Here’s one for the Scrabble lovers—eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels. It means “beautiful thinking”, and it’s also the title of a book by Canadian poet Christian Bök, in which each chapter uses only one vowel.

Bök (pronounced book, fittingly enough), said Eunoia “proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language.” Here is an excerpt for ‘o’, which I particularly enjoy because it’s all about books:

Loops on bold fonts now form lots of words for books. Books form cocoons of comfort – tombs to hold bookworms. Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth. Dons who work for proctors or provosts do not fob off school to work on crosswords, nor do dons go off to dorm rooms to loll on cots. Dons go crosstown to look for bookshops known to stock lots of top-notch goods: cookbooks, workbooks – room on room of how-to-books for jocks (how to jog, how to box), books on pro sports: golf or polo. Old colophons on schoolbooks from schoolrooms sport two sorts of logo: oblong whorls, rococo scrolls – both on worn morocco.

For a closer look, check out the text or flash versions, or listen to Bök read aloud from the ‘i’ chapter:

Matt Rogers’ kinetic typography of Stephen Fry’s “Language” podcast is brilliantly done.

via @brainpicker

savethewords.org from Oxford Dictionaries

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved, and unwanted.

If you love words as much as we do, find room for them again in conversation and written communication. Each time you use one of these words, you are keeping it alive in the English language.”

I like traboccant, murklins, and kalotypography so much I just adopted them. What words will you save today?

Language, digital, letterpress…these are just a few of the words that catch my attention, so it’s not surprising that Graphic Arts student Patrycja Zywert‘s use of all three immediately piqued my interest. Her “In Other Words” project explores the effects of textspeak on human language by combining traditional and digital printing methods, resulting in a typographically rich booklet of posters.

By leaving a blank space in the shape of textspeak words we want to highlight that when we take them out of the language, there are plenty of more interesting and suitable words and phrases left around.

The posters are silk-screen printed and letter pressed to show the beauty of pure and ‘analogue’ language (as opposed to digital). Textspeak abbreviations are kept in digital/pixel style font and all the words around are made of wood type fonts and therefore look more traditional. Our lives are becoming digital yet traditional ways seem to always work well and appear more human.”

For more of Patrycja’s work, check out her portfolio and blog.

found via design work life