Important Message from Grammar Girl

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Protocols

According to Freeman [1] the word 'protocol' comes from the Greek proto (first) and kolla (glue) and indicated the first sheet of a roll of papyrus whose sheets are glued together. It "listed the contents of the manuscript and its purport." The American Heritage Dictionary [2] concurs. The reason this caught my attention is that in most network protocols the first part of a packet is generally the header, which also lists its contents.

[1] Morton S. Freeman, The Story Behind the Word, ISI Press, Philadelphia, 1985, pp. 218-219.
[2] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2006, p. 1410.

Google Language Tools Improved

I like a couple of the new features of Google Language tools:

So what does 'Canada' mean?

First note the Spanish keyboard. Nice--this makes it much easier to type Spanish.
Now notice the tabs at the tops of the text areas, allowing one to quickly change the translate from and translate to languages. And the languages are easily changed. Nice.

Also worth noting is that they now support Latin, which was not the case not too long ago. Google is about search, and to a large degree search is about language, so the work'they're putting into this shouldn't be a surprise.