CNN discovers word clouds

After President's Barack Obama's second live press conference tonight, CNN's Wolf Blitzer announced one of the network's with grand fanfare.

The president words were vomited, I mean, presented in a "Word Cloud," which kind of took the speech out of context and provides no insight whatsoever.

Word clouds are nothing new in cyberspace. They're "clouds" of text that give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text of a source. Clouds, like the one below, about the entire Twitter universe, abound (even though there is no reason why).



Furthermore, you can make a cloud out of anything, thanks to www.wordle.net.

Case in point, here's a word cloud for this very blog.



Here's a better one, the Ulster economic transition task force report to the county executive.



Cool? Absolutely. But, really, what possible use can you get out of this?

Et tu, Twitter?

Those of you who had to suffer through "Twitted twits all in a twit about Twitter" may have some questions.

* Did Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. really wrote "squirrels on cocaine"?

You bet your tweaked-out squirrel he did! Here's the piece.

* Is "Twitted twits all in a twit about Twitter" an actual sentence?

It is. To twit (the verb) is to subject to light ridicule. A twit (the noun) is a fool. And "All in a twit" means either upset or frantic. Just don't try to read the headline fast.

I was trying to get the same effect as in Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo - an amusing, yet horribly constructed sentence that happens to be grammatically correct.

* Did U.S. Sen. John McCain and ABC's George Stephanopoulos really had an interview via Twitter on Tuesday?

Yes they did. Both discussed really, really important stuff during this groundbreaking interview - stuff like McCain's daughter's cred with conservative blondes and weather the senator prefers PCs or Blackberries, as reported in this story you won't bother to read. Most importantly, there's this masterpiece:

Homeschooling, home school and home-schooler

Ouch!
This is one of those language problems that will surely incur the wrath of English departments in the Hudson Valley, no matter what we settle in.
Reporter Bonnie Langston was tasked to explore the growing trend of homeschooling in the region for our Sunday edition of the Freeman.
But how do you spell the different occurrences of the word as a noun, adjective, verb?
“Homeschooling” is the only entry in the dictionary, and it is one word. The Associated Press Stylebook and the Freeman style rules -- our reference guides -- were silent on this issue.
After much sweat and consultation, we came to a decision.

• “To homeschool,” (the verb that doesn’t exist in the dictionary, but people use anyway) is one word, since the gerund “homeshooling” is one word.
• Since there is no entry for the noun, “home school” has to be two words.
• The noun “home-schooler,” however, is hyphened. “Why?” you might ask with some confusion (I did). Because “schooler” -- aside from looking utterly weird -- is not a word. “Student” is. But “home student” sounds like you are studying a home, not at home.
• “Homeschooled,” the verb’s past tense, also is one word. Not so for the adjective “home-schooled” (hyphen rules apply here).

Of course, when in a proper name, there is nothing we can do. A name is a name (like “Associated Press Stylebook”).
Therefore, the Poughkeepsie Area Homeschoool Meetup Group has “Homeschool” as one word (same with “Meetup,” which should -– in my book -- have a hyphen).

All of this, unfortunately, will make the story look like the spelling is inconsistent. But there is a reason for the many ways of the different spellings.

Beautifully filled with irony, a Microsoft Word spell check will not recognize “homeschooling” as a word (word!) which, as I’ve said before, is the only one entry in the dictionary (I used “word!” as slang, by the way).

I am sure many of you will disagree with parts or all of this.

My head hurts now.