Metaforix.com: Bookworms, Wordsmiths and Trendwatchers

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Language

If you're a language maven, whatever your pleasure or serious purpose, you'll find it on the Web. Would you like to play a word game? Do a crossword puzzle? Look up meanings, origins, synonyms, antonyms? Translate English text into another language? You'll find all that and more.

This page of our site is a potpourri of language-related destinations that have struck our fancy. (You'll find some others among our favorite sites, as well.)

French on the Net

Maintaining the purity of the French language is a never-ending task -- and the Internet hasn't made things any easier for the venerable Acad�mie fran�aise or for its Canadian counterpart, l'Office de la langue fran�aise du Qu�bec. In a valiant effort to stem linguistic cybercreep, both institutions have issued lists of approved French equivalents for English infoterminology.

Not that these two branches of the language police always agree on le mot juste. If you're surfing from Qu�bec, le Web is fine; from Paris, it's la toile. When you reach the site de la toile, site Web, or site you're looking for in Paris, the first thing you'll see is la page d'accueil. In Qu�bec, you're more likely to land on la page d'ouverture. If you're worried about security on either side of the pond, you may want to refuse les t�moins. But whatever you do, don't call them cookies.

As Kevin McLaughlin pointed out last fall in a column on Business2.com, Francophone Web content is a lot scarcer than, say, content for speakers of Japanese or German. And, McLaughlin reports, the explanations are more cultural than technological. The French are not only slow to embrace change, but they also are suspicious of the entrepreneurial bent embodied by les pointcoms. In Qu�bec, French-language content originated in France might likely be rejected as a form of colonialism.

Just a couple of those speed bumps on the Information Superhighway. C'est la vie!

"Language, Translation, and Language Technology"

The Internet moves quickly, but not quickly enough to keep pace with globalization. With most sites in English and geared for English speakers, high-quality language sites can hardly proliferate fast enough.

Enter Foreignword.com, "an Internet site dedicated to the world of languages and translation." Geared for professional translators and others whose interests or needs involve language, the site features bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, machine translation resources, a resume bank of translators, a discussion forum, and links to numerous related resources. The languages currently featured on the site range from Afrikaans to Yiddish, with more to come.

To visit this unusual resource, go to:

www.Foreignword.com

Magnetic Poetry

I don't know what your refrigerator door looks like, but mine is covered with poetry. Well, to be precise, it's a mass of little white magnets, each with its own word, letter, or punctuation mark -- and lots of the magnets are grouped into poems.

Magnetic Poetry online appeals to me for two reasons: First, the ready stock of words jump-starts my imagination. Second, making a magnetic poem is like composing text in a word processor. It's liberating, because it's so easy to change things around if you're not satisfied. (The poems on my refrigerator door sometimes don't last an hour. Other times, they become permanent fixtures of my decor.)

There are many Magnetic Poetry kits with a variety of themes, target audiences, and languages. The link above will take you to the manufacturer's site, where you can play to your heart's content with the currently featured kit, just by dragging and dropping the words.

If you become inspired to redecorate your refrigerator, follow this link to purchase a kit of your own. 7/31/00

Anagrams

An anagram, says The American Heritage Dictionary, is a "word or phrase formed by reordering the letters of another word or phrase, such as satin to stain." The Internet Anagram Server uses a program known as an "anagram engine" to rearrange the letters for you. Not incidentally, the site also offers a wealth of anagrams and word-related lore.

Anyone who loves wordplay is a kindred spirit, so far as I'm concerned. As if anagrams weren't enough, author Anu Garg further endears himself through his interest in Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," a nonsense poem (or maybe not!) he seeks to decode through the magic of anagrams.

When I entered "metaforix," the engine spewed forth over 350 anagrams. Some of the most amusing results: MAITRE FOX, EXAM FOR IT, AFRO TIMEX, AXIOM FRET, MATRIX FOE, and AX ME FOR IT. To generate a shorter list, I might have used the filtering capabilities of the advanced anagram engine.

With apologies to Lewis Carroll, on the frabjous day when I discovered this site, I chortled in my joy. 8/1/00