London - Bird flu, blogosphere, Islamophobe and MP3 player have made it into the latest Chambers Dictionary, the august work of record used by crossword fans and Scrabble players the world over.

At 1 800 pages of dictionary text and about 270 000 definitions of about 150 000 words, the new edition, out next month, updates its predecessor from 2003.

But billing the 500 or so words as new is something of a misnomer: they have all been common currency for the last three years or more; the only new thing is their first appearance in the dictionary.

For example, global fears over an outbreak of new entry “SARS” - severe acute respiratory syndrome - was at its height in 2003.

“Sex up” - “to make more interesting or attractive” - emerged from Britain’s exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons capability to justify military action in the same year.

“Congestion charge” - the fee levied on motorists to drive into central London - also makes it in, three years after it was introduced to widespread controversy.

As Samuel Johnson, the author of the “Dictionary of the English Language” in 1755, put it: “Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.” - Sapa-AFP

Third-graders all across the state will have a head start on their homework this year thanks to the Rotary clubs.

The organization is distributing 20,000 dictionaries for the kids personal use.

This scene will be repeated in third grade classes in public, charter and private schools. Rotarians are presenting dictionaries to each youngster.

“We at home have said that words form ideas and ideas run the world. that’s what we taught our kids and so dictionaries are a good first step in third grade,” says Sheri Rolf, rotarian.

As students received their dictionaries and returned to their seats, they couldn’t resist the urge to start looking up words.

“I thought it was pretty cool because it had more words than you can find in my regular dictionary,” says Mari Kumura, third grade student.

And why do you need to know long words?

“So you can have a better education. If you know longer words, you might not have to struggle like in college, or high school or middle school,” says Mari Kumura.

It’s called a student dictionary - but it has supplements like the declaration of independence and the U.S. constitution.

“This will be a wonderful resource for them because they have their own personal one at their desk, they can use it any time they like. what I like is all the extra things in there about our country’s history, the presidents, it’s wonderful,” says Jenny Howard, teacher.

Some of the definitions are more complicated than the word - I asked Mari to look up the word “joy.”

“It’s a noun. Great happiness, delight - - elation,” says Mari Kumura.

Matthews - “elation.” Kumura - “elation.” Matthews - “Do you think this will give you some joy?” Kumura - {laugh} “maybe.”>

The kids know how important it is to get a good education - no matter what they plan to do when they grow up.

“Yeah, I’m gonna play major league baseball.” Matthews - “Cool. But you’ll need to know big words to get a good contract, huh?” Pryse - “Yeah. My dad said I can only go to college if i get a scholarship. Which I hope I will,” says Benjamin Pryse, third grade student.

A dictionary is a good start, Benjamin.

The Indio Noon Rotary and Indio Sunrise Rotary clubs, in a joint effort, will distribute more than 1,800 dictionaries — one for each third grade student attending Indio schools.

The Rotary clubs are providing dictionaries to local school children as a part of the “SoCal Dictionary Project”. The project’s goal is to get a dictionary in the hands of every third grader in Southern California.

Each dictionary has an insert for the student’s name and may be taken home to assist with homework in addition to classroom use.
President Martha Mendez of Indio Noon Rotary and Merritt Wiseman, president of Indio Sunrise Rotary represented their clubs in the joint project.

Club members will deliver the dictionaries to Indio elementary schools and present each student with their own personal dictionary.

“Charitable” is one word that some students can look up in their new dictionaries, after the local Elks Lodge decided to donate them to some third-grade classes in Pottawattamie County.

Dennis Clark with the Council Bluffs Elks Lodge No. 531 said the idea came from a state convention in April.

“They talked about the Davenport (Elks Lodge) delivering between 700 to 800 dictionaries to the kids in their area,” he said. “We thought this would be a neat idea.”

The goal, Clark said, was to get a dictionary to every third-grader in the Council Bluffs, St. Albert and Tri-Center Districts and at the Iowa School for the Deaf.

That meant a lot of dictionaries would need to be delivered - 912 books total, Clark said.

The Elks Lodge had talked to Lewis Central School officials, but Larry Hutchinson had recently delivered dictionaries to all the second-graders in the school district in April.

Larry’s late wife, Nancy, died Feb. 11, and taught at E.A. Kreft Primary, where the dictionaries were handed out.

On Thursday, the dictionaries were given away to all the Washington and Crescent third-graders at Washington Elementary.

“It’s neat. It’s cool that the students were able to get these,” said Washington Principal Jason Plourde.

Clark hopes to have all the dictionaries distributed by the Labor Day weekend.

This won’t be the last such donation drive, however. Clark said the Elks Lodge is beginning to look ahead to next year, and hopes to eventually work with Larry Hutchinson with distributing dictionaries to the Lewis Central District.

“We’re just glad to be able to do something like this for the kids,” Clark said.

Don’t be insulted if somebody calls you a “mouse potato.” It just means you spend too much time at the computer.

And, if you want to include Finland when speaking of Scandinavia, the politically correct word is “Fennoscandia,” which also includes part of Northwest Russia.

The editors at Webster’s New World College Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary have released partial lists of the hundred or so new words to be included in their dictionaries later this year.

You’ll most likely hear the word in conversation or see it in print before it winds up in either dictionary.

Mike Agnes is editor-in-chief of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, headquartered in Cleveland since 1951. He said his staff spends the whole year combing through newspapers, magazines and listening to talk shows, searching for new words ready for prime time.

“There are a limited number of words that fit in the dictionary,” he said. We “include them when they reach a certain level.”

That’s why it took 23 years after the Woody Allen movie about an enigmatic character named Zelig before the name became a noun in the New World dictionary.

Tom Pitoniak, associate editor of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in Springfield, Mass., said there are always words that didn’t quite make the cut, but should have.

“There are a few words that were strong candidates, like “podcast” (referring to broadcasts made over iPods) and “SuperMax” (super-maximum security prisons),” he said. “We tend to want to see the words in print, rather than just hear them in conversation.”

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary started in 1847.

Pitoniak said he would personally never use the word “mouse potato,” but his 6-year-old son knew the definition of “unibrow,” a single continuous eyebrow.

And that was before the word was added to the dictionary.

Iran’s Academy of the Persian Language and Literature starts defining the most unabridged Persian dictionary with over 35 million entries on Sept. 23, the head of the project announced here on Saturday.

According to Ali Ashraf Sadeqi, the plan was proposed in 1997 since the Dehkhoda Dictionary, the most comprehensive Persian dictionary ever published, dates back to at least 60 years ago and does not contain new words and expressions.

The book lacks the new methods of linguistics and lexicography, he said.

Sadeqi believes that like Oxford or other famous foreign dictionaries, the new Persian dictionary should cover all new words even scientific ones compiled by the experts.

Over $100,000 has been allocated to the project, he stated.

“We selected about 1,000 texts, including old and new books, dailies, and websites through which we chose the words,” he explained.

Sadeqi noted that foreign words which will enter the Persian language sooner or later are seen very frequently in the press.

Hence, a comprehensive dictionary should contain all of them, he added.

A dictionary designed for pupils and middle school students is considered unsuitable by many parents for their kids.

The Xinhua Dictionary with English Translation, published by Nanfang Press in 2003, defines the Chinese word “chicken” as either a kind of poultry, or the derogatory short form for prostitutes. The dictionary also gives “pimp” as one of the meanings of the Chinese word “duck.”

The dictionary describes itself as a “modern, up-to-date dictionary specially designed for pupils and middle school students in the new century.”

An anonymous parent, however, said she thinks some of the definitions are unsuitable for young kids and teenagers.

According to an on-line survey on the People’s Daily website, 560 out of 878 people who took part in the survey think the dictionary will have a bad influence on kids and teenagers, and 322 of them believe the editors should be punished. 318 respondents think the definition given by the dictionary will not harm young readers.

An editor surnamed Zhang with Nanfang Press said in an interview with Beijing Youth Daily on Thursday, “There is only one edition of the dictionary, published in 2003, so any bad influence on pupils is limited.”

He said that if Nanfang Press publishes other dictionaries, definitions of this kind will be deleted.

The country’s most authoritative dictionary, Xinhua Dictionary published by Commercial Press in 2005, and other commonly used dictionaries for pupils and middle school students define “chicken” only as poultry.

There is no connection between Commercial Press’ Xinhua Dictionary and the Xinhua Dictionary with English Translation by Nanfang Press.

The Xinhua Dictionary with English Translation is now unavailable in most Beijing bookstores and on eBay and TaoBao, China’s biggest on-line auction sites. But according to Shenzhen Evening News, hundreds of copies of the dictionary can still be bought in the city’s Shenzhen Bookmall.

Source: Xinhua

Google and Apple contest the fight over trademark protection for ‘to google’ and ‘pod’

In the struggle over their trademark rights two global players are pulling out all the stops at the moment. While the Internet search machine, according to reports in the german newspaper ‘Die Welt’, would like to oust the phrase ‘to google’ from everyday language, the computer firm Apple is battling over the concept ‘pod’ according to a report in the Financial Times. The background to all this lies in the fact that trademarks can lose their protection if they become generic concepts.

In the past prominent newspapers have been the lucky recipients of correspondence from Google, and editors of dictionaries are being treated in the same way - the phrase ‘to google’ should not be used any more in the sense of searching the Internet. To be more precise, in German you might have to say instead something like ‘Ich habe eine Google-Nachfrage gestartet’ or, in English, something like‘ I ran a Google Search’. In the German Duden in the meanwhile the phrase has become defined exactly as in the British ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ and the American Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

At the ‘request’ of the Internet giant, in their recent 24th edition Duden have modified their definition which originally ran as ’to search the Internet, especially via Google’. Now it says ‘to search the Internet using Google’. The Duden entry for the actual word ‘Google’ on the other hand leaves no doubt as to its trademark aspects - it is supplied with an ‘r’ in a circle. Duden would have yielded to the request for an alteration of the entry in order to avoid any legal action,. say the editorial team. Such requests do occur from time to time . From the legal point of view, Google’s appeal is completely comprehensible - in decisions to do with generic concepts, dictionaries can be used as a weighty argument.

The consequences for future trademark activity. the linguistic authority of dictionaries, especially Duden, must come to be viewed with uncertainty. When trademark lawyers can influence dictionary definitions and a dictionary editor can permit an alteration of a definition, the believability of language bibles is bound to suffer. ‘ When in doubt, I would rather prefer to omit such entries from dictionaries, because a dictionary is not assigned with the task of providing advertising for trademarks’, said the head of Duden’s editorial team, Matthias Wermke, to the Financial Times..

In its action against the infra-red scanner ‘Profit Pod’ and the protective coverings for electronic gadgets ‘TightPod’, Apple has been beating a traditional path and sent injunctions to the infringers. What this makes clear is that the brand iPod will be closely monitoring and cautioning. In the case of ‘Profit Pod’, an injunction fluttered in shortly after the publication of the product name in the US Trademark Register. Whether the concept ‘Pod’ will follow a similar Duden career path is uncertain at the moment. It seems to be just as popular, as shown by the prevalence of podcasting which is so trendy at the moment.