You just sold schadenfreudgeon to a noob? lol, only 297 to go!

Thanks for the welcome, gangerh!

I am just poking around and checking out all I can do here - very impressed so far.

Good to read John's comment (bottom below) on citations - I added extelligence early on and am glad it meets his stringent policies... :P

:D

Thanks for the welcome, gangerh!

I am just poking around and checking out all I can do here - very impressed so far.

Good to read John's comment (bottom below) on citations - I added extelligence early on and am glad it meets his stringent policies... :P

:D

Thank you. I needed it.

gangerh: re: your 'sugar puff' experience, serendipity's somehow involved, don'tcha think? See serendipitoast.

WeirdNet tells us that a citation is also a kind of racehorse. Unfortunately I don't think HTTP POST was designed with them in mind.

Seriously: citations are references, like my comment on counterknowledge to show where I found it/what it means/how it's used. Just the source would have counted as a citation, but illustrative quotations are nice when you find them.

Hi gangerh. Welcome to Wordie.
I am a newby here, too. I also had trouble understanding what a citation was intended to be...and then I went insane and made so many citations...I was a kid in a candy store!

Citations are anything you put in the comment box of a word. Some of them are real notes about the word or its history and some are your personal observations about a word. Some are jokes. Some are free-association things...bits of poetry or song or literature that the word appears in or brings to mind. Some are just conversations between wordies...chit chat...for fun.

I hope to see you around.

Just replied to your last question on my profile. Maybe Wordie needs to rip off Facebook's "wall-to-wall" feature :-)

Hi gangerh, to my mind a citation is a sourced quote. If this was an academic journal that would mean strict rules about formatting, etc. It's not, thank God, so just a link or the simplest of attributions (like the book the quote is from) suffices. See the first comment on plethora.

When Wordie first hit the airwaves it was, well, just me, so there was no one to talk to. As more people joined the party the comments/citations field has been used more for chatting, which is fine by me. I leave the 'citation' language up there, though, because it's used for both, and I really like it when people dig up--or make up--good usages.

Any suggestions for how this dual use can be made more clear to newcomers?