Linguistics more scientific than Evolutionary Biology!

Well, that's a lame effort to find a positive side here.

Following a link from Wonkette to the Chronicle of Higher Education, I see that the Department of Higher Education is offering Smart Grants that include "the scientific study of language" (under 'foreign languages', not science), while the science fields listed as eligible for grants do not include evolutionary biology.

Can dictionaries list 'to google' as a verb?

Sheesh, I barely kick off this blog with a trivial little post, and then here comes a big legal issue (involving a Verb, no less, but fortunately not a relative). The post here is from a German "magazine for brand name owners", and shows that Duden, the authority on German language, has CHANGED its definition to googeln 'to google' under pressure from Google over a trademark issue (see the link for details). The article rightly argues:

The linguistic authority of dictionaries, especially Duden, must come to be viewed with uncertainty. When trademark lawyers can influence dictionary definitions and a dictionary editor can permit an alteration of a definition, the believability of language bibles is bound to suffer.

It's a simple fact that to google and googeln are the common ways of saying 'to search the internet', and typically but not necessarily using google.com. (In fact, when I suggest to students that they look around for something on the web, I hope they try a variety of search engines, but I still use that same verb.)

Anybody remember when Dan Quayle, then a US Senator, tried to pass a resolution to change the dictionary meaning of 'Hoosier'? That was stupid and was widely recognized as such. If publishers like Duden cave in here, this seems like a potential threat to producing accurate references works. Is this just one of those situations where Duden made a business decision not to stand up for what is clearly right?

The German word for 'secure'

... is siecher. Well, that's what an advertisement for Really Big Corporation says. The speaker, a woman in a serious business suit, goes on to talk about how she knows how to talk to clients in a whole bunch of languages about network security.

Actually, in Standard German siecher is a fairly obscure term. There's a pretty archaic word siech, meaning 'ill, infirm' which pops up often enough that folks know it, but siecher would be the comparative form ('more infirm') and that's hardly a common form. The word for 'secure' in German is sicher, pronounced with a lax vowel like in 'bit', not the tense vowel of 'beat'. The woman in the ad simply has an accent; she's pretty clearly a native speaker of a language that doesn't distinguish these kinds of vowels. (Some dialects of German would have this vowel here too ... a lot of the google hits ('g-hits') are in fact dialect texts, and a lot more a inflected forms of the adjective -- which would be impossible in the context of the sentence in the ad.)

The question is, why does a giant corporation spend gazillions on an ad campaign with such an obvious glitch when it's specifically aimed at an international audience and bragging about profiency in a range of languages. It seems all but impossible that they didn't know about this. Did they figure this was a charming accent? Or that this would make it stick in the mind of anybody who knows German?