Old A Way With Words Articles

5 July 2007

I have begun adding articles from old issues of A Way With Words to the website. When I converted the site to the new format, I included all the AWWW articles that were in HTML format, but the older articles (2002-2005) were in PDF format and I did not convert them. I’m doing that now.

So far, I’ve added all the 2002 articles and I’ll be adding the rest in the coming couple of weeks. Unlike the Big List, I’m not updating these articles, so some of the statements in them are obsolete. But the articles are all marked with the original date of publication, so it should be easy to see that these were written some time ago.

So go ahead and browse through them. They are also accessible via the site’s search engine.

Second Life Dateline

4 July 2007

The Reuters news agency has been using “Second Life” as the location in the date line of stories about the online, virtual world. As in:

Ginko Financial - Pioneer or Pyramid?
Sun Oct 15, 2006 10:10pm PDT

By Adam Reuters

SECOND LIFE, Oct 15 (Reuters) — If you make a 44 percent annual return in the real world it means you’re a genius hedge fund manager, or maybe Warren Buffett. In Second Life it means that you’re an account holder at Ginko Financial – unregulated, unaudited, and a magnet for controversy.

It’s an interesting meld of the cyber and real worlds.

OED Update: prima to proteose

20 June 2007

On 14 June, the Oxford English Dictionary published their latest quarterly update, primarily covering the words from prima to proteose.

Additionally, the editors added a number of new words from outside the range. This include chill pill, flip-flopper, Islamofascist, sabermetrics, Gaia, and Syrah.