The Internet Is A Giant Experimental Language Lab
James Gleick in the NY Times on the Oxford English Dictionary's quiet revolution to keep up with the incredible speed of change in the English language.
"The scouring of the Internet for evidence — the use of cyberspace as a language lab — is being systematized in a program called the Oxford English Corpus. This is a giant body of text that begins in 2000 and now contains more than 1.5 billion words, from published material but also from Web sites, Weblogs, chat rooms, fanzines, corporate home pages and radio transcripts. The corpus sends its home-built Web crawler out in search of text, raw material to show how the language is really used." (via Kottke).
I reviewed Gleick's Faster a long time ago. "That Gleick avoids hectoring the reader to slow down makes the book’s impact all the more pointed, especially when he indicates how timesaving techniques can become counter-productive. It makes our continual rushing around seem faintly ludicrous - or as one time-use report put it, "Sometimes American culture resembles one big stomped anthill"."
