Language: August 2006 Archive Page

Get into the action of creating words with falling letters in WORDTRIS. Letters drop from the top of the screen, and you must form words horizontally and vertically. When the words form, the letters disappear, and the pace begins to quicken as you complete levels. As the letters continue to descend, look out for the letter to create the magic word that will clear all of the letters from the screen. Test your reflexes and your vocabulary with WORDTRIS. --Flash Game: WordTris (QuickFlashGames.com)

Great little word game.

Bloggers have been making fun of the examples Google's lawyers deem acceptable. They included: "Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie."

Web veterans have also been taken aback by Google's suddenly humourless approach. The eight-year-old company has previously cultivated an image of youthful non-conformity, from the jeans and T-shirts often worn by its billionaire founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to the scooter lanes and volleyball courts at its Palo Alto headquarters. --To google or not to google? It's a legal question (The Independent)

The word google has recently joined words such as photoshop and xerox, as a generic term for an activity once tied to a specific product. Google's copyright lawyers have to demonstrate that they have acted to defend the copyright, or else the word can fall so far into the common domain that the company wouldn't be able to defend its name against competitors who try to use it. But I'm filing this as another example of why lawyers don't live on the same planet as the rest of us.

I'll also mention that "mute point" is an "eggcorn" -- a new category of writing mistake that linguists have identified and my fellow college teachers might find useful in responding to student writing. I'm certainly glad to have a new tool that helps me climb down from the high horse I have occasionally mounted in 10-plus years of teaching creative writing, essay writing, business writing, and you-fill-in-the-blank-here writing. It's nice to have a way of explaining mistakes that doesn't make students feel stupid.

[...]

All eggcorns makes sense on some level. For example, the eggcorn "girdle one's loins" is far more understandable than the archaic "gird one's loins." "Free reign" -- an extremely common misspelling -- expresses a similar laxness to "free rein," and there's a kind of exclamatory kismet between "whoa is me!" and "woe is me!" --Mark Peters --Like a Bowl in a China Shop (Chronicle)

I just recently used "free reign" in a blog entry. Whoa is me!