The BBC network has announced that some of their comedies will be turned into films by BBC Films. They don’t mention any specific shows, but this Reuters/Hollywood Reporter article [Edit 2/21/10: dead link] mentions The Office, Extras, and Little Britain as contenders.

I’ve been watching and enjoying the original The Office, as well as Coupling, Absolute Power and People Like Us, on the PBS network in America. If they could make the movie versions of shows accessible to newcomers, they could sure sell a lot more DVDs of the shows.

American dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster (THE “Webster’s” before the trademark was lost) announced some new words for the 2006 update of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Editon. They don’t mention this there, but an Associated Press article says that the verb to google has also been added.

Observations

• I’m glad spyware and ringtone are finally making it in, but it’s hard to imagine I’ll get much use out of labelmate (a singer/musician on the same record label as another singer/musician). This is the first I’ve heard of it.
• I didn’t recognize the word coqui, but I’ve heard of the tiny yet very noisy frogs. The “introduced into” in the definition downplays that the frogs are talked about because they’re an invasive species. Hawaii is trying to fight back. (You can keep up with such things on the Invasive Species Weblog.)
• It’s interesting that in English, manga (Japanese characters: 漫画 ) are comic books/graphic novels whereas in Japanese (as shown in the etymology) the word could also refer to an uncollected cartoon or comic strip. A secondary Japanese definition is “political cartoon” or “satirical cartoon.”

Related News

• It’s also the 200th anniversary of Noah Webster’s first dictionary, so Merriam-Webster has a list of words and definitions first appearing in his American 1806 A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, including debit, slang, psychology, immigrant, and nutrient.
• Both Merriam-Webster and the U.K.’s Collins dictionaries have a submit-your-own-new-word feature. [Edit 2/21/10: Collins one seems to be gone.]