The big news this week is that you can go out and buy an Encarta. However, if you think you'll be bringing home your very own freedom fighter, that's not quite what Sadbh means. Encarta is the name of a new World English Dictionary, and the first dictionary to be written for both print (a hefty 2,172-page tome selling at £30 in UK) and electronic publication (CD-ROM at £29 in UK). Bloomsbury and Microsoft are the joint publishers.
Wondering what arm candy is? It's American slang for "a good-looking woman with whom a man does not have a relationship who accompanies him to a social event by prior arrangement". A gym rat, classified as "informal" rather than as slang (no country of origin given), is one who "spends a great deal of time exercising or playing a sport in a gymnasium." There's a lot of similar fun to be had by browsing though the pages.
There are also definitions for things that might never have particularly taxed your brain before. Homolosine projection, for instance, is "a map of the Earth's surface that distorts the oceans in order to represent the continents with a minimum of distortion." Bound to be worth a few points in a pub quiz.
Still on words, definitions, and dictionaries: not to be outdone in the dictionary stakes, the Oxford English are updating their own lexicon. Or rather, you personally have the opportunity to help them do so. The OED are looking for new words and accompanying definitions to include in their next edition.
The first instalment of the (next) definitive OED will be published online in March 2000, with the entire update ready by 2010, at an estimated cost of £35 million. They are currently collecting words and definitions from the international public.
If you want your favourite new slang or other words to get a mention in the next edition, bear in mind that they really must be new (in other words, check that they're not already in the current dictionary), be accompanied by published evidence of usage (for instance, a newspaper cutting, and entered on a special form, available from OED Department, Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP.
According to the most recent issue of The Bookseller, Dillons bookshops, which were bought by Waterstones not long ago, will be renamed as such by October. So what's going to happen to Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street, which was bought by Dillons and then Waterstones? Will we shortly be seeing two Waterstones just a, ahem, stone's throw from each other?
Cormac Kinsella of the current Dawson Street Waterstones says not. "Hodges Figgis is a very strong brand name", he declares. "So it'll be staying as it is."
But it would be nice to think that Hodges Figgis won't be remaining quite as it is at present: any time Sadbh goes in to browse, she emerges blinking and half-blinded. When are they going to light up the darkest bookshop in Dublin?
THE recent tropical weather must have played some part in inspiring the French Department in UCD towards the theme of its September conference: Caribbean Writing in French - Place and Displacement. The conference, which will be held through French, runs for three days, from 2nd September to the 4th.
Haitian novelist and academic, Emile Ollivier, and writer Ernest Pepin from Guadeloupe, will be in Dublin for it , and speakers will be visiting from Japan, Australia, and the States.
The papers will include Transatlantic displacement and the problematics of space; Central questions in anglophone Caribbean writing - history and the future in Naipaul, Walcott and Harris; and, most intriguing, one entitled Stubborn chunks - chaotic soups and Caribbean identity. Details from the Department of French in UCD.
Sean Donovan, President of the Cusack Literary Society, writes to draw attention to the fact that this is the Centenary Year of Margaret Anna Cusack, better known as the Nun of Kenmare, who died in 1899, and who was the author of some 100 books on history and social reform.
Mr Donovan writes: "The only reason for holding back this phoenix writer is that she was missing for 100 years by being excommunicated by the Church in 1888 . . . is it not in the interest of tourism that our libraries and museums display the talent of a renowned lady author of 100 books?"
Bord Failte, take note.