Word of the day

Today's word is batpack. This is of course a near-homonym, and in normal Australian speech we often pronounce consonants indistinctly, so that many words sound the same. The next time you refer to a backpack in normal speech, say batpack. See if anyone notices.

Of course, in this world of rapidly-growing vocabulary choice, batpack is a word in its own right, too. BATPACK Pty Ltd recharges battery packs, of course. "Rip Curl's Bat Pack Pants are warm, snugly, and super comfy." And in baseball, the bat pack is, naturally, a pack for holding baseball bats.

Next word: digitalise.

Word of the day

Today's word is feedforward. I have always had mixed feelings about the word feedback, but it is too hard to dispense with it. I used the word feedforward yesterday, and had a strong feeling that I had invented it.

Unfortunately, not true. Google claims to have retrieved 938,000 instances. Feedforward, invented by Marshall Goldsmith in an article on management, already has the trappings of a used word - domain names, Wikipedia entries, and so on. Wikipedia describes the word as meaning "giving a pre-feedback to a person or an organization from which you are expecting a feedback. It usually involves giving a document for review and giving an ex post [after the event] information on that document which you have not already given." And feedback itself is defined as "information about actions returned to the source of the actions."

This is not one of Wikipedia's best definitions. It is curious that two spellings of the word are allowed - FeedForward and Feed-forrward - but not the much simpler runtogether, feedforward. And it is curious that both feedback and informaton are used in a singular form - a feedback, an information.

What does the term actually mean? This is what Goldsmith says: "Instead of rehashing a past that cannot be changed - feedback . . . [we] . . . coined "feedforward" to encourage spending time creating a future." You can watch Marshall explain it all on Youtube. Or you can follow up on the other meanings which have been attributed to feedforward through a Google search, or watch the Dutch progressive rock / melodic metal band, FeedForward.

Word of the day

Sometimes I think that rather than a word of the day (and its been a long time between days) I should have a metaphor of the day. I love metaphors, and yesterday The Australian provided several examples of a wonderful metaphor, "not out of the woods yet". The Cut and Paste column in the newspaper provided examples from Agence France Presse, the Wall Street Journal, Wayne Swan and the New Brunswick Times and Transcript. Needless to say, the out of the woods website tells us more about the wonderful industry which has arisen to monetise domain names than about the metaphor. To find out about that, you need to go to something like the Free Dictionary, and poke around amongst the advertising for a definition.

The Economist

I have read The Economist pretty much every week for the last 25 years or so - ever since I thought I could afford it, rather than having to sneak a look at the State Library of Victoria copy. So I was engaged by the piece in The Australian today about the new movie Dead Man Running, where the main character (played by the rapper, former drug dealer and multi-millionaire 50 Cent) is seen reading The Economist. If you are a serious liberal, a radical liberal, with a real-world approach to economics, it is for you. If even 50 Cent reads it . . . what did The Economist pay for that brilliant piece of product placement, I wonder? Or was it done for love? I would have.

Word of the day

Today's word is an acronym, BOEH, from Dutch Baas Over Eigen Hoofd and in English Boss of My Own Head. According to the Economist this week, it is a Belgian feminist group with mixed Muslim and non-Muslim members. It supports the idea that women should be able to choose what they put on their own heads, or what they don't put on their heads. BOEH has demonstrated the principle in demonstrations, where they put "sieves and toys on their heads." Here's a nice group picture, and some more from Indymedia ("don't hate the media, be the media").

Poems and Songs

Last week my colleague John Arfield, University Librarian at the University of Western Australia, sent us all a song written about the new UWA Science Library. "To my knowledge" he wrote, gloating, "it's the first song written about a new library building." And as the refrain goes "It sets your inner nerd free, Its the new science library."

On Sunday afternoon John Shipp, at the centenary celebration of the Fisher Library (the University of Sydney), produced not only a wonderful poem about the Fisher Library - Les Murray's Incunabular (1998) - but also the poet himself to read it. Surely the only poem about a university library written by Australia's greatest living poet? And with this memorable comment on the virtual library:
"Others may have my joys at home. Fine.
But I surfed the true paper."

My own library is certainly not jealous of these achievements. Youtube has everything one could wish for including, in the case of Swinburne, Library Pacman, possibly the only live Pacman re-enactment in a university library. It was put together by Swinburne games students. It only has these words: "They're more than games to us too."

The poem about the Fisher Library (an ode to Thomas Fisher) was complemented by the Vice-Chancellor, who described the pleasure of cutting the pages - and discovering the contents - of books which no-one had yet read. I wonder how many more thousands of volumes that no-one has ever read lie awaiting discovery in the University of Sydney library?

Word of the day

One of my favourite expressions is win-win, and the expression was recently used by Bryan Frith in The Australian to describe the Commonwealth Government's recent announcement relating to Telstra. The piece was headed "Reform package a win-win for all but Telstra." But given that Telstra is the major party in the reform package, surely this is a win-lose situation? How can youo have win-win when the major party loses?

The term applies in both game theory and conflict resolution, according to the Wikipedia, and according to the Wictionary, win-win is an adjective. And according to the Wikipedia article, non-zero-sum is a synonym. Brad Spangler, on the Beyond Intractability website, points out that a win-win situation doesn't necessarily involve everyone winning - but everyone believes he has won.

Nevertheless, I think that Telstra lost, making it a win-lose, or possibly a win-loss, to turn the expression into a noun.