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Wayne State University’s (@WayneState) Word Warriors (@wordwarriors) has as its objective “to retrieve some of the English language's most expressive words from the dank closet of neglect, in hopes of boosting their chances of a return to conversation and narrative.” See how many on the list you can work into your vocabulary today:

Antediluvian – Antiquated; old-fashioned; out of date.

Erstwhile – Former; bygone. Rampantly misused.

Execrable – Atrocious; wretched; abominable.

Frisson – That sudden, involuntary shiver we may feel at times of great emotion.

Parlous – Dangerous or risky.

Penultimate – Next to last.

Sisyphean – Actually or apparently endless and futile.

Supercilious – Contemptuous; disdainful; condescending.

Transmogrify – To change completely, usually grotesquely, in appearance or form.

Truckle – Submit obsequiously; be subservient; kowtow.

Read this in full.

Michigan Radio (@MichiganRadio) reporter Jennifer Guerra (@RadioJenG) uses all 10 words in her radio report.

What words would you like to bring back into common usage? Parsimonious? Bellicose? Pedestrian? Parlance? Keen? Mendacious? What others?

Shelf Awareness (@ShelfAwareness) reports that Jay Schwartz, Dictionary.com’s head of content, said, “We’re taking a stand on this choice. We think that it’s immensely rewarding to find existing words that capture a precise experience, and this year, tumult has been the norm rather than the exception. There are contested public spaces around the world, where people are demonstrating in one direction or another. Opinions and circumstances have been oscillating so much.”

This year’s verbal shortlist included “occupy,” “austerity,” “jobs” (both the noun and the person), “zugzwang,” and “insidious.”

Oxford Dictionaries (@OxfordWords) declared its Word of the Year 2011 to be “squeezed middle” (“the section of society regarded as particularly affected by inflation, wage freezes, and cuts in public spending during a time of economic difficulty, consisting principally of those on low or middle incomes”).

Other words and phrases considered by OED included Arab Spring, hacktivism, phone hacking, sodcasting, bunga bunga, crowdfunding, facepalm, and fracking,

Also see OED’s “What Makes a Word of the Year?”

Merriam-Webster’s (@MerriamWebster) word last year, as listed in its archive, was “austerity.” In 2011, Merriam-Webster lists the words that “spiked in lookups” each month because of events in the news (such as “vitriol” in January, “inclement” in February, and “prefecture” in March). For its 2011 word of the year, Merriam-Webster selected “pragmatic.”

Wikipedia chronicles a history of words of the year as selected by the American Dialect Society (@americandialect) (#woty11). ADS will chose its 2001 Word of the Year at its annual meeting in January in Portland, Oregon. Last year’s word was “app.”

iPad storyteller Joe Sabia (@joesabia) introduces his TED (@tedtalks) audience to Lothar Meggendorfer (Lothar Meggendorfer at University of North Texas Libraries), who created a bold technology for storytelling: the pop-up book. Sabia shows how new technology has always helped tell stories.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Infographic: The Periodic Table of Storytelling.”

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you tell your story and promote your brand.

Do you have Writer’s Block? Consult this Infographic to break through. ☺

Click for a larger version.

By the way, today is the National Day of Listening (@StoryCorps).

Humor columnist W. Bruce Cameron (@wbrucecameron) takes on the electronic ereader industry with this essay:

Move over, Kindle: Cameron Industries, a mono-national corporation headed by CEO W. Bruce Cameron (no relation), announced today it will soon be marketing the "next generation" of portable readers. Dubbed the "book," Cameron predicts it will take the world by storm.

As described by Cameron, the book will mark major advances in current reader technology. Among them:

Battery life: While some manufacturers boast that their reading machines can have as much as 150 hours of battery life, Cameron claims that the (pat. pend.) "always on" technology used by the book means the battery life is actually longer than human life.

Read it in full.

It makes us think of another humorous look at the printed format: the Bio-Optical Organized Knowledge Device (BOOK):

Introducing the new Bio-Optical Organized Knowledge device, trade named B.O.O.K.

BOOK is a revolutionary breakthrough in technology; no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It's so easy to use, even a child can operate it. Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere -- even sitting in an armchair by the fire -- yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM disc.

Here's how it works.

BOOK is constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information. The pages are locked together with a custom fit device called a binder which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence. Opaque Paper Technology (OPT) allows manufacturers to use both sides of the sheet, doubling the information density and cutting costs. Experts are divided on the prospects for further increases in information density; for now, BOOKs with more information simply use more pages. Each sheet is scanned optically, registering information directly into your brain.

A flick of the finger takes you to the next sheet.

BOOK may be taken up at any time and used merely by opening it.

Read this in full.

Editors: Have you ever thought of yourself as a CEO? Well, Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey (@jack) sees himself as an editor. Evidently editing is pretty important!

Typographer Stephen Coles (@typographica) writes in Fonts In Use (@FontsInUse) that this year’s Fortune magazine’s (@FortuneMagazine) annual “500” issue is “a particularly typographic feast.”

The core of Fortune’s typography is MVB Solano Gothic. The typeface was originally made by Mark van Bronkhorst for the Bay Area city of Albany, designed to work alongside the community’s early 1900s architecture. With its sturdy, utilitarian geometry derived from sign lettering of the era, Solano can feel slightly vintage, but the standard variant is more sober than the Retro and Round members of the family.

I was surprised to open Fortune and find what could be considered a character actor playing such a central role. But editorial designer and two-time National Magazine Award winner John Korpics proves with Solano that some “display” typefaces can be more versatile than we assume. Besides setting headlines and teasers, Solano performs admirably in Infographics and even the “500” issue’s essential lists and tables.

Read this in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you achieve maximum interior page design quality for your publishing projects. And use the SomersaultNOW dashboard to access useful websites and information about page design and editing in general.

http://www.gocomics.com/speedbump/2011/09/17

In The New York Times (@nytimes) Janet Maslin reviews Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield (@simongarfield), saying, “This is a smart, funny, accessible book that does for typography what Lynne Truss’ best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves did for punctuation: made it noticeable for people who had no idea they were interested in such things.”

Knowledge of fonts is essential to advertising, book publishing, professions (like law) that require thoughtfully chosen stationery and any written work that can be done on a home computer. Personal computers are the main reason that font fandom and do-it-yourself design have snowballed in the last two decades. Had Steven Jobs not taken a shine to calligraphy as a college student and decided to include a choice of fonts in computer software, we might not be having this conversation.

Mr. Garfield’s book overlaps with Gary Hustwit’s (@gary_hustwit) 2007 documentary Helvetica, which concentrated entirely on a single, unstoppably popular typeface. Is global proliferation of the very Swiss, clean, antiseptic Helvetica a welcome phenomenon, or is Helvetica the weedy, unstoppable kudzu of the design world? Mr. Garfield takes a somewhat jaundiced view of Helvetica mania, but he hardly limits himself to one narrow school of fontificating. A full look at font history, aesthetics, science, and philosophy could fill an encyclopedia, but Just My Type is an excellent gloss. Mr. Garfield has put together a lot of good stories and questions about font subtleties and font-lovers’ fanaticism.

Just My Type covers phenomena including how the fonts on road signs are tested for legibility and what the fonts used by various political campaigns subliminally communicate about candidates. It explains relatively arcane matters like kerning (the science of spacing letters)....And if it does nothing else Just My Type will make it impossible for you to look at logos, road signs, airports, magazines, and advertisements indifferently any longer.

Read this in full.

Let Somersault help you in the page and cover designs of your books. And stay informed about publishing best practices with the SomersaultNOW dashboard, such as the content in the Editing and Innovation tabs.

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) writes in The New York Times (@nytimes) that spelling has become a major problem in publishing. “Bad spellers, of course, can be sublime writers and good spellers punctilious duds.”

Book publishers used to struggle mightily to conceal an author’s errors; publishers existed to hide those mistakes, some might say. But lately the vigilance of even the great houses has flagged, and typos are everywhere. Curious readers now get regular glimpses of raw and frank and interesting mistakes that give us access to unedited minds. Lately, in a big new memoir from a fancy imprint, I came across “peddle” for “pedal.” How did it happen?

Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. “In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages,” Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (@FSG_Books), explained. “Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next stage. Now there are intermediate stages; authors will email in ‘one last correction,’ or we’ll produce intermediate stages of proof — the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos.”

Authors, too, bear some blame for the typo explosion....

Craig Silverman, a Canadian journalist with a book and a website about corrections called Regret the Error (@CraigSilverman), expressed chagrin. “We seem to keep removing steps that involve editing and checking and don’t bother to think about how we replace them with something better,” he told me.

Read this in full.

Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard of more than 300 links and RSS feeds assembled specifically for publishing and marketing professionals. Especially see the resources in the Editing tab.