Subscribing to the OED online costs £195/year. Does anybody actually pay that? Wouldn’t they make far more cash if they took it down to £20 or so, the price that people like me (language-obsessed, not millionaires) would pay?

The first volume of the OED was published in 1888. Surely that means it’s out of copyright by now? And if so, why hasn’t Project Gutenberg got at it?

What do those of you outside of universities use instead of the OED?

Edit

scans are online at the Internet Archive. How fantastic is that? Now, if I can just find a way of shunting them into a usable format…

*plots*

Nobody except me will like this rant by Nataša Velikonja, but I’m going to post it anyway:

Europe is boring. Boring for its self-sufficiency, among its own boundaries; Europe is a jail of virtual affluence and credit standard in which migrants without asylum, lesbians without lovers, intellectuals without mass media, and the homeless without comrades are wandering around. Europe is boring for its “white” conviction that it is better than the others, as it is supposedly the cradle of education, culture and literature. It is boring in its perpetual ecstasy with its fat kisses and broken glass on our lips. It is boring with its perpetual integration, which is being swallowed as a sacrificed young body, while images of hatred, slaughter and genocide are whirling in its eyes. Europe is boring because of its ritualized oblivion and ritualized machines of desire that never stop their craving.

Incidentally, why are there so many excellent Slovenian writers/activists/theorists these days? Is it just that when your main export is Slavoj Zizek, you at least have somebody interesting to kick against? Or that small nations have to synthesize foreign culture, not having enough local production to be tediously inward-looking? Or just the result of decades buffeted by Tito, Austrian Social Democracy, and Italian radical theorists?

Fantastic review of a Sanskrit play:

They were also believed to break the five basic prohibitions of renunciates: liquor, meat, fish, parched grain, and getting it on. Often.

So the stereotype was of creepy horny drunk carnivorous beggars covered in human ash, accompanied by hott chick acolytes, carrying around someone’s skull, asking you for money.

I think they used to squat in Tompkins Square Park.

[via the sainted Cosma Shalizi]

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…is how much translation proper nouns take. What possible reason is there to call a language ‘German’ in English, ‘Allemand’ in French, and ‘Nemetskii’ in Russian, none of them with the faintest similarity to ‘Deutsch’ (*)? And just about every name or place gets mangled by one language or another. Not to mention all the faff over everybody transliterating Cyrillic in their own special way.

At RIA Novosti there used to be a little old man whose sole function was to figure out how to transliterate names of people and places for the various foreign-language newswires. When I was there I chalked it up to the inefficiency of a former Soviet propaganda agency. But maybe they really did need Igor and his library of atlases and Who’s Who’s. Grr!

(*) I assume there is some deeply fascinating and compelling historical excuse.

I don’t care

. It’s silly.

Also: I have the strong sensation that this is a rant I’ll regret later, although I can’t for the life of me imagine why. May as well post it and find out, in any case…

One of the things I’ve been working on the past few months has just launched.

I have no idea what to say about it: my instinct is to be snarky, but actually I think the site is reasonably good. And I can’t really be proud of it, since I had no hand in the design or planning. I’ve basically just been the outsourced dogsbody, churning out a lot of the really routine, repetitive code. Still: it’s there, it works (so far), and it manages to fulfil an impressive number of Web 2.0 cliches.

Whenever you folks in the UK post about the weather, we seem to be having something similar in Berlin. I don’t understand it; I thought I was distant enough to get different weather.

Yes, it’s snowing here too.

[Mother Jones’ account](http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/viktor-bout.html) of the Victor Bout arrest is good, but it’s more fun reaing the [DEA’s charges](http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2008/March/bout-complaint.pdf) against him. Not for the facts – Mother Jones summarises most of the interesting bits – but for the sheer semiotics of the thing.

Just look at the document: Monospaced Courier 12 in numbered paragraphs. Badly reproduced text, lines sloping up the page. Government stamps and signatures. It fits so perfectly into nostalgic stereotypes: typewriter keys clattering in a nondescript government building, as a sweating government agent writes up his report.

And the text plays up to every cliche. The boilerplate allegation that Bout “

affected interstate and foreign commerce

“. The long, oft-repeated list of aliases (

VIKTOR BOUT, a/k/a “Boris,” a/k/a “Victor Anatoliyevich Bout,” a/k/a “Victor But,” a/k/a “Viktor Budd,” a/k/a “Viktor Butt,” a/k/a “Viktor Bulakin,” a/k/a “Vadim Markovich Aminov”

). The whole document is begging to be stuffed into a brown paper envelope and sent to Bob Woodward or Fox Mulder.

Since I don’t spend much time reading US legal documents (maybe I should?), I have no idea how standard all of this is. Apparently a lot of US court documents really do still have to be produced in this format. Intentional or not, though, the layout makes it all seem like part of a great cloak-and-dagger Cold War adventure. I’d like to believe that somebody in the US goverment has figured this out, reasoned that it gives people the impression they have mountains of secret information, and decided to stick to Courier.

Oh, and the content? Still reasonably entertaining. Bout’s henchman Andrew Smulian comes off as a complete muppet, calling Bout on a phone the DEA had given him. It looks like the main problem with arranging the sting was that they couldn’t do it in Moscow, but had to entice Bout out to more US-friendly Thailand. Mostly, though, I’m just reading for the typography.

>So here’s a trick: A first step toward understanding Russia would be to read the press and academic accounts on China — and then substitute the word “Russia” for “China.” (This works in reverse as well.)

[New York Times]