“If you are like I, you are pretty sick of reading articles about how the financially-troubled newspaper industry is making desperation budget cutting moves: Downsizing its products, laying off staff, buying prostitutes for advertisers, and so forth. But believe me, you’d be even sicker of it if you were INSIDE a typical American newsroom these days, where it’s sometimes hard to hear over the 200 decibel background drone of human whining.

One frequent newsroom complaint is that they are cutting back drastically in the use of copyeditors. It’s true, but I for one am not complaining. I say good riddance.”

“For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change. I wrote my first two books, and many hundreds of articles, in Word. But I’m writing my third book in an inexpensive yet wonderful piece of Mac-only software written by a single person instead of a “business unit” at Redmond. Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this?”

The Alphabetizer puts just about any list in alphabetical order with options to strip HTML, ignore case, make all lowercase, capitalize first word, remove duplicates, reverse list, randomize and/or ignore indefinite airticles.

“Paul McHenry Roberts (1917-1967) taught college English for over twenty years, first at San Jose State College and later at Cornell University. He wrote numerous books on linguistics, including Understanding Grammar (1954), Patterns of English (1956), and Understanding English (1958).”

“If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.”

“This application example uses live questions from Yahoo! Answers to generate an overall, up-to-the-minute impression of people’s raw feelings and thoughts on the network. Typically such language visualization applications screen out common words, such as our Answers Cloud. When we look at such pronoun words and see how often they are used on Yahoo! Answers, an overall pattern of common meaning and usage emerges.”

This week, the newly formed XPLANE Press achieved its first milestone: The reprinting of Bob Horn’s classic book Visual Language. Horn’s book makes the case that visual language is truly an emerging international language, and – like all languages – it has an inherent order, syntax, and grammar that can be learned and applied. While the world of information design has come a long way in the 10 years since Visual Language was first published, the book’s core message remains relevant today.

Visual Language has been out of print for the last few years, but is now back on the market via the XPLANE store. We will soon be offering it on Amazon as well, where used copies have been selling for upwards of $100. Here’s more from XPLANE founder Dave Gray.

“Currently [Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary] does not recognize ‘concepting’ or ‘to concept’ as a proper mode of speech. Seeing as this is a process that we, as creatives, use on a daily basis, I aim to have Merriam-Webster acknowledge our creative methods and make an addition to their upcoming edition.”

Check out this visual over at XPLANE founder Dave Gray’s blog: “Language is more than just communication, it is the primary method by which we do things together. Language is the accumulation of shared meaning — on common ground.”

“Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought. State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country. They say many of these symbols bear a strong resemblance to later forms of ancient Chinese characters. Scholars had thought Chinese symbols came into use about 4,500 years ago.”

Jorn Barger: “I often complain to interviewers that ‘weblog’ is the least interesting of my many neologisms. Here’s a sampling of others…”

“Visual language is any communication which is primarily visual. For the purposes of this wiki, it will focus on an emerging field which focuses on improving thinking, learning and communication by making it more visual. Visual language integrates words, both spoken and written, with visual elements, to enhance and expand the meaning of both.” (Disclosure: This is an XPLANE-related Wiki project that is open to anyone interested in visual language.)

“The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand. When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters. And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.”

“A stone slab bearing 3,000-year-old writing previously unknown to scholars has been found in the Mexican state of Veracruz, and archaeologists say it is an example of the oldest script ever discovered in the Western Hemisphere.”

“Harold Keables taught me how to write. He was my English high-school teacher in the early seventies (1970s, not 1870s). I wasn’t that great a student, so he’s probably having a good laugh in heaven watching me write books and blogs.”