A friend sent me this amusing cartoon from The Oatmeal, so I thought I’d share.

*Oops, the image doesn’t seem display fully, so go check it out over on The Oatmeal’s website.

When I attended school in London as a child, we learned about the history of the city partly through place and street names – Pudding Lane for example, was where the Great Fire of London started, and Rotten Row is a corruption of ‘route du roi’ (road of king). (If you’re interested in this subject, check out this website).

The Atlas of True Names is a set of world maps where the traditional names of cities, countries and geographical features have been replaced with words showing their origins and literal meanings. The results are surprising and intriguing, with London renamed the somewhat less substantial “Unfordable River Town” and Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, becoming “Sibling Love”.

As some language commentators have pointed out though, it’s best not to take the map too seriously – some of the etymology may be disputed or incorrect. As a way to look at the world in a different light and discover the fun of words though, it’s a great resource. And as the cartographers say:

“We wanted to let the Earth tells its own story,” Stephan Hormes, who produced the maps together with his wife Silke Peust, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “The names give you an insight into what the people saw when they first looked at a place, almost with the eyes of children. Through the maps, we wanted to show what they saw.” (Source: Der Spiegel)

Take a look at a slideshow of the maps here.

These words crop up so often in the English language that their ‘new’ meanings are becoming more and more accepted. Here are some examples from the article:

Disinterested is occasionally used as if it means uninterested — indifferent or bored. For example, a Times article in February 2008 described Senator Joseph Lieberman as “so disinterested in the Democratic presidential candidates” that he didn’t vote in the primary. Nine out of 10 American Heritage Dictionary authorities would reject that usage. The favored definition is unbiased or impartial, as in Adam Liptak’s article in The Times in March 2008 about foreign judges: “Punishments, they say, should be meted out only by the criminal justice system . . . and disinterested prosecutors.”

Enervated. Appearances can be deceiving, as when an NPR commentator described the men fighting a fire in Nevada as tired but enervated by their progress. The word, a phantonym of energized, in fact means weakened.

Fortuitous looks like lucky, as it did to an official at N.Y.U. when Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accepted an appointment as a professor: “It was so fortuitous,” she said. But the word means “happening by chance,” says The Times’s Manual of Style and Usage. “It does not mean fortunate.”

Can you think of any other phantonyms?

The site’s been running since at least the mid-90’s, as far as I can tell, and provides an interesting historical glance of buzzwords through the times. If you click on the link ‘Top 100 posts’ for example, it gives you a rundown of the top hundred most-visited words from the past seven days. When I checked, such diverse notions as “Wikipedia kid” (added June 30 2009), “tankini” (March 23 2000) and “nanny-cam” (March 5 1996) appeared on the list.

Clicking on the word will give you a definition, example citation and earliest citation, as well as a list of related words and categories. Whilst I would say that a lot of the words on the site appear to be more trendy than useful and will most likely disappear from usage as quickly as they have appeared, it’s definitely amusing to see what writers will come up with.

Perhaps one of my favourite words from the site is from its founder, whose bio on his Twitter page states: “Word Spy is devoted to “lexpionage,” the sleuthing of new words and phrases”. “Lexpionage”. Brilliant.

Oxford University Press has announced that the world’s largest thesaurus is due to be published in the autumn. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, to give it the full name, contains 800,000 meanings in over 230,000 categories, with the project taking over forty years to complete. Started in 1965, the Press originally used classifications from Roget’s, but the authors had to start a new system when it became obvious this was not detailed enough.

The thesaurus has an interesting history, having survived fire and funding problems, along with the above mentioned new classification system. Not to mention all the new words that have been added to the English language since 1965… One of the co-authors, Professor Christian Kay, has been with the project almost since the beginning – starting work when she was 27, she is now 69 and has survived several of the project’s founders.

Apparently the aim is to link the thesaurus to the online Oxford English Dictionary, but no date has yet been set for this – let’s hope it doesn’t take another 40 years! In the meantime, if you’d like to buy your own copy of the thesaurus, it’s a snip at just £250.

See the full article from the BBC here.

However, I’ve been reading an article that mentioned the Oxford Corpus, a language project at Oxford University in England that provides the basis for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), one of the most influential and authoritative texts on the English language. But what is the Corpus?

A corpus is a collection of texts of written (or spoken) language presented in electronic form. It provides the evidence of how language is used in real situations, from which lexicographers can write accurate and meaningful dictionary entries. The Oxford English Corpus is at the heart of dictionary-making in Oxford in the 21st century and ensures that we can track and record the very latest developments in language today. By analysing the corpus and using special software, we can see words in context and find out how new words and senses are emerging, as well as spotting other trends in usage, spelling, world English, and so on.

The corpus currently contains over 2 billion words (as of Spring 2006), and draws them from all over the English speaking world, not just the UK. Two billion seems like a huge amount, but they note that the count is not 2 billion different words – the word ‘the’ on its own makes up about 100 million entries.

From these two billion words the OED is compiled, with the last comprehensive dictionary published in 1989. This second edition ran to twenty volumes with supplements printed in the 1990’s. Since 1990, the dictionary researchers have been working on reviewing the whole dictionary rather than just adding to it – no word yet on when the final version will be published.

Feeling a little overwhelmed by all those words? Well, the OED compact contains a mere 145,000 words, phrases and definitions.

(Source: www.oed.com)