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The 2007 edition of the OED has done away with over 16,000 hyphens that once split compound nouns used to refer to a single entity (such as hobby-horse). Thank goodness. We philosophers were way ahead of the curve on this one, insofar as we have been using words hitherto considered multiple for some time. Henceforth, whereof one cannot hypenate, thereof one must concatenate forthwith. (before you linguists start writing me, yes, I know that my examples are not compound nouns)

See the Reuter’s report here:

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

And the OED press release on the new edition is:

OED News

The new word list includes (my favorites): arsewipe (n), boink (n, v and int), Cal-Mex (adj), guggle (n), over-emote (v), lawyer (as a v), touristed (adj) and wankered (adj).

There has been numerous stories on the death of Alex the African grey parrot including this one in the New York Times:

Alex Wanted a Cracker, but Did He Want One?

It is currently listed as the ninth most popular, but it has been as high as 8. The story ends with this paragraph:

In a well-known essay, “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel speculated about the elusiveness of subjectivity. What was it like to be Alex that last night in his cage? We’ll never know whether there really was a mind in there — slogging its way from the absence of a cork-nut to the absence of Alex, grasping at the zeroness of death.

It strikes me as a little bit of coffee-shop banter. But nonetheless, it isn’t every day that a Philosopher of Mind gets referenced in the NY Times.

Language Log, which is an inspiration for this blog, has weighed in on the story as well, although with more interest in the grammatical phrasing of the press release than the linguistic abilities of said parrot:

Survived by his trainer

NPR aired a story tonight fact-checking Pres. Bush’s speech on Iraq. Their first comment accuses Bush of an equivocation:

President Bush: “We must help Iraq defeat those who threaten its future and also threaten ours.”

Analysis: The president doesn’t clearly define who he is talking about. “Those” who threaten Iraq and “those” who threaten the U.S. are not one and the same. Iraq’s government faces sectarian challenges, including Sunni and Shiite death squads, and al-Qaeda in Iraq. America is threatened by al-Qaeda, which carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. But there is no perceived threat in the United States from such Shiite militia groups as the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps or the Sunni militia group, the 1920 Brigades.

I’ve used the Progress For America’s ‘11′ ad from the 2004 election for a couple of years to point out the same equivocation:

<swf file="http://inquiry.mcdaniel.edu/videos/2004BushAd-527PFA-11.swf">

Whenever I show this, someone tries to argue that ‘these people’ really can cover Chechen terrorist groups and al Queda. I like the NPR story, because I’m not making the case that ‘these people’ are two different groups of people, NPR is.

Ever since I wrote that paper for The Grateful Dead and Philosophy, I’ve been keeping an eye out for interesting takes on intellectual property. I found this one one YouTube. It isn’t exactly academic, but it is hilarious: