New New York Times.

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. 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. Ah, thanks for that clarification.

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

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

  11. J.W. Brewer says

    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. soooooul

    how touching…

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