Produced by the Local Government Association, the list for 2010 [pdf] includes the new additions:
It’s good to see webinar put in its rightful place. I’d find it hard to even venture a guess about what half the words on the list are actually supposed to mean.
[via].
If I were looking for an abbreviation for copper nanotube, I would probably choose something other than what these Chinese researchers went for:
(Thanks to Eleanor for letting me know this exists!)
There’s two quality corporate euphemisms in this news article, about a flight that appeared to get lost and failed to land, possibly because the pilots were asleep. See if you can guess their real meanings!
Reports that the pilots may have fallen asleep were "speculative" but the investigation would look at fatigue issues.
The crew stated they were in a heated discussion over airline policy and lost situational awareness.
This ‘discussion’ must have been very heated to produce a flight path like this one:
.
I know a bit about science, certainly enough to be aware that media coverage of science is on the whole terrible. I used to think that this was a specific problem with science coverage; however, now that I know a little bit about language, I find that the media coverage of this is also, in general, crap.
This makes me wonder: are there any specialists in any field who are happy with the way their subject is treated in the news? I suspect I’m taking far too many media stories on trust just because I lack the background knowledge needed to see that they’re rubbish.
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.
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