The perfect David Bowie song has been created, and it wasn’t even done by David Bowie himself. Dr. (of psychology) Nick Troop at the university of Hertfordshire has employed Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count on Bowie’s body of work to wind up with his song “Team, meet Girls; Girls, meet Team” which, according to him, is the ideal configuration of Bowie’s secret blend of ingredients. We don’t have to take his word for it though. He has actually recorded himself playing guitar and singing this track on video and put it up online for us to examine. It’s now only a mater of time before Bowie is fully replaced by a robot.

[News:lite]

English teacher Mrs. Buttermer has taken out her red pen and given it quite the workout, proof reading and marking up an article by Ryan Ash about the worst video game consoles of all time. The hyperbole she highlights penetrates both journalism around videogames and marketing of games and their hardware. The industry needs to start treating us like adults.

Erin McKean, over from Verbatim, had recently given a Google Tech Talk^TM about hacking the english language in order to invent a new word. Funnily enough, a video of her Google Tech Talk^TM is available for viewing up at Google Video. Sadly nobody asks her about ginormous or crunk.

When it is in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate^® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition: The supermarket tabloid of dictionaries. Thats right, Merriam-Webster has announced this year’s additions to their catalog of linguistic monstrosities.  ‘Ginormous‘ is among them which earns particular disdain from Ohmpage. They don’t list all the additions though as they prefer to just give you a sampler. Presumably this will encourage you to buy a new edition every year. One of the other confirmed additions that we feel compelled to warn you about, believe it or not, ‘crunk‘. If the English language were already dead, this is the equivalent of hiring an necromancer to raise it’s zombie incarnation then killing it all over again with shotgun and chainsaw simultaneously.

China is really big. There are a lot of people in china all sharing the same cultual context. One of the problems that emerges as a result is the fact that over a billion people there are sharing about one hundred surnames. That is starting to cause some difficulty in differentiating people. We can’t all have the same name after all. It would be rather inconvenient. They seem to have come up with one possible solution though – allowing parents to combine their surnames to give their children a compound surname. That seems like a decent solution in theory but only if you lose the misogyny.