[A-List] US news media: Rupert Murdoch

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Fresh from brown-nosing the Bush administration via Fox TV's coverage of the
Iraq invasion, the publishing division of Murdoch's empire now joins in --
something unremarked in this article. Richard Littlejohn, a thoroughly nasty
piece of shit, writes for the Sun and has a Sky TV show. Both the Sun and
Sky TV are parts of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

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Collins has an aha moment with weblish

Mark Oliver
Thursday June 26, 2003
The Guardian

George Bush appears to be annexing the English language. The new Collins
English Dictionary includes some of his favourite phrases, including regime
change, road map, rogue state and sleeper terrorist.

President Bush's slippery grip on the language is also celebrated with the
inclusion of "Bushism".

Al-Qaida also features for the first time, but Mr Bush cannot be credited
for that.

There are 5,500 fresh words in the 2003 version, which is the sixth since
the millennium edition, when Viagra was the buzzword. The dictionary
includes Sars, stealth tax and congestion charging and highlights the impact
of Harry Potter with quidditch, the "imaginary game in which players can fly
on broomsticks".

Vying to gain the ubiquity of yuppies are yetties, "young, entrepreneurial,
and technology-based [people]" and those aspiring to be a Nylon - a
"high-earning business executive who enjoys a transatlantic lifestyle",
living in New York and London.

Employees can aspire to be idea hamsters, toiling to give their firms a
priceless aha moment after enjoying their deskfast, or breakfast at work.

Then there is the rise of weblish, presented by Collins as shorthand for the
words text messaging and email are spawning. Weblish abbreviations include
CYA, gr8, luv and want 2tlk.

Far from taking a jaundiced view of text messages, Jeremy Butterfield, the
dictionary's chief editor, declared himself a fan. "The sheer weight and
quality of weblish now entering the language is unmistakable evidence of the
intoxicating vitality of English," he said.

Collins' philosophy is that "a dictionary should not dictate language but
should listen and record language as it is spoken now ... language should be
a living and evolving creature rather than tied down with out-of-date and
inflexible definitions".

But a spokesman for the Campaign for Plain English, questioned whether some
of the new words had been chosen to win appeal, with the publishers trying
to beat rivals: "Our concern was that the threshold seems to be getting
lower and lower every year for how widespread a word's use is, and we wonder
how long some of them will last."

Collins said some words were culled at the time of each edition if they had
proved "too ephemeral".

The Guardian has also had an impact on the lexicon. A new entry, perhaps
popularised by Richard Littlejohn in his column in the Sun, describes a
member of a band of right-thinking people: Guardianista.