Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Choose Your Words

GOOD describes itself as “the integrated media platform for people who want to live well and do good. We are a company and community for the people, businesses, and NGOs moving the world forward. GOOD's mission is to provide content, experiences, and utilities to serve this community.”

Their tagline is “For People Who Give a Damn”.

From what I can tell, GOOD is the perfect content website for those profiled in “
Stuff White People Like”. This site is aimed at idealists who have not yet become cynics, those who love to keep tabs on the societal pulse, and (less important but still of note) those who appreciate a modern and clean aesthetic when they read online. The first time I saw the sub-section of the site called “Wordtastic”, I all but clapped my hands in delight. Here, “language columnist Mark Peters looks at new words, old words, slang, jargon, euphemisms, mistakes, and other aspects of how we talk and write.”

YES. PLEASE.

I took a linguistics course for exactly 45 minutes in college. The professor was an insufferable dinosaur who clearly hated human interaction but taught in order to fund his research. The juxtaposition of someone who studied the building blocks of communication but preferred silence at all times was too much for me. (Also it had an attendance policy.) He mentioned something along the lines of ‘theoretical articulatory phonetics’ (not really, but I just googled some really boring phonetic vocabulary to prove my point) and I closed my notebook while mentally clicking "drop class" on the university registrar website.

Wordtastic, in contrast, is biting and relevant. The
column I just read about renaming atheists was especially hilarious and I’m going to start using the word “blasphematour” as much as possible now. Because I’ve now linked to this dude’s column twice, I might as well also tell you that you can follow him on Twitter here and read his equally hilarious blog, wordlustitude, here.

1 comments:

KC said...

Super! I'm adding this guy to my Twitter and to my Reader.

I love the literacy challenge, but isn't it so hard?