Ask The Pilot: Airline Glossary

4 May 2007

Every Friday, pilot Patrick Smith writes a column for Salon.com on commercial aviation. It’s a fascinating, insider’s look into the world of airlines. This week (and continuing next week) he is presenting a glossary of airline terms. If you’ve ever wondered the heck “cross check” was, click and find out.

Revisions Complete

29 April 2007

Well, I’ve just finished the revision of The Big List with the posting of the updated entry for Murphy’s Law a few minutes ago.

The revision took just over a year. (I started back on 8 April 2006.) Prior to the revision, some of the entries were nearly nine years old and badly in need of updating to reflect new research and improved research skills on my part. (Some of those early entries were embarrassingly bad.)

Moving forward, I’ll revise entries as they warrant it and I’ll be adding some of the old A Way With Words articles that are not currently on the site. These older articles will appear as “archived” versions under their original dates.

And I’ll be adding new items to the list at a greater rate than I have over the past year.

In Passing: Kelsie Harder

22 April 2007

Onomastician and toponymist Kelsie Harder died at this home on 12 April. He was 84. He was the editor of the Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names and numerous other works about names. His NY Times obituary is here.

Rules For The Revolution: Fair Use

21 April 2007

From time to time we discuss issues having to do with copyright and intellectual property here at Wordorigins.org. For those interested, there is a fairly new podcast on the subject called Rules For The Revolution. It’s hosted by Colette Vogele, an intellectual property lawyer here in the Bay Area and a non-resident fellow at Stanford’s Center for Internet & Society. Rules For The Revolution is geared primarily for those producing podcasts (lots of discussion about copyright of audio), but it is also of interest to anyone who is producing or using any kind of copyrighted material.

Episode 11 of the RFTR podcast is all about fair use of copyrighted material. It features an interview with Tony Falzone, executive director of the Stanford Fair Use Project. If you’ve ever wanted a concise, legal interpretation of the fair use doctrine give this a listen. You can also subscribe via iTunes. The RFTR podcast is free.