i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Foolishness reigns in the Old World.

CNN article: English getting its millionth word [...]

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One million words! Wow. Since English is not my native language, having to catch up with roughly 995.000 more words is not really good news for me. But then, how do you count the words that comprise a language? How do you define "a word"? What is "a word"?

According to the article, linguists state that

The Guardian reports the story of the Obama administration's attempt to silently discharge one of the signature phrases of their predecessors from political discourse: 'The global war on terror'.

The team at Wordnik are trying hard not to let people think of them as a dictionary.

This article in Science is about how linguists uncovered dozens of languages in a particular region in China. The striking thing : People who spoke different languages, and could barely understand each other, were less than 5 miles away !!

Most of us have heard of service dogs — but what about service horses, chimpanzees, or parrots? Should they be treated the same way under the Americans with Disabilities Act that more "typical" or "expected" service animals are? Or should there be different categories within the designation of "service animal" to determine which companions are allowed in which public places? That's the subject of this December 31, 2008 New York Times Magazine story.