By Ben Yagoda. I’ve proven I’m not too good at touting the Word of the Year. A couple of years ago, I was all on about curate, and it didn’t even get a mention in the end-of-year tally. Nevertheless, I am giving it another try. The word I have in mind is smart. Mind you, I don’t mean smart in the sense of smart phone or smart card or smart bomb: the “smart” in those formulations seems to signify merely that the device or object purports to mimic the reactions of a human with rather limited intelligence. Read more...

By Allan Metcalf. Last week at the University of Georgia, down in Athens, some 60 odd people came together for a meeting. They shared a Rare, but not Obsolete, interest: dictionaries.
“We are strange people,” said Ilan Kernerman, head of K Dictionaries, in Israel. “Most people do not like dictionaries.” Indeed, he wondered whether there will be dictionaries at all in the future. The answer seemed to be, Yes there will, but the dictionary of the future will require a new definition. It won’t be a book. It was the 19th biennial conference of the Dictionary Society of North America. The society includes those who make dictionaries and those at colleges and universities who study them, not only from America but from Asia and Europe as well. There were talks on everything from jazz in the Oxford English Dictionary to lexicography in China during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), from the Big Apple of New York City to the 19th-century Hobson-Jobson dictionary of English in India. But among more than 30 such talks, there was a common thread: Dictionaries aren’t what they used to be. And they aren’t yet what they are going to be. Read more...

By Eric Hoover. Prospective students have a zillion questions for colleges, and they expect Google-fast answers. Yet no admissions office has enough of a staff to handle each and every query. That’s why Tessa McSwain sees promise in live chats. At the Rocky Mountain Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual conference here on Thursday, Ms. McSwain, assistant director of admissions at the University of Colorado at Boulder, described her office’s recent experiments with two forms of online communication. Read more...