Posted on
15 June 2009 @ 7:21 pm. This post has 1 comment. Tagged words.
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The most commonly searched words on Dictionary.com. The list includes such English GCSE staples as metaphor, irony, alliteration, effect, and affect. The most commonly referenced word is search – not because people want to know what it means, but because that’s the result you get when you press the Search button without entering text. Users: you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.
Also interesting is this list of words on the New York Times website that are looked up most frequently using the site’s built-in dictionary function. As a comparison with the Dictionary.com list, the most commonly-referenced words here are sui generis, solipsistic, louche, laconic, and saturnine.
Posted on
14 June 2009 @ 10:28 pm. This post has no comments. Tagged Science.
The coldest temperature possible is −273·15°C, otherwise known as absolute zero: but is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?
Seems like an innocent enough question, right? Absolute zero is 0 on the Kelvin scale, or about minus 460 F. You can’t get colder than that; it would be like trying to go south from the South Pole. Is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?
Well, the answer, depending on which theoretical physicist you ask, is yes, no, or maybe. Huh? you ask. Yeah, that’s how I felt. And the question doesn’t just mess with the minds of physics dummies like me. Several physicists begged off of trying to answer it, referring me to colleagues. Even ones who did talk about it said things like "It’s a little bit out of my comfort zone" and "I think I’d like to ruminate over it." After I posed it to one cosmologist, there was dead silence on the other end of the line for long enough that I wondered if we had a dropped call.
Candidate temperatures range from 1017 K to 1032 K, the latter being one quadrillion times hotter than the former (although both are really quite warm).
I once asked if there was such a thing as a maximum temperature when learning about absolute zero in my A-level chemistry class; happily, it seems that it’s not as stupid a question as I assumed at the time.
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Posted on
13 June 2009 @ 6:57 pm. This post has 3 comments. Tagged dictionaries, language, words.
The millionth word in the English language was added last Tuesday morning, at exactly 10:22 am GMT. Well, no it wasn’t, but that didn’t stop Paul Payack of the Global Language Monitor claiming it was: at 10:22 am “Stratford-upon-Avon time”, the millionth word in the English language was announced to be the convenient-for-marketing-purposes phrase web 2.0.
If the outlandish claims of accuracy made by Payack didn’t already induce scepticism—he managed to measure this to the minute?—then the “word” which preceded the millionth should do so. Beating web 2.0 to the punch was the phrase jai ho!, a phrase which apparently gained “popularity” through the film Slumdog Millionaire (the word slumdog itself was apparently word number 999,997).
A quick comparison on Google suggests that web 2.0 is about 100 times more popular than jai ho!; a search on Nexis UK gives around 1,800 citations for jai ho in the year up to 7th June 2009, whereas web 2.0 is used over 2,000 times in the last month alone. It’s hard to see, then, what could cause jai ho to be recognised as entering English before web 2.0, unless, of course, it’s all made up for reasons of publicity and marketing.
For this reason, it was an enjoyable piece of schadenfreude to see Payack being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight who, to Payack’s seeming surprise, opens his questioning with “well this is rubbish this idea of yours, isn’t it?”, and gets more aggressive from there.
Posted on
3 June 2009 @ 8:48 pm. This post has no comments. Tagged computing, dictionaries, internet, language.
Microsoft launched a new search engine this week named Bing. The name seems odd, but, Microsoft being Microsoft, there are a lot of marketing reasons why it is so – the most interesting for a lexicographer being the (possibly optimistic) hope that it will start to get used as a verb:
If Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
This verbification is an unusual thing for a company to want to one of its trademarks, for reasons explained by the Chambers Editors’ blog:
Becoming the generic term for a class of product is certainly confirmation of a brand’s dominance. However, if a trademark becomes genericized, the owners’ intellectual property rights to the word are threatened. Syntactic or morphological shifts such as verbification and pluralization can often signal a trademark’s demise and so are actively discouraged by the likes of Google™, Hoover™ and Xerox™ wishing to avoid the fate of escalator, kerosene, trampoline and yo-yo.
Google made the jump from noun to verb years ago: the verb is first attested in the OED with a quotation from a Usenet post from October 1999, made just over a year after the search engine itself launched. It remains to be seen if the verb Bing catches on in the same way, not least because Binged resembles a common spelling of the past tense of the verb binge – which might have what Steve Ballmer calls negative, unusual connotations.
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26 May 2009 @ 6:15 pm. This post has 3 comments. Tagged environment, future, Science.
Astronomer Royal Martin Rees thinks that this century is the most important one in the Earth’s 4.5 billion year history:
It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that astronomers, contemplating timespans measured in billions, must be serenely unconcerned about next year, next week and tomorrow. But a "cosmic perspective" actually strengthens my own concerns about the here and now.
Ever since Darwin, we’ve been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.
Our sun formed 4.5bn years ago, but it’s got 6bn more before the fuel runs out. And the expanding universe will continue – perhaps for ever – becoming ever colder, ever emptier. As Woody Allen said, "Eternity is very long, especially towards the end". Any creatures who witness the sun’s demise, here on Earth or far beyond, won’t be human. They will be entities as different from us as we are from a bug.
But even in this "concertinaed" timeline – extending millions of centuries into the future, as well as into the past – this century is special. It’s the first in our planet’s history where one species – ours – has Earth’s future in its hands, and could jeopardise not only itself, but life’s immense potential.
Hint: it’s not good.
It seems to be a truncated version of his book Our Final Century (which I’ve not read). Interestingly, Rees’ publisher removed the question mark from his original title Our Final Century?; his American publisher seemingly didn’t think this made the doom impending enough, and renamed it again as Our Final Hour.
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