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* *
* CYBERSPACE *
* A biweekly column on net culture appearing *
* in the Toronto Sunday Sun *
* *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer *
* Free for online distribution *
* All Rights Reserved *
* Direct comments and questions to: *
* *
* *
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I write for a newspaper so it should come as no big shock that
I love the printed word. Despite dire predictions that the net
and push technologies like PointCast would be the death of
black squiggles on handy coffee-absorbing paper, newspaper
revenues keep growing while the venture capitalists have
switched from backing push start ups to these infernal "portal
sites".
Being able to express your ideas in clear or interesting ways
is still more important than being able to load up a web page
with animated GIF files. The net has been and continues to be
all about having fun with the written word.
Generating new words seems to be the central preoccupation of
many in the high tech world. It can be hard to keep up.
Luckily, there's a couple good high tech dictionaries available
online at
www.currents.net/resources/dictionary/dictionary.phtml and
www.techweb.com/encyclopedia.
One of my favorite regular features in Wired magazine
(www.wired.com) is the Jargon Watch section. I've submitted
about a dozen terms to the section and I've only managed to get
two published. They're so picky! Wired seemed to like "YODA"
(Young Opinionated but Directionless Artsie: a person that
doesn't do much else but sit in a cafe and spout all sorts of
wisdom about what government and business should be doing to
make life better) but rejected "zealrut" (a tendency on
net.news to find yourself repeating the same arguments over and
over again on a newsgroup every time a new crop of users join).
My favorite term from Jargon Watch is "Blame-Storming": getting
a group of people together to figure out who is to blame for a
messed up project.
If you have an eye for neologisms, both computer and non-
computer related, The Word Spy page
(www.mcfedries.com/WordSpy/) might be a better place for
submitting and discussing them. Users submit terms they've
either cooked up or have discovered in use in the popular
press. One of the cuter ones is "Baby Bills", a suggested term
for Microsoft spin off companies should the U.S. Justice
Department ever force it into an AT&T-style break up.
Neologisms are fun but there's a couple hundred thousand words
in the traditional English language I haven't gotten to yet.
When I want to look up a real word, Merriam-Webster's online
dictionary (www.m-w.com/netdict.htm) is pretty handy. I
actually have a paper edition of Merriam-Webster's dictionary
right behind me but i haven't opened it in months. I'm that
much of a geek.
The online variant is handy to copy and paste from and it
provides the word's etymology, something a lot of cheap paper
dictionaries lack. Knowing where a word comes from adds a
dimension to a term that can't be easily encapsulated in the
definition section.
A fun way to tease out a term's hidden meaning is seeing what
kind of anagram you can get by rearranging the letters. Its
pretty easy to determine "lark" is an anagram for "Karl" but it
the process of generating anagrams for longer terms is
laborious. Thankfully the Anagram server at
www.wordsmith.org/anagram/index.html can quickly generate
anagrams for terms of any length. For example, who would have
ever guessed "Nose Onto Truth " hides in "The Toronto Sun"? Did
you ever doubt it?
Being a heavy user of IRC these days, I find myself more and
more encountering people who's first language is not English.
Its always nice to try to say a few words in the person's
mother tongue. But after 8 years of French education in Quebec,
I have to admit I'm never going to be a polyglot. I'd be hard
pressed to carry on even a basic conversation in French. I know
the French word for "milk". And I know enough swear words that
I could engage in some road rage on St. Catherines in both
official languages. Other than that I'd be lost if it wasn't
for the AltaVista Search engine's translation utility at
babelfish.altavista.com.
Some say the language of love is universal but the people who
say that are probably a lot better looking than me. If I'm
going to fall in love with someone who doesn't speak English, I
don't want there to be any confusion. I want to know I'm really
saying "I love you" and not "I want to paint a squirrel with
the blood of my ancestors". The Alt.Romance FAQ at
www.landfield.com/faqs/romance-faq/part3/section-1.html lists
how to say "I love you" in languages ranging from Albanian ("Te
dua") to Zulu ("Mena tanda wena").
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