IU’s Lilly Library has taken possession of book collector Madeline Kripke’s wide-ranging dictionary collection, according to an IU News article. Kripke, also known as the “Dame of Dictionaries,” collected more than 20,000 linguistic books in her lifetime.
Kripke kept the books in her apartment in New York City until her death in April 2020, according to the article. One of her dying wishes was to create a public dictionary library, leading to IU gaining ownership after her passing.
Michael Adams, provost professor and chair of the department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, met Kripke through the Dictionary Society of North America, according to the article. After Kripke’s death, Adams reached out to the Lilly Library Director Joel Silver to begin acquiring her large dictionary collection.
"It was of primary importance to the community of dictionary people that the collection stay together," Adams said in the article. "But we knew Madeline would have wanted the collection to end up at a public university, where all the very rarest materials would be available to everyone."
At this time, only a third of the collection, 6,000 volumes, from the Kripke collection have been inventoried at the Lilly Library.
"We're very pleased to be able to preserve Madeline Kripke's remarkable collection here at the Lilly Library," Silver said in the article. "We'll always be grateful for her unrivaled knowledge and dedication, which enabled her to assemble this matchless resource.”
Climate change has become an increasingly common topic of conversation, and the Oxford Dictionary knows it. In a special update issued in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) set to be held later this month in Glasgow, Scotland, the principal historical dictionary of the English language has added a handful of climate- and sustainability-related terms to its official pages.
There are more than 48 new entries and sub-entries, as well as 28 new tenses and other additions, all related to conversations about the climate. Terms like “CO2” have been added, as well as “climate crisis,” which was added as a sub-entry for climate and defined as “the increasing risk of hazardous, irreversible changes to the climate, resulting from global warming; the environmental crisis arising from this risk.”
The new terms are reflective of the moment. Additions like “climate action” and “climate strike” help to provide language for how activists, environmentalists, and many others have responded to the increasingly dire crisis. Meanwhile, language like “global heating” (“an increase in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere, waters, and land surface; the long-term gradual temperature increase occurring in the wake of the Industrial Revolution”) and “extreme weather” (“weather that is very harsh, unseasonal, or atypical for a particular region, (now) especially when attributed to the effects of climate change”) give us the ability to clearly name what is happening to the planet. The fact that the definitions do not shy away from connecting the dots to climate change adds a sense of certainty: This is happening, and it is because of climate change.
Oxford also took on new terms that speak to the aspirations that we should collectively have if we want to keep the planet in a livable state. The pages of the dictionary will now include “decarbonization,” defined as “the action or process of reducing or eliminating the fossil fuel use of an economy, business sector, etc., so as to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.” Likewise, the long-term goal of net-zero emissions now exists in the dictionary as a sub-entry of “net.” The accompanying definition states net zero is “an overall balance between the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced and the amount removed from the atmosphere.”
Of course, while Oxford’s new entries recognize the reality of climate change, they also recognize the skeptics. “Climate denial” has made it into the dictionary, too, defined as “rejection of the idea (or the evidence) that climate change caused by human activity is occurring, or that it represents a significant threat to human and environmental welfare.”
The full list of Oxford’s new additions, along with the accompanying definitions, can be found here. Now we just have to hope that terms like “climate disaster” and “mass extinction” don’t end up with new entries in the near future.
Last week, the CFPB released a Spanish translation of the model-English language validation notice set forth in Appendix B of Regulation F.
The final debt collection rule allows a debt collector to send a validation that is completely and accurately translated into any language if the debt collector either (1) sends an English-language version in the same communication, or (2) previously provided the consumer with an English-language version in a prior communication.
The CFPB advises that the translated notice is a “complete and accurate” Spanish translation of the model English-language validation notice and that a debt collector that uses the translated notice and also satisfies the requirement to provide an English-language version will have a safe harbor for the rule’s requirement that any translation be complete and accurate.
The Campus is excited to launch a new translation initiative with the aim of making its articles and content
accessible to a broader community of readers whose preferred language is not English. Tapping into Middlebury’s robust language programs, the initiative involves translating important articles and op-eds into other languages on a weekly basis.
The Campus is looking to hire a Senior Translation Editor who will work closely with the leadership team to develop a translation framework, weekly workflows and translation team.
Initially, the Senior Translation Editor will be responsible for the following tasks:
Recruiting a team of translators in a variety of different languages, who will be responsible for translating at least one Middlebury Campus article per week
Liaising with Middlebury language departments, study abroad coordinators and first-year students to market the position and gauge interest
Researching what processes and frameworks to implement to ensure that articles are translated in an accurate, grammatically correct and ethical way
Coordinating with the Middlebury Campus leadership to create a plan for the translations team in future semesters
The newly hired Translation Editor(s) should have fluency in at least one foreign language. Experience overseeing teams or projects is preferred but not required. Interested candidates should submit a brief statement (200-300 words) to Editor in Chief Bochu Ding (bding@middlebury.edu) detailing the candidate’s interest in this position, relevant experience and how they would approach this project.
The Google Pixel 6 has plenty of promising features, but one stuck with me more than others – mostly because it would have come in clutch when a massive thunderstorm grounded flights and stranded me in an airport with a perfect stranger.
I had been traveling through the South visiting family, and flew into Charlotte in the middle of North Carolina, hoping to board a plane to Raleigh, but the storm kept every plane out of the sky. I quickly coordinated with my family for alternative transport – a taxi to the train station – and was about to leave when someone handed me a phone.
The phone's owner didn’t speak English, but his contact did, and begged me to help the man get to the same city I was going; could he tag along on my planes, trains, and automobiles journey? Divided by a language barrier, we labored back-and-forth with the person on the other end of the call acting as intermediary. I managed to direct my fellow traveler through a US airport and got us safely on a train to our mutual destination, but it was a journey of faith and trust in strangers.
It would have been a lot easier if my phone could bridge that language gap for us.
(Image credit: Google)
When Google introduced the Pixel 6, it showed off plenty of new software features made possible by the phone’s new secret weapon, the Tensor chipset. One of these was an enhanced version of Live Translation that lets folks use the phone as an intermediary that, well, translates spoken phrases into another language.
Imagine how groundbreaking a Pixel 6 could’ve been in that situation! I could simply have held the phone between myself and the non-English-speaking stranger to hold a delayed but still direct conversation.
If you’ve ever had the uncommon experience of using someone on a speakerphone as an intermediary, you know how frustrating it is to lose crucial details over scratchy call quality, let alone the awkwardness of hovering over a phone hoping what you say is being conveyed to the other person.
Using a feature like the responsive Live Translation on the Pixel 6 in the moment seems like it would feel not just superior but a relief to both parties – it’s so much more dignified to look someone in the eye as you speak rather than belatedly wait for a third party or translation software to bridge the language gap over a speakerphone (subject to the usual pitfalls of calls, like audio dropout and lack of clarity).
Which isn’t to say that the Pixel 6 or Pixel 6 Pro will single-handedly break down language barriers; there are surely kinks to work out in its Tensor-enhanced version of Live Translation, and it’s limited by Google’s lineup of languages and dialects integrated into the service.
But it’s a promising feature that could be a relieving safety net for travelers and others who regularly engage with folks who don’t speak their language. If it could’ve helped me connect with a stranger suddenly cast adrift in a foreign place who didn’t speak the local tongue, it would’ve been a port in an airplane-grounding storm. That’s what cutting-edge chipsets and tech should help with.
It is that tie of the year when new words are being added to dictionaries. A report in The Independent states that the present situation and the perils embedded in it have percolated in the words chosen. The Oxford English Dictionary has added words like “climate catastrophe”, “net zero” and “eco-anxiety”, the report states. It further says that “global heating” has also been added.
Apart from this words like “climate crisis”, “climate strike” and “climate justice” have been added. This update, the report goes on to inform, has been “dedicated to exploring the new language around climate change, has been launched ahead of Cop26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will see world leaders meet in Glasgow next month”.
“As world leaders come together to seek solutions to the climate change problem, it has been fascinating, if at times somewhat alarming, to delve deeper into the language we use, both now and in the past, to talk about climate and sustainability,” Trish Stewart, science editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, was quoted as saying in a statement.
“The very real sense of urgency that is now upon us is reflected in our language. What happens next depends on so many factors but, one thing we can be sure of is that our language will continue to evolve and to tell the story.”
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As formerly green forests turn into charred remains and glaciers melt away to reveal bare mountainsides, the effects of climate change on the landscape are hard to miss. But there are less obvious results, too, as our conversations adapt to a rapidly changing climate, ushering in new words.
In a special update this month, the Oxford English Dictionary reviewed the scope of this "rapidly changing area of vocabulary" encompassing words and phrases like eco-anxiety, net-zero, and climate strikes. The dictionary's editors updated old entries and added new ones ahead of the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland next week, where world leaders will meet to hash out their climate pledges. Among the new entrants: global heating, food insecurity, and climate crisis.
The update reflects the urgency and the often complicated emotions that people feel when confronted by rising seas, worsening floods, and hotter temperatures. The editors picked eco-anxiety — "apprehension about current and future harm to the environment" — to make its dictionary debut, a signal of climate change's psychological toll. According to Google Trends, search interest for climate anxiety has gone up 565 percent over the past year.
Even the name for climate change itself has undergone some adjustment as people have begun to use more intense language to describe what they see happening. The phrase climate crisis, which appeared in the dictionary for the first time this month, became 20 times more popular from 2018 to 2020, and climate emergency increased 76 times, the OED found. The phrase greenhouse effect, popular back in the '90s, has dropped by the wayside; the once-common global warming has also gradually fallen out of favor.
Language nerds love the Oxford English Dictionary because it attempts to trace words back to their origins and documents how their meanings have changed over time. Today, the phrase climate refugee refers to someone who has been forced to relocate in response to rising seas, wildfires, drought, or other environmental disasters. But the OED places climate refugee's entrance into the lexicon back in 1889, when the phrase was a disparaging name for someone who moved somewhere for a more mild or pleasant climate. ("He is a climate refugee from the frigid east, and is looking for a home under genial skies of Southern California," read an Indiana newspaper article in 1911.)
While the dictionary update includes some downers — including mass extinction — it also reflects a growth spurt in solutions. Words related to electric vehicles are gaining ground as drivers talk about smart charging their vehicles to optimize their battery life and report range anxiety that the battery will run out before they finish their journey.
The phrases renewable energy and fossil fuels are both increasing in use, according to the OED. However, the words used alongside fossil fuels are becoming more negative in tone (divestment, phasing out, and transition), reflecting the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
In what might cause a chemistry class flashback for some, the OED decided that CO2 — aka carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas heating up the planet — merited its own entry, since people have started to throw it around in the same casual way they talk about H2O.
