Design URLs

Design Observer is not just a name we stumbled upon: we searched hi and low. Delineator was not available, nor was untitled. The Velocity of Modern Life sounded too, well, too obvious and far afield. As a service to our readers over the holidays, here is a list of the twenty URLs we found to be available, and more interestingly, the close to one hundred URLs we found to be taken...

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Shallow Water Dictionary

A number of years ago, I stumbled across an out-of-print tract called the Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English by John R. Stilgoe, a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard. This almost-a-book, really-a-long-essay, is of the type described by Lawrence Weschler, writer and former The New Yorker editor: "the extended, writerly, not necessarily immediately topical piece of non-fiction reportage ... that is one of the greatest contributions of American culture to world literature."

An excerpt, the Letter C, from the index:

canoe 6, 22, 25-26, 28, 54
   burning from a log 22
Cape Cod (Massachusetts) 37, 40, 48
Cape Cod (Thoreau) 34, 37, 40, 47, 48
Cape Fear (North Carolina) 9
card 49
Carthusians 50
Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, 27, 37, 39, 41, 45, 46, 53
century storm 36
chart 49
chartreuse 48, 49, 50, 52
Chaucer, Geoffrey 38
Civilian Conservation Corps 36, 40
clamming 40
Connecticut 10, 35
Cooper, James Fenimore 9
cordgrass 12
Cornwall (Britian) 14
cove, 10, 11
creek 9, 11, 12, 14, 16
   vs...

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