December 12, 2017  Keeping Your Law Library Relevant In The Age Of Google by Donna Terjesen   In less than 20 years, Google has transformed everything from advertising to workplace collaboration.  But undoubtedly its most notable impact has been on how people find information.  Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day and over 2 trillion searches per year worldwide, according to the most recent estimates.  The phrase ‘Google it’ has become an everyday verb, synonymous with finding answers online.  Google’s status as a go-to research tool has transformed legal research habits and the traditional law firm library.  Our own market research found 88 percent of attorneys now go to Google first when conducting research.  Yet, at the same time, law firms are still spending millions of dollars on third-party research resources.  This disparity feeds into critics’ perceptions that law libraries are cost centers and is fueling the debate over how to effectively manage law libraries in the digital age.  Google’s intuitive and smart search functionality has made it easier for internet users to conduct searches quickly, creating an expectation among attorneys that legal research interfaces should be simple and intuitive.  In response, nearly every research vendor has refined their search functionality to be more user-friendly, creating a sense of uniformity.  This has alleviated the burden of having to conduct user training on various research tools.  In more recent years, Google has led the use of machine learning to process search inquiries and field more accurate results.  Similarly, other research vendors are using artificial intelligence (AI) to curate content, and guide and support attorneys through the search process. And like Google, many of these vendors have made their research more visually appetizing and intuitive.  As a result, even the busiest attorneys can find useful, relevant information online.  Thank you, Muse reader!

The October 15, 1932 issue of “The New Yorker” published a poem titled “Song of the Open Road” by Ogden Nash:  I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree.  Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.  Over the decades, variants of the text have evolved.  By 1940 Ogden Nash had produced a modified version of his own verse.  He published a collection of works titled “The Face is Familiar” containing an instance of the poem that replaced the word “perhaps” with the word “indeed”.  This made the point of the poem more emphatic.  Read five variations of the poem at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/04/14/tree/

A picture is worth a thousand words emerged in the USA in the early part of the 20th century.  The introduction is widely attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece commending the effectiveness of graphics in advertising with the title "One look is worth a thousand words", in Printer's Ink, December 1921.  Barnard claimed the phrase's source to be oriental by adding "so said a famous Japanese philosopher, and he was right".  Printer's Ink printed another form of the phrase in March 1927, this time suggesting a Chinese origin:  "Chinese proverb.  One picture is worth ten thousand words."  The arbitrary escalation from 'one thousand' to 'ten thousand' and the switching from Japan to China as the source leads us to smell a rat with this derivation.  In fact, Barnard didn't introduce the phrase--his only contribution was the incorrect suggestion that the country of origin was Japan or China.  Many things had been thought to be 'worth ten thousand words' well before pictures got in on the act; for example:  "One timely deed is worth ten thousand words" - The Works of Mr. James Thomson, 1802.   "That tear, good girl, is worth, ten thousand words" - The Trust: A Comedy, in Five Acts, 1808.  "One fact well understood by observation, and well guided development, is worth a thousand times more than a thousand words" - The American Journal of Education, 1858.  The idea that a picture can convey what might take many words to express was voiced by a character in Ivan S. Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons, 1862:  "The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book."  A similar idea was seen widely in the USA from the early 20th century, in adverts for Doan's Backache Kidney Pills, which included a picture of a man holding his back and the text "Every picture tells a story".  Neither of the above led directly to 'a picture is worth a thousand words'.  Who it was that married 'worth ten thousand words' with 'picture' isn't known, but we do know that the phrase is American in origin.  It began to be used quite frequently in the US press from around the 1920s onward.  The earliest example I can find is from the text of an instructional talk given by the newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane to the Syracuse Advertising Men's Club, in March 1911:  "Use a picture.  It's worth a thousand words."   https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words.html

Of all the joys that humans share, eating food and enjoying music are surely two of the most beloved.  By combining the communal pleasures of dining and song, the University of Delaware is helping to soothe those far-from-home feelings for hundreds of international students on campus.  At the World Kitchen Series events, the tastes and sounds of other countries became pathways toward friendship between UD’s international students and their American counterparts.  On one evening, the familiar tastes of Turkish moussaka and the sensual rhythms of Middle Eastern drumming fostered easy interaction among students.  On another, Chinese dumpling-making lessons served to encourage meeting and mingling.  Each year, UD hosts more than 5,000 international students, scholars and their families, who came to Newark from 96 countries from this year.  During the World Kitchen Series dinners, students are strategically seated so that cross-cultural conversations can arise.  Between bites and songs, students are encouraged to speak about themselves before the crowd, offering a warm glimpse of their lives and personalities.  http://www1.udel.edu/udmessenger/vol25no3/stories/students-world-kitchen.html

Maurits Christopher Hansen (1794–1842) was a Norwegian writer.  He was born in Modum as a son of Carl Hansen (1757–1826) and Abigael Wulfsberg (1758–1823).  He is recognized for his contribution to a diversity of genres and the introduction of the novel in Norway.  He was a major contributor to the Norwegian Romantic Movement.  He also wrote one of the world's first crime novels with "Mordet på Maskinbygger Roolfsen" ("The Murder of Engine Maker Roolfsen") in 1839, two years before Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841.  After attending Oslo Cathedral School from 1809 and completing his examen artium in 1814, he worked as a teacher in Trondheim from 1820 and in Kongsberg from 1826.  He was a fellow of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in Trondheim, but was not appointed when he applied for a position as lecturer of philosophy at the Royal Frederick University around 1839.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurits_Hansen

Q.  Why do we say an  SUV rather than a SUV?  A.  Because the S is pronounced ESS, a vowel sound.

A Traditional Crumpet Recipe  https://www.thespruce.com/traditional-crumpet-recipe-435276

Welsh Pancake Recipe for Crempog  https://www.thespruce.com/welsh-pancake-recipe-for-crempog-434989

Was and were are both past tenses of the verb to be.  Was is used in the first person singular (I) and the third person singular (he, she, it).  Were is used in the second person singular and plural (you, your, yours) and first and third person plural (we, they).  Was is used in the first and third person singular past.  It is used for statements of fact.  Were is used in the second person singular and plural and first and third person plural.  It is used in the subjunctive mood to indicate unreal or hypothetical statements.  The words if and wish usually indicate the subjunctive mood.  A good example of the subjunctive mood can be found in the musical Fiddler on the Roof.  In the song, “If I were a rich man,” the character Tevye sings about how different his life would be and all the things he would do if he were rich.  If I were a rich man, I’d build a big tall house . . . If I were a rich man, I’d have the time that I lack.  If I were a wealthy man, I wouldn’t have to work hard.  In these lines, Tevye is fantasizing about life as a wealthy man.  He isn’t rich now; he’s just imagining it, so we need to use  “If I were,” not “If I was.”  https://writingexplained.org/was-vs-were-difference  

Thank you, Muse reader!

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1826  January 15, 2018  On this date in the closing months of World War II, a young American lieutenant named Charles von Stade was killed in Germany.  Six weeks later, at a hospital back home in New Jersey, his widow, Sara, gave birth to a daughter, Frederica, who would grow up to become one of the most acclaimed singers of her generation. Frederica von Stade never knew her father, but the love letters he sent his bride from the front survived.  Von Stade recalls that a chance comment led to the idea of these letters somehow becoming a song-cycle, and, with the help of poet Kim Vaeth and composer Richard Danielpour, that is exactly what happened.  On today’s date in 1998, mezzo-soprano Frederica Von Stade and baritone Thomas Hampson gave the premiere performance of “Elegies” in Jacksonville, Florida, and soon after recorded the work in London.  Composers Datebook