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According to this article by Jonathan Duffy at BBC News Online, Google is taking vigorous legal action to keep people from listing “google” as a lower-case vocabulary item; their fear is, of course, that their trademark will go the way of escalator, pogo, gunk, heroin, and tabloid.

Paul McFedries, who runs the lexicography site Word Spy, received a stiffly worded letter from the firm after he added “google” to his online lexicon.
The company asked him to delete the definition or revise it to take account of the “trade mark status of Google”. He opted for the latter.
Google’s problem is one of the paradoxes of having a runaway successful brand. The bigger it gets, the more it becomes part of everyday English language and less a brand in its own right.
Just as we talk about “hoovering” instead of vacuuming, people have started to say “google” to mean search. The word has become an eponym.

At the end of the article comes this interesting twist:

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Anyone interested in Russian poetry will want to bookmark the site From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Poetry.

The aim of this innovative project is to provide an intelligently chosen, well-translated, and comprehensive anthology of Russian poetry from its beginnings in the 18th century to the contemporary scene. The anthology breaks new ground the in study and appreciation of Russian poetry by including multimedia elements that would have been impossible in any other format:
• Facing texts of Russian originals and English translations of 200 poems that broadly represent more than 225 years of Russian poetry.
• 38 detailed resource pages on the various poets containing extensive biographical information, bibliographies, and links. For many of these poets, russianpoetry.net is the only English-language source of information on the Internet.
• 75+ previously unavailable archival recordings of poetry performed by Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Esenin, Bunin, and others. When recordings by the poets themselves are not available, the site contains performances by leading Russian actors or musical renditions of the works.
• 400+ illustrations of authors, monuments, and manuscript versions of many poems.
• A search engine that enables free-text and Boolean searches of the collection.

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An older edition of the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English is available online; as the introduction says:

The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English gives essential grammatical and lexical recurrent word combinations, often called collocations; when necessary, it provides definitions, paraphrases, and Usage Notes….

Much of the material provided in this Dictionary has never before been published. This material is of vital importance to those learners of English who are native speakers of other languages. Heretofore, they have had no source that would consistently indicate, for example, which verbs are used with which nouns; they could not find in any existing dictionary such collocations as call an alert, lay down a barrage, hatch a conspiracy, impose an embargo, roll a hoop, draw up a list, administer an oath, enter (make) a plea, crack a smile, punch a time clock, inflict a wound, etc. This Dictionary provides such collocations; in order to enable the user of the Dictionary to find them quickly and easily, they are given in the entries for the nouns.

(Via Avva.)

Via the always interesting Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufry, an entry about the dialect of Liguria, “that tight, cramped little province — whence my father’s family came — jammed up between the sea and the mountains, stretched out between France and Pisa.” The dialect is called zeneize (=”genovese“); apparently the term ligure ‘Ligurian’ is used largely in connection with antiquity, and there is not even a corresponding word in the dialect. At any rate, he links to two websites exclusively written in the dialect and has an Addendum about the name Baciccia, which is extremely common in the region and has turned up in American Spanish thanks to the many Genoese immigrants (in Argentina bachicha is both an insulting term for Italians and a slang word meaning ‘simpleton’). A tip of the hat to Jim, who makes Uncle Jazzbeau dance.

Incidentally, his previous entry consists of a nice Montale quote about seeing the coastal part of the region, the Cinque Terre, from windows in a train tunnel.

The June 9 entry at Panchayat, The Imam and I: An Argument in the Qasbah, presents as sharp a picture of the divide in today’s world and the way it affects the way people talk with each other as I’ve read in a long time. The entry’s author, Conrad Barwa, quotes a difficult conversation Amitav Ghosh [archived 2003] had with an angry imam; I urge you to read the whole thing, but here’s the conclusion:

I was crushed as I walked away; it seemed to me that the Imam and I had participated in our own final defeat, in the dissolution of centuries of dialogue that had linked us; we had demonstrated the irreversible triumph of the language that has usurped all the others in which people once discussed their differences. We had acknowledged that it was no longer possible to speak as any one of the thousands of travellers who had crossed the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages might have done; of things that were good, or right or willed by God; it would have been merely absurd for either of us to use those words, for they belonged to a dismantled rung on the ascending ladder of Development. To make ourselves understood, we had both resorted, I, a student of the social and ‘humane’ sciences, and he an old fashioned village Imam, to the very terms that world leaders and statesmen use at great global conferences, the universal, irresistible metaphysic of modern meaning; he said to me in effect: ‘You ought not to do what you do, because otherwise you will not have guns and tanks and bombs.’ It was the only language we had been able to discover in common. I felt myself a conspirator in the betrayal of the history that had led me to Egypt, a witness to the extermination of a world of accommodations that I had believed to be still alive and in some measure still retrievable.

(Link via Path of the Paddle.)

Update: It turns out the conversation is an excerpt from Ghosh’s book In an Antique Land, which I’ve been meaning to read for years but haven’t gotten to yet; thanks to Conrad Barwa and Ikram Saeed for their e-mails, and I have edited my intro above accordingly.

This excellent site presents the Great Isaiah Scroll of the Qumran community, showing a photographic plate of each column of the scroll with a line-by-line translation and a detailed analysis of physical characteristics and textual variants.

My comments on each page about the scroll are meant to help you to get to know about the scroll and the technical differences between it and the received text. It is not meant to be a commentary on the book of Isaiah. If you can read Hebrew it will enhance your study of the scroll greatly, but it is not necessary to read Hebrew to gain some insight into what the Scroll is like and to understand its importance…. The critical comments are meant for beginning and intermediate students. Advanced students will also find things of interest on these pages, but this is not to be considered a “scholar’s” work.

A good place to start is the introductory page, which describes the physical condition of the scroll and the editorial markings and (for those who know some Hebrew) the peculiarities of the language.

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From Enslin‘s 1978 book-length poem Ranger (Volume I), the start of section XIII:

How difficult it is!
How strange to break in
on the self    on those sections
of self that lie buried
but so vulnerable
that a footstep above them,
on loose-packed detritus,
hurts to the quick,
and makes life of
pain—that it lives—
at all lives.
So I have heard of one more—
perhaps the first woman
I knew as a woman—
gone away, and now dead.
We speak briefly
of the dead,
as if we no longer wanted
to think of them,
but their presence is
none the less—
living in some other place.
We stay with them.

Some short Enslin poems here.

Addendum. wood s lot has posted much more Enslin, all excellent. Go and enjoy.

A trilingual journal called Trans went in search of some triple romance… No, no, no, this isn’t Limerickhat. Let’s start over. Trans is an “Internet journal for cultural sciences” that’s published simultaneously in German, English, and French. A lot of the material is outside my sphere of interest, but there are enough special issues like “Nation, Language and Literature” and “Multilingualism, Transnationality, Cultural Sciences” that I’m going to bookmark it. (Courtesy of wood s lot.)

Via this MetaFilter thread, the latest quarterly update of the Oxford English Dictionary is now available. First comes the range of entries must-necessity; if you scroll down below that list, you get the new subordinate entries, the out-of-sequence new entries “from across the alphabet” (includes 0800 number, Amandebele, bazillion, bitch-slap, Brigadoon, and everybody’s favorite buggeration, just to sample the first two letters; it ends wonga, yapunyah, Zorb, zorbing), out-of-sequence subordinate entries, and finally new meanings for old words. I’d just like to express my abject worship of the OED, in case I haven’t yet. It goes from strength to strength. (Of course, in the beginning Oxford was reluctant to spend a shilling on it, but we’ll let bygones be bygones until the next time they do something to seriously annoy me.)

This book looks like it would be of interest to a lot of Languagehat readers (including me):

Though it is difficult enough to write well in one’s native tongue, an extraordinary group of authors has written enduring poetry and prose in a second, third, or even fourth language. Switching Languages is the first anthology in which translingual authors from throughout the world examine their experiences writing in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one. Driven by factors as varied as migration, imperialism, a quest for verisimilitude, and a desire to assert artistic autonomy, translingualism has a long and brilliant history.
In Switching Languages, Steven G. Kellman brings together several notable authors from the past one hundred years who discuss their personal translingual experiences and their take on a general phenomenon that has not received the attention it deserves. Contributors to the book include Chinua Achebe, Julia Alvarez, Mary Antin, Elias Canetti, Rosario Ferré, Ha Jin, Salman Rushdie, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Ilan Stavans. They offer vivid testimony to the challenges and achievements of literary translingualism.

If anybody has seen the actual book, please give an appraisal!