February 22, 2005 - Greetings in the U.S.

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Broadcast: February 22, 2005

I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: we say hello again to English teacher Lida Baker in Los Angeles to talk about greetings in America.

AA: "So now typically, if someone says 'how are you doing?' ... "

RS: "Yeah, typically when you say 'hi, how are you?' what's the typical response there?"

LIDA BAKER: "Well, 'fine.' And, in fact, that's something I have to teach students right at the beginning of the course, that when somebody says to you 'how are you?' they're not really asking about your health. It's just a different way of saying hello. Back in the days when people were more conscious of grammar, one of the traditional replies to the question 'how are you?' was 'I'm well.' But when's the last time you heard somebody say 'I'm well?'"

RS: "I guess the last time we heard someone answer that same question 'I'm sick'! [laughter]"

LIDA BAKER: "But you do hear people all the time saying 'I'm good.' At least here in California, that is extremely common. You know, and as a teacher, this kind of presents me with a dilemma: Do I teach students expressions that are grammatically incorrect but that everyone is using?"

RS: "Yes."

LIDA BAKER: "Well ... "

RS: "Yes with a warning."

LIDA BAKER: "Exactly! Yes, I like that -- yes with a warning, that this is what people say, but don't use it if you're in a formal situation or a situation where you're trying to make a very good impression."

AA: "Like the expression 'how do you do,' that's a little formal, right?"

LIDA BAKER: "Well, 'how do you do' is a really interesting expression. I don't know if you realize this, but on subsequent meetings, you don't use 'how do you do.' You can switch to 'how are you?' or 'hello.' But we only use 'how do you do?' the first time that we meet somebody."

RS: "So, in other words, when you're introduced to someone, you say 'how do you do?'"

LIDA BAKER: "That's right."

AA: "Now what about a greeting like 'good morning'? Good morning, Rosanne."

RS: "Hi, Avi."

LIDA BAKER: "Yeah, there are greetings I think that are time-bound. We have 'good morning,' 'good afternoon,' 'good evening' and 'good night.' But, again, there's something tricky about 'good night.'"

RS: "You say it when you're going to sleep."

LIDA BAKER: "That's right. And you also say it when you're leaving. Like at the end of the workday, people might say 'good night' to one another. But you can't say 'good night' as a greeting. On the other end of the spectrum, again out here in California, I don't know about the rest of the country, but it's very common to greet people by just saying 'hey.' Again, you wouldn't use it if you were in a job interview, if you were talking to your boss, if you were talking to maybe a religious leader. You would use something a little more elevated than that, like 'hello' or 'how are you?'"

RS: "Hey, Lida. [laughter] I want to know how you would go about teaching this."

LIDA BAKER: "Well, first of all, you want to provide students with information about the language. So on the blackboard I would make a list of greetings, and at the top of the list I would put the more formal ones, and at the bottom of the list I would put the least formal ones. And I would draw an arrow from the top of the list to the bottom of the list, to give students the visual notion that there's a range here.

"And then we would move into the practice phase of the lesson, where there's one activity that I really like to do. And I'm afraid I can't remember where I first read this, because I'd like to give credit, but it's called the 'cocktail party waltz.' It's great to have students meeting each other at the beginning of the course. And what you do is, you put the students in two circles. One circle is inside the other circle, so the students are facing one another.

"At a signal from the teacher, these people greet one another, and then they spend a couple of minutes in small talk, talking about the weather, about the event where you happen to be, about a person's background or what they like to do. Or their work -- that's always a good topic in the United States.

"You let the students talk to one another for a couple of minutes, and then the teacher gives another signal, and the people who are on the outside circle move like, you know, one person to the right. So that's one really fun activity, and what's nice about it is that it works with people at all levels."

AA: Lida Baker teaches at the American Language Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and she's working on a reading comprehension textbook that might come out in about a year.

RS: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. And our segments are online at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

MUSIC: "Pop Song '89"/R.E.M.

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February 16, 2005 - Emotion Words

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February 16, 2005

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: words that express emotion.

RS: Suppose someone gave you two minutes to write down as many different emotions as you could think of -- for example: happy, sad, angry. You're also told to rate each emotion as "unpleasant," "neutral" or "pleasant." What would come to mind?

AA: That's what groups of English speakers in Chicago, and Spanish speakers in Mexico City, had to do for a study led by Robert Schrauf, a linguistics professor at Penn State University.

ROBERT SCHRAUF: "So that data was available to me, and I began to analyze it one day and found this rather curious difference. And that was that about 50 percent of the emotion words that people mentioned were negative, and about 30 percent positive and 20 percent neutral. And those proportions were consistent across all of these groups, from young Mexicans to older Mexicans in Mexico City and young to old English speakers in Chicago. For instance, here is the young Anglos', in order, the first five: happy, sad, angry, excited, afraid.

"Now what's curious about that list is, happy is positive. That's one word. Then there's sad, angry, afraid -- that's three negative -- and excited, which generally comes across to people as a neutral word."

RS: "What does this tell us, that 50 percent are negative, 30 percent are positive and 20 percent are neutral? What does this tell us about our emotions, or how we express ourselves?"

ROBERT SCHRAUF: "Right, so that's the curious thing. So you could look at that list and entertain a number of hypotheses. You could say, 'well, you know, human beings just have more negative experiences than positive ones, and therefore ... ' Or you might think that people take dour views of things, I don't know. So what became interesting was how to explain this. And I went back to the literature and found that the theorizing about emotions is as follows:

"We tend to think that there are positive and negative emotions on a kind of a continuum. But both the behavioral and the neurophysiological literature suggest that actually there are two channels [in the brain] for processing emotions -- one negative and one positive.

"And what happens is, it seems to me -- or the explanation I'm taking from the literature -- is that we respond to negative emotions by thinking more carefully, in a more detailed manner, and we respond to positive emotions by thinking more schematically. We tend to process those more facilely. So my response to a happy emotion is to sort of think top-down, to think that things are moving as they should in the world or perhaps a bit better.

"And that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. I mean, if there's danger or threat, then I need to pay a great deal of careful attention to that. If things are going OK, then it's benign; I can sort of move ahead."

RS: "I find it very interesting, the comparison across cultures in the studies that you reviewed."

ROBERT SCHRAUF: "Right, right. So let's say there are five to seven basic emotions which we'll find with appropriate emotion words present in all languages and all cultures. I mean, we would have to do an empirical study to find that, but the evidence that we've gathered so far tends to suggest that that's true. What makes cultures unique are all of those non-basic emotions that once you get through joy, anger, fear, sadness -- those initial very pan-cultural words and pan-cultural emotions -- then there are long lists of emotion words in each language that make rather curious distinctions that are not translatable.

"So an example in Spanish, for instance, is 'verguenza,' which we translate as 'shame.' But it's a far more powerful word than our word shame. Or for instance, in German, 'schadenfreude' is a word that implies a feeling of glee at someone else's misfortune, and we don't have an appropriate translation in English."

AA: Professor Robert Schrauf, speaking to us from the studios of WPSX at Penn State University. His report, written with researcher Julia Sanchez, can be found in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.

RS: That's all for Wordmaster this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. And Internet users can download our reports, back to 1998, at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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February 9, 2005 - Pretentious Language

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February 9, 2005

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: more "junk English."

RS: Back in 2001, we talked to writer Ken Smith about his book "Junk English." In his words, "Junk English is much more than sloppy grammar." "

Most often it is a trick we play on ourselves," he says, "to make the unremarkable seem important."

AA: Ken Smith is back with a sequel, "Junk English 2." I talked to him about some examples of what he considers pretentious language. Yet even he admits that sometimes, the best way to say something is not always what people want to hear.

KEN SMITH: "If you speak precisely in idiomatic American English, it almost sounds pretentious, because idiomatic American English is very casual. So you've got the sort of pretentious variant, you've got the normal variant and then you've got sort of the junk English variant falling off to the other side.

"So say you take a word like, I don't know, 'talk.' Now, if you wanted to say that with sort of a pretentious air, you'd say 'converse.' It's not necessarily wrong. But it has a sort of a snobbish air to it that's not really casual as American English is. But if you wanted to go over to the junk English side, you'd say 'you know, we need to dialogue.'

"Using dialogue as a verb, that's definitely junk English. And the problem is that sometimes you have to understand what the purpose of the language is. Do you want to be correct? Do you want to be clear? Or do you want to fit in with your crowd? It's almost like there's three different languages at play here."

AA: "Well, right -- take a word like 'succeed,' you could say 'I succeeded' or 'I did well.' What would be the junk ... "

KEN SMITH: "Well, 'succeed.' Well, I don't know -- you might have been 'impactful.' That might be a junk English use. I think actually 'impactful' is more 'effective.' Like if you were effective, the pretentious English variant of that would be, you were 'efficacious.' But the junk English is, you were 'impactful.'

"So there's a lot of examples like that. Well, like, 'new' is another good example -- 'new,' a simple word, but if you want to be pretentious you'd say 'oh, that's postmodern.' If you use it in art, that's fine, I mean it's an established sort of jargon in art. But I mean if you use it to describe something like 'oh, that's very postmodern,' if you're referring to a new car that you've got, I mean it's pretentious."

AA: "And elsewhere in your book I came across a word that we do hear a good bit lately, is the word 'meme,' and I've always wanted to -- "

KEN SMITH: "Oh meme, yeah."

AA: " -- to do something about that. First of all, could you explain what exactly is a meme?"

KEN SMITH: "Well, a meme is -- again, it's a term of philosophy. It's actually a term of science, meaning to sort of describe a thought or a belief or a behavior that can spread from one person to another within a culture. It's a very specific term. And again if you're using it in an academic sense, that's fine. But then the word has sort of spilled over, like so many terms do, into the general language. And that's just pretentious. 'I'm utterly enthralled with your new meme.' You know, it's an idea. You had an idea or a thought. That's what a meme is in general usage."

AA: "And we should spell it: M-E-M-E. So it's not 'me-me', it's a meme [laughter]. And you say it's 'pretentious language for idea, slogan and so on.' Now but, as I've heard that term used, isn't it sort of like an idea that spreads like a virus?"

KEN SMITH: "Well, but all -- I mean, you could say that of any idea. I mean, you could make that analogy. That's just a metaphor -- you know, 'that's viral marketing,' as they use in business terminology. So is that a meme? I don't know. I think they're just ideas."

AA: "Now let me ask you, is there a term where you have to use the pretentious form of it?"

KEN SMITH: "It's not necessarily pretentious. I mean, some words I don't like but I can't think of a better way of saying it -- for example, 'multitasking.' I don't like 'multitasking.' It just seems kind of long and grating. But I honestly can't think of a better, more efficient way to say 'doing several things at once' or 'doing a lot of things at the same time,' which is what multitasking means. So it's a useful word. Much as I dislike it, I have to admit that it serves a purpose."

AA: "Now I'm looking at the cover of your book here. It's 'Junk English 2: the Inevitability of Sequelization.'"

KEN SMITH: "Yes."

AA: "Is that your idea of a joke?"

KEN SMITH: "Yes, it is. [laughter] The clean way of saying that would be 'the inevitable sequel.' But the junk English way is to say the 'inevitability of sequelization.' One of the ways of recognizing junk English is, it's tacking a lot of extra syllables onto specific words. For example, we cited impact before. Well, that's now become 'impactfulness,' which makes a bad thing worse. That's a problem that we have here in America. I'm not sure that people in other countries speaking English do that. I hope they don't."

AA: Ken Smith is a writer. His newest book is called "Junk English 2."

RS: If you'd like to "impact" your English learning, visit our Web site: voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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Abraham Lincoln, Part 5

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General Pierre Beauregard" src="http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/Archive/images/Beauregard_gov_se_2Feb05_15.jpg" width="142" border="0" height="150" hspace="0">

General Pierre Beauregard

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VOICE 1:

THE MAKING OF A NATION -- a program in Special English.

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The storm of battle spread across the United States in the summer of eighteen-sixty-one. For several months, small fights had flashed like lightning around the edge of this great storm.

Soldiers fought pro-southern rioters in the streets of Baltimore and Saint Louis. A Confederate supporter shot and killed a famous young officer from the north. Untrained soldiers of both sides fought in the mountains of western Virginia.

So far, the fighting had not claimed many lives. But very soon, the storm would break in all its fury.

VOICE TWO:

The old general who commanded the Union forces, Winfield Scott, did not want to rush his men into battle.

Scott believed it would be a long war. He planned to spend the first year of it getting ready to fight. He had an army of thousands of men, and it would get much larger in coming months. But this army was not trained. His soldiers were civilians who knew nothing about fighting a war. General Scott needed time to make soldiers of these men.

He also needed time to organize a supply system to get to his forces the guns, bullets, food, and clothing they would need. Without supplies, his army could not fight very long.

VOICE ONE:

There were many in the north, however, who thought Scott was too careful. It was true, they said, that Union forces were untrained. But so were those of the south. And the Confederacy's supply problems were even greater than those of the Union. The south had much less industry and fewer railroads. It could not produce as much military equipment, and it could not transport supplies as easily as the north could.

In the early months of the war, Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President, did not even have guns enough for the men in his army.

Those who demanded immediate action expected a short war. They said Scott should take the army and March to Richmond. They were sure that if Union forces seized the Confederate capital, the southern rebellion would end.

Northern newspapers took up the cry, "On to Richmond!" Political leaders began pressing for a quick northern victory. Public pressure forced the army to act.

VOICE TWO:

For more than a month, General Irvin NcDowell had been building a Union army in northern Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington. He had more than thirty-thousand men at bases in Arlington and Alexandria. Late in June, McSowell received orders: "March against the Confederate Army of General Pierre Beauregard. "

Beauregard had twenty-thousand soldiers at Manassas Junction, a railroad village in Virginia less than fifty kilometers from Washington. McDowell planned to move on Manassas Junction July ninth, but was delayed for more than a week.

He planned the attack carefully. McDowell was worried that another large Confederate force west of Manassas Junction might join Beauregard's army.

This force, led by General Joe Johnston, was in the Shenandoah Valley near Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Across from Harpers Ferry, in Maryland, was a Union army almost twice the size of Johnston's. It was ordered to put pressure on Johnston's force to prevent it from helping Beauregard.

VOICE ONE:

General Beauregard received early warning from Confederate spies that McDowell would attack. Much of his information came from a woman, Misses Rose O'Neal Greenhow. Misses Greenhow, a widow, was an important woman in Washington. She knew almost all the top government officials. And she had friends in almost every department of the government.

The beautiful Misses Greenhow also had some very special friends. One was Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. He was chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. Another special friend was Thomas Jordan, a Confederate colonel in Beauregard's army.

VOICE TWO:

Jordan asked Misses Greenhow, soon after the war started, to be a spy for the south. She agreed and sent much valuable information about Union military plans.

Early in July, she sent word to Beauregard that he would be attacked soon. She also sent a map used by the Senate Military Affairs Committee showing how the Union army would reach Manassas Junction.

Then, on the morning of July sixteenth, Misses Greenhow wrote a nine-word message. She gave it to a man to carry to Beauregard. The Confederate General received it that evening. It said: "Order given for McDowell to march upon Manassas tonight."

VOICE ONE

Beauregard sent a telegram to Richmond. He told the Confederate government that McDowell was on the way. He asked that Johnston's ten thousand-man force in the Shenandoah Valley join him for battle. He was told to expect Johnston's help.

But Johnston's army was threatened by a large Union force that entered Virginia from Maryland. Led by General Robert Patterson, the Union troops moved toward the smaller Confederate force. They were not really interested in fighting Johnston. But they did want to prevent him from reaching Beauregard.

Johnston knew he could not defeat Patterson. So he decided to trick him.

While most of his army withdrew and prepared to join Beauregard, Johnston sent a small force to attack Patterson's army. Patterson believed Johnston was attacking with all his troops. He stopped moving forward and prepared to defend against what seemed to be a strong Confederate attack.

By the time the trick was discovered, Johnston and most of his troops were at Manassas.

VOICE TWO

General McDowell's huge Union army left Arlington on the afternoon of July sixteenth. It was a hot day, and the road was dusty. The march was not well organized, and the men traveled slowly. They stopped at every stream to drink and wash the dust from their faces. Some of the soldiers left the road to pick fruits and berries from bushes along the way.

To some of those who watched this army pass, the lines of soldiers in bright clothes looked like a long circus parade.

Most of these men had not been soldiers long. Their bodies were soft, and they tired quickly. It took them four days to travel the forty-five kilometers to Centreville, the final town before Bull Run. The battle would start the next morning -- Sunday, July twenty-first.

VOICE ONE

The road from Washington was crowded early Sunday morning with horses and wagons bringing people to watch the great battle.

Hundreds of men and women watched the fight from a hill near Centreville. Below them was Bull Run. But the battleground was covered so thickly with trees that the crowds saw little of the fighting. They could, however, see the smoke of battle. And they could hear the sounds of shots and exploding shells.

From time to time, Union officers would ride up the hill to report what a great victory their troops were winning.

VOICE TWO

In the first few hours of the battle, Union forces were winning. McDowell had moved most of his men to the left side of Beauregard's army. They attacked with artillery and pushed the Confederate forces back. It seemed that the Confederate defense would break. Some of the southern soldiers began to run. But others stood and fought.

One Confederate officer, trying to prevent his troops from moving back, pointed to a group led by General T. J. Jackson of Virginia. "Look!" He shouted. "There is Jackson...standing like a stone wall! Fight like the Virginians!"

The Confederate troops refused to break.

The fighting was fierce. The air was full of flying bullets. A newsman wrote that the whole valley was boiling with dust and smoke. A Confederate soldier told his friend, "Them Yankees are just marching up and being shot to hell."

Neither side would give up. Then, a large group of Johnston's troops arrived by train and joined in the fight. Suddenly, Union soldiers stopped fighting and began pulling back. General McDowell and his officers tried to stop the retreat, but failed. Their men wanted no more fighting.

VOICE ONE:

The fleeing Union soldiers threw down their guns and equipment, thinking only of escape. Many did not stop until they reached Washington.

It was a bitter defeat. But it made the north recognize the need for a real army -- one trained and equipped for war. President Abraham Lincoln gave the job of building such an army to General George McClellan.

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VOICE TWO:

You have been listening to the Special English program, THE MAKING OF A NATION. Your narrators were Jack Weitzel and Frank Oliver. Our program was written by Frank Beardsley. THE MAKING OF A NATION can be heard Thursdays.

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Cassini-Huygens at Titan

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VOICE ONE:

I’m Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And I’m Steve Ember with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. On January fourteenth, a human-made object landed on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. For one hour and twelve minutes it sent back exciting information and photographs.

Our program today is about the landing device named Huygens and the Cassini spacecraft that carried it through our solar system to land on that distant moon.

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VOICE ONE:

On October fifteenth, nineteen ninety-seven, a huge rocket was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in the state of Florida. The rocket carried a spacecraft named Cassini. The Cassini spacecraft carried a deployment vehicle named Huygens. The launch of these two spacecraft was the beginning of a seven-year flight to the planet Saturn. The flight was the joint effort of America’s space agency, NASA; the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency.

VOICE TWO:

On July first of last year, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft arrived at Saturn after traveling almost four thousand million kilometers. Scientists said they were able to guide it into a near-perfect orbit around Saturn. Cassini flew into orbit from below the famous rings that circle the planet.

Cassini immediately began sending back photographs and information about Saturn and its huge moon, Titan.

Titan from the Cassini spacecraft.

The study of Titan is one of the major goals of the Cassini-Huygens flight. Titan is very large -- even larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto. Scientists are very interested in Titan because it is the only known moon in our solar system to have an atmosphere. Plans call for Cassini to make more than seventy orbits around Saturn. Forty-five of these will include passing close to Titan.

The photographs and information about the huge moon sent by Cassini only added to the excitement about the Huygens landing device.

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VOICE ONE:

On December twenty-fifth, Cassini released the Huygens lander. Cassini quickly moved away from Huygens to lessen the chance of an accident between the two vehicles. After twenty days of circling the huge moon, Huygens started to move into Titan’s thick atmosphere. Huygens entered Titan’s atmosphere moving at eighteen thousand kilometers an hour. It had to immediately slow its great speed to keep from burning up.

Huygens slowed down by using three different parachutes. After its main parachute opened in the upper atmosphere, the vehicle slowed to a little more than fifty meters per second. This is about as fast as an automobile moves on a highway.

As it moved lower into the atmosphere, Huygens slowed to about five meters per second. This permitted it to safely prepare to land on the surface.

Martin Tomasko is the member of the team that guided the flight of the Huygens lander. He said the flight down to the surface of Titan was not as smooth as the team thought it would be.

Mister Tomasko said the lander moved from side to side while hanging from the parachute. He said it often moved as much as twenty degrees from side to side.

VOICE TWO:

The scientific instruments on Huygens began measuring about one hundred sixty kilometers from the surface of Titan. This permitted the instruments to gather information about the atmosphere. The instruments included sound recording equipment.

Huygens began sending back information and photographs to Cassini four minutes into its flight to the surface of Titan. Cassini immediately began to transmit this information back to Earth using its more powerful radio equipment. NASA’s Deep Space Communications Network received the information and photographs. Then NASA transmitted them to the European Space Operation Center in Darmstadt, Germany.

VOICE ONE:

Slowly and safely, the three hundred seventeen kilogram vehicle moved down through the atmosphere of Titan. It quickly transmitted information about a rich mix of nitrogen and methane in the upper atmosphere.

Huygens’ instruments showed that the amounts of the gas methane increased as the lander moved closer to the surface of Titan.

While scientific instruments were investigating the atmosphere, cameras were ready to begin taking photographs from high above the surface. The cameras were able to begin their work thirty kilometers above the surface of Titan. Thick clouds above thirty kilometers did not permit photography.

VOICE TWO:

The first photographs looked much like those taken here on Earth from an aircraft high in the sky. Part of one photograph shows a land area next to what might be a large area of liquid, similar to a lake. Some areas of the surface looked like islands.

Chanels on Titan.

There were photographs of areas of water ice. Some areas showed rivers created by liquid methane. Other photographs of the surface area seemed to show mountains and huge rocks. Still others showed deep lines in the surface that seem to have been cut by fast- moving liquid.

The scientific instruments on Huygens showed the temperature of the atmosphere of Titan is extremely cold. The instruments recorded a temperature of minus one hundred eighty degrees Celsius.

VOICE ONE:

When Huygens was seven hundred meters above the surface, a special landing lamp was turned on. The lamp was used to light the surface of Titan to aid Huygens’ cameras and see where the vehicle was going to land. The lamp was designed to last for about fifteen minutes.

It continued to light the immediate area for more than one hour after Huygens landed on the surface. Scientists believe the Huygens lander hit an area of Titan’s surface that may be mud or wet sand. The lander’s recording equipment transmitted a sound similar to a large object hitting a wet surface.

Instruments on Huygens showed the surface landing area is mostly a mix of dirty water ice, hydrocarbon ice, sand and clay. This mix of water and chemicals makes the ground a dark color. The instruments on Huygens began to quickly send back large amounts of information about the surface. This information included air temperature, air pressure and wind speed. It also sent information about chemicals on the surface of Titan and in the air. Experts say Huygens sent back enough information and photographs to keep researchers very busy for several years.

VOICE TWO:

After it landed, Huygens immediately began transmitting photographs from the surface of Titan. The photographs are orange in color. Scientists say the surface of Titan is orange because of its huge distance from the sun. The large amounts of methane gas in the atmosphere also add to the orange color.

Rocks on the Surface of Titan.

These photographs show an area of rocks of many sizes. The rocks can be seen for as far as the camera can see. Experts say many of the rocks look as if they have been shaped by fast-moving liquid.

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VOICE ONE:

The Huygens lander stopped transmitting information after one hour and twelve minutes. The fierce atmosphere of Titan and extremely low temperatures halted the vehicle’s ability to gather information. Yet it lasted longer than scientists had planned.

Scientists will use the information gathered by the Huygens lander to learn a great deal about this unusual moon. One of the main reasons for sending Huygens to the surface is that Titan has a rich nitrogen atmosphere. It is also rich in methane gas. And its surface may have many of the same kinds of chemicals that existed on Earth millions of years ago. Titan may help scientists learn more about the very beginnings of our planet.

David Southwood is the Director of the European Space Agency’s scientific program. Mister Southwood says Titan is a very interesting world. And scientists now have good information about this far away moon.

VOICE TWO:

If you have a computer that can link with the Internet communications system, you too can see the orange photographs taken on the surface of Titan. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California has many links to both Huygens and Cassini. J-P-L can be found at www.jpl.nasa.gov. That address again is www.jpl.nasa.gov.

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VOICE ONE:

This program was written by Paul Thompson. It was produced by Mario Ritter. I’m Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And I’m Steve Ember. Join us again next week for another EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English.

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February 2, 2005 - Internet Terms

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First broadcast: February 2, 2005

Personal computers and the Internet have become vital tools for everything from communications and research to entertainment and office work. Not surprisingly, new words connected with these technologies are becoming part of common speech. VOA's Adam Phillips reports:

Internet users may be annoyed, amused or simply resigned to the number of new technical words that keep popping up in cyberspace, only to become so useful and familiar it is hard to imagine everyday American speech without them.

But Peter Sokolowski, a dictionary editor at the Merriam-Webster company, reminds us that, even as recently as the mid 1990s, almost none of those technical computer and Internet terms existed.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "And today, ten or eleven years later, there are hundreds of them. They come at us from print sources when they are talking about the Internet and then of course they come from the Internet itself."

Many of the first common computer-related terms had to with word processing, and borrowed their terminology from the world of the traditional office.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI:: "Words like folders, desktop, clipboard, bookmark and homepage. Those are words that are very comfortable to all of us. 'Homepage' was never a word before the Internet, but of course home and page separately were very common. But now it means the first Web page that you look at when you open up your computer."

TEXT: One comfortable, even cozy, word that has acquired a new technical meaning is cookie.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "Which, in Internet terms, means the piece of information that remains behind once you've visited a Web site. That word is obviously better known to most English speakers as being a little biscuit or something sweet to eat."

Mr. Sokolowski says that some new terms combine the old and the new. Take, for example, the word Wi-Fi.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "And it sort of combines two separate words. One is wireless, or technology that allows for wireless computing. So, for example, you can walk around within your house and go upstairs with your laptop and you would never have to plug it in. That's the first part of the word. And the second part, -fi, comes from hi-fi, which is the old high fidelity system of stereo components which were used from the 1950s forward. But of course in this digital age, we don't say 'high fidelity' anymore. So this word is sort of a throwback and a combination at the same time.

TEXT: Even a single letter can transform the meaning of the word it precedes. The vowel e, for example, which stands for electronic, changes mail into e-mail, and e-commerce becomes the multi-billion phenomenon of Internet trade. Still, Mr. Sokolowski's favorite categories of Internet terms are new combinations of old words that mean completely new things.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI:: "So you have a word like blog which came from Web log. A log is like a diary -- something where you record the events of your day or your thoughts and, in this case, on the Web. Another word like that is dot-com. We have derived it from the Internet address of so many businesses to describe the period and then the com, which means commercial, for the Internet address.

Whether a word arises from the Internet or some other sphere of activity, the folks at Merriam-Webster always use the same criterion to determine when it has actually entered the language or can be dismissed as mere jargon or slang, known and used only to insiders.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "And that is if the words are used without an explanation or any kind of definition in running prose in a major print source. And that means in American sources, a major newspaper such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, a major magazine such as Time or Newsweek.

"When a word such as blog appears in those magazines or newspapers, we know that the editors of those journals expect their readers to already know what the word means. So that's when the word is ready to go into the dictionary.

Mr. Sokowloski is confident that next year's dictionary will include the word google.

PETER SOKOLOWSKI: "Because it is a word that has entered the language very, very quickly, and is being used as a verb even though it is the name of a company and people often say, I'd like to 'google' some information, or I'll 'google' you to get information, and that means using a search engine, like Google, to get information very quickly off the Internet. I can see that becoming part of the dictionary in about a year's time because it is already part of the language."

And it is part of some non-English languages as well, it seems. Even though the Internet is international, many new terms begin in English, and are then absorbed into foreign languages.

So while the French, for example, have their own word for email, Mr. Sokolowski says his research indicates that French Internet users employ the original English term most of the time, and other languages often take English Internet terms and write them in their own alphabets.

For Wordmaster, this is Adam Phillips reporting from New York.

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