Alleen Pace Nilsen

The Mouse that Roared: Teaching Vocabulary with Source-Based Lessons.

berleys novel and the 1959 film starring Peter Sellers. The tiny, bankrupt duchy of Grand Fenwick declares war on the United States in hopes of being defeated so that it will be eligible for foreign aid. The concept may have been funnier in 1959 than it is today, but the point is that the contradictory idea of a roaring mouse was dramatic enough to catch the publics fancy. We were reminded of the image when Arnold Schwarzenneger turned real muscle into political muscle by getting elected governor of California. The word muscle is thought to have developed as a metaphor from the Latin musculus, the diminutive form of mus or mouse. Long ago, some creative speaker observed that a muscle resembles a mouse moving under a persons skin. Moles on peoples skin were named in a similar fashion, but thats another story. Once the word muscle was firmly established, speakers developed such related terms as muscular, muscle-bound, muscular dystrophy, muscle shirt, and musculoskeletal. A little further removed is the term muscle car. When someone is muscled out of line, real muscles might be involved, but if a person is muscled out of a job or out of office, we assume the phrase is metaphorical rather than literal.

Why Big Businesses Break Spelling Rules.

cessful brand names of the 20th century is Jell-o, which Mary Wait, the wife of the manufacturer, coined in 1897. Ungenerous historians have conjectured that she might have thought gelatin was spelled with aj, but its more likely that she was simply ahead of her time in creating a distinctive neologism, which today is an increasingly popular method of naming products and companies. Todays companies are forced to create new words to use as product names because the United States Trademark Office has approximately 750,000 live registrations with another 150,000 under review. Because this is more entries than are in some dictionaries, chances are high that whatever name a company tries to register will already have been registered by someone else. Also, consultants advise against making a name from a commonplace description of a product or service as in Affordable Cleaners, Secretary Services, One-Hour Photo, Best Printing, ReRoofing Specialists, and Computer Mart. Even though these names might be accepted for trademark registration, a second company could begin using the same or a very similar name without registering it. If the first company sued the second company for trademark infringement, it would probably lose the case based on the reasoning that the chosen name honestly described the second companys product or service. Trademark laws are designed to protect unique names, not to prevent people from using ordinary words. This is why we see such product names as those on the left instead of the correctly spelled words on the right:

Teaching a computer to speculate

Advanced natural language processing techniques may well lead to a major breakthrough in computer applications. Those working in artificial intelligence are seeking ways in which the computer can be made to emulate the ability of the human mind to handle language. This article illustrates the challenges of restructuring human semantic knowledge into computer-usable forms. We discuss hierarchies, Venn diagrams, chainings, cycles, matrices, maps, networks, webs, hubs, and scripts, all of which can be used in our attempts to teach the computer to handle meaning and thereby speculate.