Mark Cousins’ excellent documentary has an interactive timeline taking you through the history of cinema.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-story-of-film-an-odyssey/articles/history-of-film-timeline
Archive for August, 2012
28
Aug
12
history of film timeline
Scribd is a great site that is basically youtube for documents. User generated content (eg. student projects, PHd disserations) are there along with published documents such as journal articles and some books. Very worthwhile to have a search to see if a topic you are doing is listed in their search engine – for ANY subject you do – and it is a good place to start if you are conducting your own research.
Words like ‘Google’ prove that a noun (“Google”) can become a verb (“To Google a news feed). Recently though, people have been getting hot under the collar after Medal and Podium have become verbs.
The BBC notes:
For example, “he’ll be hoping to medal” or “she’ll know that performance is good enough to podium”.
But while some might suspect both to be neologisms, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was Lord Byron who first used “medal” as a verb.
Twitter users have spent days exploiting the Scooby Doo-inspired “we could have got gold if it wasn’t for you medalling kids” gag.
“To medal in [a sporting] context has been on the radar for the Collins English Dictionary since the 1990s,” says Collins consultant editor Ian Brookes. The earliest is from an Australian newspaper in 1995.
The first example of “to podium” in the dictionary’s database is a 2004 story in the Denver Post relating to a skiing article. The writer uses the reference “to podium” and adds an explanation “to finish third or higher”.
Turning a noun into a verb is something that’s been going on for centuries – it was Shakespeare’s Hamlet who says Claudius “out-Herods Herod”.
So that means we can all blame Shakespeare then!
While we are discussing the language of the Olympics, check out the spoken language of two very different Olympian’s parents: South African swimmer Chad Le Clos’ dad and American gymnast Aly Raisman’s parents.
suzannemorris's blog 