Oh my Wordle

Wordle is a rather splendid thing. (Discovered, as is so often the way, via Russell.)

If you paste a chunk of text into Wordle, it creates a cloud of the most frequently used words, their sizes relative to their usage. (Like a tag cloud.)

The one here is from the first 61 pages of my novel, Rag and Bone Dreams. Goodness, a copywriter with a novel on the go. Who'd have thought it?

What's your Question Mark Inside?

I've just come from tea and cakes at the Chapter House of St Paul's Cathedral. This is not the sort of thing I do every day, as you might imagine. In fact, I've never done it before and probably won't again. So I should thank Martin Firrell for inviting me.

Martin is a public artist, known for projecting often provocative messages onto public buildings. (He's also a branding consultant and writer, off and on, which is how I met him.)

He's been commissioned to create a work to celebrate the 300th Anniversary of the topping-out of St Paul's. His response is The Question Mark Inside: an attempt to explore that part of ourselves that leads people to religion or other forms of spirituality. The part that wrestles with all the big questions - why are we here? What's the meaning of life? What's the secret of happiness? All that stuff.

The project blog invites people to contribute their own thoughts on the subject, and has become an archive of deep thoughts from around the world (and some not so deep). Martin's plan, as he told the assembled throng at the Chapter House today, is to 'put all these thoughts into the hugest blender in the world, and press pulse, and create a Question Mark smoothie. Then I'll spread some of that smoothie onto the dome of St Paul's'. Well, there's a thought.

It's an ambitious plan, and an exciting one. The first sneak preview will be on 8 November, to coincide with the Lord Mayor's Show, and then there will be a full, three-week run of the project later that month. Martin and the Cathedral are busily fundraising for the project, so if you feel like helping - either in cash or in kind - you can email emma at martinfirrell dot com with offers.

Well, for starters...

I just saw this in my local branch. All my Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells instincts erupted in a moment.

Inside, they repeat the headline. But this time without the offending mark. So not only are they incorrect, they're also inconsistent.

Why oh why oh why, etc.

The Visual Dictionary

Thanks once again to Ben Terrett's Noisy Decent Graphics blog, I was introduced to the splendid Visual Dictionary this month.

This is an archive of photographs of words, contributed by hundreds of people. Right now, there are almost 6,000 images of nearly 3,500 words. It's a lovely idea, and one of those 'what the internet was made for' projects.

(Of course, it's my professional duty to point out that it's not a dictionary at all, as there are no meanings, etymologies or whathaveyou provided for the words. 'The Visual Lexicon' might have been a more accurate name. Ah, it's a lonely furrow that I plough.)