The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself. The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR2010091304476.html

Sell Your Friends by Brad Stone
There were two obvious winners at the FIFA World Cup this summer. Spain took home the 13-pound, 18-carat-gold trophy for its achievement on the field. Nike won the branding championship, thanks largely to a three-minute commercial called "Write the Future," in which its stable of soccer endorsers fantasize about the glory or disgrace that might result from their play in the tournament. Hundreds of millions of people saw "Write the Future" on television. Before it blanketed traditional media, however, Nike launched the video on Facebook, the Web's dominant social network. The video started as an ad on the site. Then it was passed from friend to friend, often with comments and members recommending it. In the resulting discussions, the clip was played and commented on more than 9 million times by Facebook users—and helped Nike double its number of Facebook fans from 1.6 million to 3.1 million over a single weekend. Getting the ad onto Facebook cost a few million dollars, according to the companies. All that passing around was free. Davide Grasso, Nike's chief marketing officer, says Facebook "is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It's an integral part of what we do now." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39325170/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/

Grocery-store shopping carts are rife with germs, says Chuck Gerba, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Arizona who’s taken samples from shopping carts throughout the U.S. To avoid germs while grocery shopping, disinfect your shopping cart’s handle and child seat with a wipe, or sanitize your hands before and after you shop. Use products with the words “disinfect” or “sanitize” on them, because the Environmental Protection Agency has approved those terms, Gerba says. The next time you need to withdraw money or decide to use the self-checkout aisle at the grocery store, make sure you have travel-size hand sanitizer handy. Cell phones are covered with contaminants, and people rarely, if ever, clean them. If you’re kicking back in a hotel room, or watching basketball at a neighbor’s house, slip out a disinfectant wipe before using the remote. TV remotes are rarely cleaned and carry numerous germs, Gerba says. http://updatednews.ca/?p=27283

emanate or M-N-8 (EM-uh-nayt) verb tr., intr.: To emit or to come out. From Latin emanare (to flow out), from ex- (out of) + manare (to flow).

extenuate or X-10-U-8 (ik-STEN-yoo-ayt) verb tr. 1. To reduce or attempt to reduce the severity of (an error, an offense, etc.) by making partial excuses for it. 2. To lessen or to make light of. From Latin extenuare (to lessen), from ex- (out) + tenuare (to make thin), from tenuis (thin). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ten- (to stretch), which is also the source of tense, tenet, tendon, tent, tenor, tender, pretend, extend, tenure, tetanus, hypotenuse, pertinacious, and detente. A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

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From: Don Williams Subject: Emanate As a university biology professor, "text speak" just drives me nuts, especially in emails from students. I recall my first abbreviated science term, though, was "N R G" for "energy" which a student used many years ago, well before cell phones and texting. I must admit, I have even used it from time to time, myself.

From: Henry Willis Subject: Acronyms, LEET, etc. My father, who once collected license plates, told me of a book he had heard of, but had not seen, written entirely in the telegraphic punning language of vanity license plates. And now, thanks to Google and Amazon, it's possible to locate it: PL8SPK, with a metallic cover that looks like a slightly rumpled plate. GR82CIT after all these years.

From: Bard Ermentrout Subject: Deify Def: 1. To make a god of. 2. To revere or idealize as a deity. I always liked the past tense of the word, deified, since it is palindromic!

From: Bob Doolittle Subject: X-10-U-8 Like myself, I'm sure many readers first encountered this word in Othello's final speech: "Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice." I wonder how the Bard would fare in the world of texting and tweeting: "2 B R not 2 B, that S the ?"

From: Ben Carnes Subject: Letter Words My sons both work in the computer industry and started doing tech support at a large insurance company. When they got one of those ridiculous calls like "The cupholder won't come out" or "I can't find the "any" (N-E) key", they referred to it as an eye-dee-ten-tee problem. When I asked them why that term, they wrote it out I-D-10-T. Strictly speaking, not a letter word, but a combination letter/number word.

From: Saranne Cessford Subject: elegy Def: A poem composed as a lament for the dead. We spent some years in Indonesia, and were intrigued by the way words found their way into Bahasa: It took me a while to recognise elpiji as LPG -- liquid petroleum gas.