Hermeneutic Heretic

BostonHerald.com - Opinion & Editorial: Education studies show: $$ wasted on them
Choice, competition and freedom are core values that define what we are about as a nation. The Bush administration proposal to appropriate $100 million in opportunity scholarships for poor kids in failing schools is a needed program. Let’s use our limited taxpayer dollars to enhance education freedom and not on superfluous research.

Very interesting statement of values, that hides a basic contradiction: in order to make these statements about educational research, the author needed educational research in the first place. And of course, freedom is best served by information - and we should not forget that the overheads on running freedom are very high.

There is also an interesting cognitive model (conceptual frame) that is invoked here, viz. education is a marketplace, educational system is a micro nation, freedom is an essential part of our nation, freedom in the marketplace means choice and competition, and therefore education only promotes freedom if one can make choices. This allows the author to get away with this argumentative shortcut quite legitimately - even though his syllogisms are implied, the underlying ‘logic’ is still indisputable. (Although, of course he is disasterously wrong, here.)

‘Google’ becomes an official verb - ZDNet UK News
Though you may have been “googling” people for years, the verb you were using was technically slang, until recently.

In fact, many regularly used tech words are just now getting the official stamp of approval from English-language dictionaries.

On Thursday, Merriam-Webster announced its latest update, and the new science and technology words added to the venerable dictionary include agritourism, biodiesel, mouse potato, ringtone and spyware.

And google is defined as a transitive verb meaning “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web.” While the entry retains capitalisation in explaining the word’s etymology — “Google, trademark for a search engine” — the verb google is lowercase.

This is an very common example of how language change gets reflected in the popular discourse. I suspect that this may actually be one of the key mechanisms of linguistic change (Labov has written three thick volumes on the whole gamut of them) but more importantly the ability if not necessity to bring these questions into popular and individual consciousnes is probably one of the central aspects of our general linguistic competence (langage).