristic? Well have no fear thinkgeek is here! For a mere $15 you are able to purchase an adapter for your water faucet. I know that if I happen to find $15 in my jacket pocket any time soon, I will be getting one of these.