The shadowy Cayman Islands holding company that owns this newspaper, The Warren Group, does almost everything that has anything to do with business and commerce and real estate and finance and things.
Just for real estate alone, B&T publishes all manner of sales and offers and flubs and residential and commercial and liens and stuff – as well as renting out columnists to paint your bedroom ceiling. That’s the “tradesman” part.
Less well known is the business dictionary that the Warrens publish, in direct competition with Springfield’s Merriam-Webster dictionary stuff.
The Warren Dictionary is very low-key and professional, with no color pictures or agonizing uncertainty about whether “theater” should be spelled “theatre,” if you are pretentious or something.
The Merriam-Webster thing is all flashy and well-publicized and in-your-face – including an annual “Word of the Year” that gets all kinds of free press and helps them sell an extra 42 zillion dictionaries or, in the alternative, wins them an additional 67 trillion hits for online spell-checkers and definition hunters.
This year’s top word was “bailout,” as in, I stupidly took my boat out off Cape Cod on a rough day, and by noon, I needed a bailout.
I can’t imagine why that word was so popular, but what can you expect from people who patronize Merriam-Webster? The best people, looking for the best columnists and dictionaries and stuff, come to The Warren Group.
For example, our most popular search term in 2008 was “Federal Reserve,” as in the Federal Reserve System, which we define as a bunch of hard-to-understand old guys whose job it is to control the money supply, except when times are tough, at which point they can print money with the speed and enthusiasm that adolescent rabbits have sex – all because we need a bailout (see Merriam-Webster, p. 187.)
You see? You can’t get clarity like that from some publisher in Springfield, where they think they invented basketball or something.
Hard Charging
The Merriam-Webster folks reported that “maverick” was also high up on their list of popular words this year, because puzzled John McCain watchers weren’t sure whether that word was a term of endearment, or, maybe, some Latin neoconservative term that meant “lover of wars and offshore drilling and stuff.”
The more with-it, way-cool crowd that uses the Warren Group Dictionary searched the label “innovator” much more often than “maverick.” We defined it as a risk-taking, push-the-envelope, driven-mad-by-money type person who in times of tight credit often needs a bailout (see Merriam-Webster, p. 187).
An innovation offered by the Warren Dictionary this year is an acronym chapter, so that you can pretend to understand the I.T. guys, without having to say “huh” when they say stuff like “SOAP.”
As explained right here in the Warren Dictionary, SOAP is “simple object access protocol, which sort of uses XML to format the XBRL, so you can communicate over the HTTP.” It’s all very simple, which is why it is called, well, you know, simple.
Some of all this may sound more like encyclopedia stuff than dictionary stuff, but the word game is sort of fuzzy these days. Google doesn’t really care how you spell anything. If you spell my first name with a “w” instead of a “u”, Google will still identify me as the Best Damn Columnist in These Here Parts, while asking you something like, “Hey, moron, did you mean ‘Laurence,’ instead of ‘Lawrence?’”
So, with spelling less and less an issue, dictionaries are often substituting for encyclopedia stuff, because dictionaries are concise and stuff.
For instance, if your boss wants you to reconcile the petty-cash accounts and water his plants and market to a big client all at the same time, and you want to complain about the “excess burden,” but you’re not sure whether he might misinterpret what you mean, you can look it up in the Warren Group Dictionary, where it explains quite clearly that excess burden depends on “consumer surplus between the demand curve and the social marginal cost of characteristics of the new equilibrium.”
Well, I’ve had enough column writing for today. I’m going to bail out (see Merriam-Webster, p. 187).â–
