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2008 ‘banished’ words

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

Once again, Lake Superior State University (Michigan, USA) has released its annual playful banishment list.

2008 list of banished words

Observations:

  • Perfect storm (a synergy of bad luck/bad decisions): I like it, but it has been overused.
  • Webinar (World Wide Web seminar): It’s inelegant. The only motivation for the blend is the same vowel sound in web and seminar. Can’t we just call it a seminar?
  • Organic: Over the last couple years, I’ve noticed that seemingly all actors now describe their movies as “evolving organically.” How is this different from “evolving naturally”?
  • Wordsmith and to Author: I like them, and they’ve been around since 1873 and 1596 (click on “2, transitive verb”), respectively. Write is better than author, but the latter gives you some variety.
  • Random (as in “that’s so random”): This has been vogue slang among teens for a few years at least. It seems to just mean “that’s so odd” or “that’s out of left field” or “Where did THAT come from?!” We’ll see if it sticks around.

See also:
Making a meatball sundae of the grass station: The hip, overused and abused business buzzwords of 2007

And my post:
2007 ‘banished’ words

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Posted in LANGUAGE, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

2007 US words of the year, vote for Australia’s

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

In addition to the already posted locavore from the New Oxford American Dictionary (Vote for Webster’s 2007 Word of the Year; Visual Dictionary) and w00t! from Merriam-Webster (Merriam-Webster’s 2007 Word of the Year), the latter from an online poll:

  • Webster’s New World Dictionary named grass station and
  • the American Dialect Society voted subprime as words of the year.

Grass station (a gas/petrol station for ethanol, perhaps made from switch grass) is clever, but I doubt it would ever be a serious word.

Subprime (as in “subprime mortgage”) has certainly been in the news a lot in the United States. I suppose it will be around a long time unless the laws change; has anyone had a need to say “junk bond” since the late 1980s?

Meanwhile, until January 31, 2008, you can vote for Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary 2007 word of the year.

I’d like to point out a couple of omissions in the Macquarie Dictionary entries.

Helengrad
noun NZ Colloquial (humorous) Wellington, seen as controlled by the government of Prime Minister Helen Clark. [Helen Clark + -grad common Russian ending meaning `town']

Helengrad isn’t just Helen + -grad; it’s clearly a blend of Helen and [Sta]lingrad and perhaps to a lesser extent of [Len]ingrad.

data smog
noun electronic information as by emails, internet searches, etc., which, by its volume, impairs performance and increases stress.

Data smog is most likely based on the accessible data cloud (popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4205068.html?page=2) [EDIT (6/7/10): revised content on linked page] of all your digital stuff (a different meaning at Wikipedia, a way of visually displaying data).

See also my posts:
Webster’s (and Webster’s) 2006 Word of the Year
American Dialect Society Word of 2006
Macquarie Dictionary 2006 Word of the Year, Australianisms surveys

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Posted in Dialects, LANGUAGE, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

2008: International Year of Languages

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

The United Nations has declared 2008 to be an International Year of Languages, to be overseen by UNESCO.

Happy new year to all.

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Posted in Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE | No Comments »

Merriam-Webster’s 2007 Word of the Year

Friday, December 14th, 2007

As I mentioned in my previous post (Vote for Webster’s 2007 Word of the Year; Visual Dictionary) American dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster was taking a word poll.

The winner is w00t! (woot with zeros, à la leet [l33t] speak), like yay! But I’d say woo hoo!/woohoo! would be closer. Merriam-Webster also points out that it can be an acronym for “We Owned the Other Team.”

I’ve seen w00t a lot in Internet posts, so I’m not surprised it got the most votes.

Naturally, Google has a leet interface (as well as a Klingon interface).

Posted in LANGUAGE, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Vote for Webster’s 2007 Word of the Year; Visual Dictionary

Friday, November 30th, 2007

You have until Friday, December 7, 2007, to vote for Merriam-Webster dictionaries’ Word of the Year.

The winner in 2006 was truthiness, as popularized by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report TV show.

2007 Nominees:

  • apathetic
  • babymoon
  • blamestorm
  • charlatan
  • conundrum
  • cruft
  • eleemosynary
  • facebook
  • hypocrite
  • linkability
  • melancholy
  • Pecksniffian
  • pretentious
  • pugnacious
  • quixotic
  • sardoodledom
  • sputum
  • subpoena
  • vanity sizing
  • w00t [woot with zeros]

Merriam-Webster also now offers a free online Visual Dictionary.

In other Word of the Year news, the New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen locavore, a person who advocates “using locally grown ingredients” for meals (runners-up).

See also my post:
Webster’s (and Webster’s) 2006 Word of the Year

Posted in LANGUAGE, Words / Dictionaries | 2 Comments »

Lingro: Free Web page translation by word and more

Friday, November 30th, 2007

You can get whole Web pages translated (Google Language Tools, Babel Fish, etc.), but here’s a free tool to translate any individual word on a Web page you want: Lingro (via Education Week).

Lingro works for English-English and both to and from English for:

  • Spanish
  • French
  • Italian
  • German and
  • Polish.

It uses the free Wiktionary dictionaries and also has an input-translator dictionary, file translator, and vocabulary study tools.

Go forth and click multiple unknown words.

Posted in English as a Second / Foreign Language, Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language Technology, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Marathon of ‘Word Girl’ kids’ vocabulary show

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

Look, up in the sky! It’s a . . . well, it’s a superpowered word-loving girl.

This Friday, November 23, 2007, America’s PBS public broadcasters will air a two-hour marathon of their new children’s vocabulary TV show Word Girl (check your local listings).

I’ve never seen the animated show, but the bits on the Web site are very entertaining and probably educational for elementary school children. The creators show that language is fun. The television series also offers the introduction and reinforcement of four vocabulary words per episode.

I put this post in the Humor category as well as Language because some of the animated shorts on the site made me laugh, as when the narrator explains that Word Girl arrived on Earth when her monkey crashed their space ship. The narrator then goes into great detail about how monkey piloting is a very bad idea until Word Girl, breaking the fourth wall, makes him stop (in the first Huggy’s House of Fun Freeze Frame).

If your kids are in America and are no longer drowsy from Thanksgiving turkey by Friday, have them take a look.

Show’s dictionary for parents and teachers

Posted in Comedy / Humor Media, HUMOR, LANGUAGE, Language Media, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Freerice: Vocabulary quiz helps UN food program

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Do you like words? If you want to test your vocabulary and add to it while helping to feed the hungry people of the world, try Freerice.

Freerice banner

Here’s how it works:

For every correct answer to FreeRice’s online vocabulary game, the site donates 10 grains of rice to its official humanitarian partner, WFP [United Nations World Food Programme].

The money for the rice comes from the sponsors of the advertisements on the site (you don’t have to click on the ads/adverts to play). The program has recently passed the one billion mark: 1,330,639,890 grains of rice since October 7, 2007, and 136,236,930 grains just yesterday (daily totals).

The quiz is addictive for three reasons:

  1. Who wants to quit when you might know the next coming word?
  2. You can see the difficulty-level number going up and down as you get correct and incorrect answers, and who wants to quit on a lower level than you had been on?
  3. Who wants to quit when you can see the grains (literally, with graphics) adding up to be sent to starving people?

I’m not sure how long I played the first time, but I got past 1,300 grains of rice (including educated guesses and random ones) as my level kept going up and down between levels 40 and 44 (50 is the highest level and very low levels are for nonnative students of English).

According to the FAQ, the difficulty level for a word is based on how many people get it correct or not. Some of the words in the low 40s seemed pretty easy even for a well-read high-school student and some were both obscure and useless except for specialists. But it’s fun, and it’s for a great cause. Plus, they tell you the correct answers when you’re wrong. Oh, excuse me, I just got up to level 47 almost immediately. Busy now.

Banners for Web sites and forums

Posted in English as a Second / Foreign Language, Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Free access to OUP foreign-language dictionaries 10/2007, quizzes

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

In honor of National Dictionary Day (American lexicographer Noah Webster’s birthday), Oxford University Press USA is offering free access to its online French-English, German-English, Spanish-English, and Italian-English dictionaries (oup.com/online/freeoldous/). [EDIT (6/6/10): dead link]

This free access is from October 15 to 21, 2007.

OUP also has some short quizzes about these languages:

French Quiz

German Quiz

Spanish Quiz

Italian Quiz

Oh, and happy 249th birthday, Mr. Webster!

Posted in Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Follow-up: Help test internationalized domain names

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

As I reported last week (Help test internationalized domain names 2007-10-15), the time has come to see how non-Latin characters will work in domain names. The Internet administrators at ICANN have set up test domains (http://example.test) in eleven writing systems. You can type them into different browsers, put them in E-mails, and create a wiki page with your name in non-Latin characters at each domain.

Here’re the domains:

It’s still ASCII encoding; each domain has a transliteration encoding starting with an “xn--” prefix.

Here’re the actual addresses:

When you get into Web pages, the encoding gets rather long. For example, this would be the wiki listing for Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa:

http://例え.テスト/黒澤明

Here’s what you may see in your browser address bar:

http://xn--r8jz45g.xn--zckzah/%E9%BB%92%E6%BE%A4%E6%98%8E

They worked in my browser and E-mail. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the Chinese and Japanese domains work with both the ASCII period/full stop “dot” (.) and with the Chinese/Japanese open-circle period (。).

More information at:

My Name, My Language, My Internet: IDN Test Goes Live

IDNwiki

Posted in Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language Technology | 1 Comment »

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