New New York Times.

January 12, 2018 by 12 Comments

Simple but brilliant: this Twitter feed automatically posts any word that the NY Times uses for the first time. Latest entry: kilimologist (if you click on the word, you get the context, in this case “Batki is a self-proclaimed kilimologist, an expert in old weavin…”). You also get the occasional typo (“attacthed”), which is fun as well. Thanks, Trevor!

Comments

  1. Stan Carey says
    January 12, 2018 at 11:38 am

    An entry from yesterday, shithole, has appeared previously in books reviews/excerpts on NYTimes.com. So maybe it’s for first uses in news/opinion articles or in the print edition.

  2. languagehat says
    January 12, 2018 at 11:48 am

    Ah, thanks for that clarification.

  3. Alex M. says
    January 12, 2018 at 12:29 pm

    It’s rather silly setting up an automated feed like this without assigning someone to edit it. A large proportion of the entries are simply typos or two words concatenated by a missing space. As there are only a handful of entries per day at most it would be no bother for a member of the social media team to keep an eye on it. As it is, it just looks sloppy, with too many irrelevant entries overwhelming the small number of interesting ones.

  4. languagehat says
    January 12, 2018 at 1:09 pm

    Eh, it probably wouldn’t exist if it depended on a paid editor, and it doesn’t bother me to have the occasional misprint. But I don’t mind sloppiness in general (you should see my workspace).

  5. Keith Ivey says
    January 12, 2018 at 4:21 pm

    You think there’s a social media team for it, Alex? I’d assume it’s one person who set it up and then isn’t spending any more time on it unless it breaks.

  6. languagehat says
    January 12, 2018 at 5:23 pm

    Yup. Exactly like my own Twitter feed, which I set up by popular demand but never look at or moderate (or whatever one might do with a Twitter feed).

  7. D.O. says
    January 12, 2018 at 6:14 pm

    Apparently, whoever did it (Max Bittker, obviously, but I am too lazy to look him up) has access to digital, I mean OCRed, copies of the NYT, which might not go all the way back to the big bang.

  8. languagehat says
    January 12, 2018 at 6:44 pm

    Now it’s got troposphering and cryptotulips, among others — what fun!

  9. mollymooly says
    January 12, 2018 at 9:58 pm

    I don’t think the NYT first said fornication on 11 Oct 2017 though that early tweet predates the context-clickthrough upgrade. The parts of the website scraped are listed here and don’t seem to include the archive. I guess the bot built up an initial dictionary for a while before being published.

    Still good fun, mind.

  10. Phil Jennings says
    January 13, 2018 at 10:09 am

    ‘Hatriotism.’ Very clever and immediately I know how to use it and produce other new words like hatriot.

  11. J.W. Brewer says
    January 13, 2018 at 3:03 pm

    I wonder how it excludes proper names, which you would expect would otherwise be heavily featured? Maybe as simple as excluding any word that’s capitalized (which might be overbroad in terms of what got excluded but would be good enough for this sort of project)?

  12. SFReader says
    January 14, 2018 at 2:16 am

    soooooul

    how touching…

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