i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

The Oxford New American Dictionary officials, in an armchair moment, captures some of our popular words in 2009.  "Twitterisms," unsurprisingly is a 'notable word cluster' but fails to win the top word.  Sure, language isn't static, but who should be the authority to rank 'tweeting' above 'unfriend'?  *grumble*

Top Word of 2009: Unfriend, But Twitterisms Abound

-joan

Amused by our classic armchair authority:
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"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't – till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."

This might be the cutest 202 news story I've seen yet: A writer got a bunch of 5- to 7-year-olds together and asked them what they call their Lego pieces. From the story:

Who knew that package size was a distinguishing property of cigars? From the WSJ, working around a recent ban on clove cigarettes, a company has rebranded their product as cigars.

202 in the Whitehouse:  a selection from Obama's recent email communications from guardian.co.uk on 10/26:

Quoted Text --------------------------------------------

To: VPOTUS <joe.biden@whitehouse.gov>

Re: Fwd: "Jonas Bros music never been used in torture, except maybe here in the White House" Hilarious stuff!!!

Yeah, I've read it Joe. I'm the one who sent it to you. You see the thing at the top where it says "Fr: POTUS"? That means me. Barack

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A thread on a discussion forum today was about tin foil. Tons of people say tin foil, yet it hasn't been made of tin since the middle of the 20th Century. But for some reason that made me think of "Saran Wrap" and how that's a more common term than "plastic wrap" even though it is a name brand.

While I was making my vocabulary the other night, I realized I'd totally forgotten to post about this controversy over the video game Scribblenauts. In the game, you draw "any word you can think of" to move your cute little hero character around — but what if the word you write is "sambo"?

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

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.