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Social-isms

Man is a social animal. —Baruch Spinoza Back in 1996, Craig Howe, who was then director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at Chicago's Newberry Library, wrote that "The Internet is either anti-social or asocial. It promotes the isolation of the individual." In...

Posted to Lingua Techna (Weblog) by Paul on 04-04-2008
Game On

Video games have longed pushed hardware to new levels, but they've also pushed the linguistic envelope, with games and gamers constantly coining new words and phrases. Way back in its April 30, 1982 edition, an op-ed piece in The Washington Post opined that "When the latest monthly unemployment...

Posted to Lingua Techna (Weblog) by Paul on 03-28-2008
It's a Wiki, Wiki World

This past summer was mostly hot and sunny in my neck of the urban woods, but here, there, and everywhere it was the summer of Wikipedia. In early August, I was reading the latest issue of The New Yorker , and I came across a lengthy article about Wikipedia with the clever title, "Know It All"...

Posted to Lingua Techna (Weblog) by Paul on 03-21-2008
When Good Clicks Go Bad

In recent months the blogosphere ( there's a term that came out of nowhere to reach mainstream status) has been abuzz with talk of click fraud — illegitimate or non-relevant clicks on advertising links — and its potential effects on the online advertising industry. Of the dozens of posts I've...

Posted to Lingua Techna (Weblog) by Paul on 03-14-2008
Changing Climate, Changing Language

According to the Nobel Prize-winning Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, we are now living in the anthropocene , his recently coined term for the present geological period, which is characterized by humanity's effects on global climate and ecology. That humans are having a (negative) effect on the world's...

Posted to Lingua Techna (Weblog) by Paul on 03-07-2008
The Web, Take Two

Please God, just one more bubble! —Silicon Valley bumper sticker The English language is a veritable assembly line of new words and phrases. Inventive wordsmiths in all fields are constantly forging new additions to the lexicon by blending words, attaching morphemic tidbits to existing words, and creating...

Posted to Lingua Techna (Weblog) by Paul on 02-29-2008
Gone Phishin'

For the past few months I've been beta-testing Internet Explorer 7. It comes with a number of new features but, as a language watcher, the feature that most interested me was the Phishing Filter. Hunh? Microsoft, as corporate and mainstream as a tech company can get, is using the jargon term phishing...

Posted to Lingua Techna (Weblog) by Paul on 02-21-2008
Folk Wisdom

Web geeks have long fantasized about a Web taxonomy: a classification scheme that would encompass the entire Web; not just pages, but also page content such as images and blog posts. Yahoo!'s hierarchical directory is an impressive attempt at a kind of Web taxonomy, but it's a weighty construction...

Posted to Lingua Techna (Weblog) by Paul on 02-15-2008
Watchwords

Privacy is already gone. —Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle Corp. In his 2005 novel, The Traveler , John Twelve Hawks describes a near-future world in which almost everything we do is traceable and almost everywhere we go is trackable. Using high-tech tools such as Echelon (the global spy network that monitors...

Posted to Lingua Techna (Weblog) by Paul on 02-07-2008
Call Me, Ishmael

When e-mail started to take off in the 90s, more than one pundit prognosticated the death of the phone call, as well as the early demises of writing and social interaction. These last two are in fact thriving thanks to the Internet and, with the proliferation of cellular, phones are now entrenched as...

Posted to Lingua Techna (Weblog) by Paul on 02-01-2008

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