I came across today’s word, fisking, in a recent post over at Corante. At fist I thought fisking was a typo or a one-time-use, bit of jargon, but in fact fisking is neologism born from the blogosphere.

The eponymous verb describes a detailed point by point refutation of a argument or article. The technique is named after the British journalist Robert risk. In late 2001, while covering the war in Afghanistan, Fisk published an account of a mob beating him and his subsequent rescue from the angry mod. Blogger Andrew Sullivan, suspicious of the credibility of the report wrote a point-by-point refutation of Fisk’s account. Since then the blogosphere has used the term fisking to describe a detailed point-by-point refutation.

I don’t know enough of the story to comment on veracity of Fisk’s or Sullivan’s claims, but I do like the word. I see a lot of fisking on the Internet and I enjoy it. I hope fisking makes it into the wider vernacular.

By the way the Corante.com post is about Grokster’s Supreme Court case and includes links to a few fisks. If you are interested in IP law or the future of innovation in America the fisks are worth the time.

I overheard today’s word around our office drayage. It is a noun and it is the sum paid for use of a dray. Duh. So what is that? A dray is a utility cart used to haul heavy items. They can range in size from a small two wheeled hand cart for moving luggage or barrels to much larger carts pulled by a horse.

Now we don’t use drays at work but the term drayage is used in the shipping world for the freight charge to pickup and deliver an ocean container.

Oh and here is a sentence using drayage, “The cost of shipping from China isn’t that bad. It is the drayage that really pushes the costs up.”

Today’s word is one we are all familiar with or at least a recent variation on it. The word is googol. Not the G-O-O-G-L-E of Google.com but the original googol that inspired Larry & Sergey to name their search tool Google.

A googol is the number one followed by 100 zeros. It is very big number. It is also known as a duotrigintillion. I am glad we don’t have to visit duotrigintillion.com for all our searches.

Here are a few fun facts about the number googol:

• A googol is greater than the number of particles in the known universe, which has been variously estimated from 10⁷² up to 10⁸⁷.
  
• A 9 year old Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner, coined the term.
  
• A few years ago the Sirotta family tried to sue Google for exploiting the term their ancestors invented.
  
• They didn’t win.
  
• A googolplex, as far as I can tell is the largest named finite number (If I am wrong please correct me). It is the number 1 follow by a googol of zeros. Too big a number to even imagine.
  

A googol can be written in conventional notation, as follows:

1 googol = 10¹⁰⁰ = 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

I came across todays word in a post over at BoingBoing.net. The word is venal. It is adjective used to describe a person or process that is corrupt. Especially one that is open to bribery or purchase.

The Boing boing post is about the Cloud Gate statue at the Chicago Millennium Park. Apparently the $11 million statue and the enhancements are copyrighted by the statue’s creator- Anish Kapoor.

This means the fine citizens of Chicago, the citizens who paid for the statue, nor tourists can take photos of the statue without the permission of the artist.

Cory Doctorow the author of the BoingBoing.net post writes, “This is about the vilest display of human venality I’ve heard of all day.”

I think it has been more than a week for me.

UPDATE: Boing Boing has a follow up post asking Chicagoan’s to take lots of photos of the Cload Gate to protest the misuse of copyright.

Today we have a French word that has made its way into the English vernacular. It is
portmanteau.

A portmanteau is a word that is formed by combining two words and their meanings. For example podcast is a portmanteau. It is the combination of the words iPod & broadcast.

Other well know portmanteau’s are camcorder- camera and recorder, smog- smoke and fog and spork- spoon and fork. The Chunnel is an example of portmanteau that is a proper name.