Save the Words - Adopt!

There are needy words out there. Ones looking to be adopted lest they become extinct and end up in one of those esoteric dictionaries sold for half-price at used book stores.  You'll see what I mean when you visit Oxford Dictionary's website Save the Words.org. Words like

riviation

primifluous

latibule

Words such as these are literally screaming to be picked up and used in everyday conversation, business meetings, emails and even text messages. Try the site and you'll see what I mean (and that I used literally correctly in the previous sentence).

In my classroom, I often have a word wall composed of words from a source such as American Heritage Dictionary Editors' 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. This is an informal addition to the words my students are required to learn from the textbooks my school uses. For correctly using the words from the wall in assignments and discussion, students earn extra credit or a small treat from "the treasure box" (a topic I should post on in the future).

I think this could be a fun site for students to visit when we are in the writing center lab or have a few extra minutes in class.  Maybe we could adopt an obsolete word each week to augment our word studies.  Even if students don't have 1:1 computer-to-student ratios, this could be an engaging activity on one class computer, especially if you have an XGA projector. Each we a student could select a word for the class, we could note etymology (unfortunately not provided by Oxford, but I recommend the Online Etymology Dictionary.), and pay attention to roots, suffixes, and prefixes.

Once you and your students go to the site and the words start calling out to you, it will be much like going to the animal shelter.  You'll want to adopt and take that cute little one in the window one home.

If you find a fun and effective way to incorporate SavetheWords into your classes, please share in the comments below.

Simple Text Reader

If you're not a native speaker and would like a general audio clue as to how a word might be pronounced in English you can easily make an application for your PC to read text to you.

1. Open Notepad
2. Copy this code:

Dim msg, sapi
msg=InputBox("Enter your text","Message Box")
Set sapi=CreateObject("sapi.spvoice")
sapi.Speak msg

3. Paste it in Notepad.
4. Save the file with any name and the extentions ".vbs"
5. Thus, if you name it "Textspeak,"  then the filename would be "Textspeak.vbs"

Now, open the file. A dialogue box appears for you to type any text into it.
Click OK and you'll hear the text spoken in English.

Unfortunately, it will only take one short paragraph at a time. You may copy-n-paste a sentence or so to see how it basically would be pronounced in English.

Re-Captcha-ring Old Texts One Word at a Time

Frustrated by typing captchas--those distorted, blotched, wiggly, struck-through words to prove you are a human user of a website?  They do help keep sites from spammers and their automated emails.

And I've noticed I'm recognizing real words more than I used to.  Perhaps this has something to do with a hidden task at our fingertips that we are performing without knowing it.  The new captchas--called re-captchas--are actually words from archival texts that computers have difficulty transcribing digitally.

At a rate of 20 million-a-day, according to ScienCentral News, Internet users are solving the mysteries by picking out the letters from noisy speckles, blotches, and lines.  Captcha inventor, Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, here in Pittsburgh, notes in this video how much time per day is used by humanity while sorting out these digital keys, part of the motivation for turning this task into something doubly useful.




So where the ink is bleeding through, where the bookworm has had its lunch, where mold had left its mark, or air had darkened the page, re-captcha is sorting the wheat from the chaff with my help. It's nice to know that next time I work out a captcha riddle I may be doing my part to save an ancient text.

Most People Exist, Some Virsist

Oscar Wilde once said, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” We'll now you can have a Second Life. But I'm not sure that's living.

Recently I've seen a promo on television for a program that examines "the effects on people who persist in virtual reality." I've seen the promo twice and can't recall whether it's a news report or special documentary. I get hung up on the phrase "persist in virtual reality." Does VR take persistance?

Well, maybe. Although I can spend clock-spinning time warps flying about in Second Life, I've yet to lose track of major slices of my first life (and I've heard some people have.) Maybe my RAM isn't hyper enough, but my avatar eventually starts freezing up and the program crashes. So persistence is part of it.

Besides being in Second Life is a sort of Oz. "People come and go so quickly here." I wouldn't call it a place to persist.

I just think "persista" is not "exist," and neither is what you do in VR. How about virsist! Persist, exist, virsist--Wilde had it right. Save some time for living.

Image: Avatar in Second Life.