词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Anu Garg: A.Word.A.Day

Broadcast: March 6, 2003

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- our guest is Anu Garg, the man behind a popular e-mail service called A.Word.A.Day.

RS: And for the past nine years, that's exactly what subscribers have gotten for free: Monday through Friday, one word a day, not just defined, but complete with a full "biography."

AA: Anu Garg talked to us from Seattle, Washington, where part of his home doubles as his office, a space filled with dictionaries and other books on words.

RS: He says he developed a passion for the English language as a young boy in his native India.

GARG: "I learned it when I was in sixth grade. My mother tongue is Hindi. But what I found interesting was English has a lot of words from Hindi, and later on I discovered that it has words from almost all the languages in the world."

AA: "I'm curious [about] a couple of examples of Hindi words in English."

GARG: "A lot of common words like shampoo, what you do to your hair in the morning. It came from Hindi, 'champee.' In Hindi 'champee' means to massage 1 the head. Words like jungle or guru or nirvana -- a lot of words from Hindi, or ultimately from Sanskrit."

RS: "So how many people from how many countries are now receiving their daily lexicon 2 from you?"

GARG: "Right now there are about five-hundred-and-fifty-thousand subscribers. They are in more than two-hundred countries."

AA: "That's basically the entire world."

GARG: "Yeah, almost -- including as far away as Antarctica."

RS: "How are you able to connect with them on a daily basis?"

GARG: "I have found ways to conserve 3 time. For example, I don't watch TV and I just enjoy it so much, it doesn't feel like I work, I feel like I'm just having fun playing."

RS: "Do you have another job that you get paid to do, or is this something that has become a source of income, too?"

GARG: "My background is in computer science, and I was working as a computer engineer until last year. Now I am a full-time 4 writer. My book has come out and fortunately it has been doing very well, and I get royalties 5 from the book. I have some paying subscribers, people who sign up to receive mailings without advertisements, and also people who contribute voluntarily."

AA: "So now can you take us through a typical day -- when do you begin and how do you find your word of the day?"

GARG: "There is no typical day. I feel like an explorer discovering new fossils or new gems 6 every day. Every morning I wake up and open the dictionary and I find new words. Sometimes I'm reading a book and I'll find an unusual or interesting word and I will make note. And eventually they build up. On a typical day I will be reading e-mail, responding to some of the e-mails, taking care of the Web site, making sure hackers 8 can't hack 7 in, playing with my daughter, answering her questions. 'So Daddy, tell me, why do we call a dog a dog?' So I say 'OK, let's look it up.'"

AA: "And what did you find?"

GARG: "Well, 'dog' came from Old English, 'docga.' Currently the English language has about five-hundred-thousand words, but new words are coming into the language every day."

AA: "And five-hundred-thousand makes it larger than any other language out there."

GARG: "Yes, English has the largest word stock of any language, and not only new words are coming in, but the existing words, they change shades of meanings."

RS: "Do you have a favorite word, or is it just so hard to pick among all these children."

GARG: "I find that all words are fascinating. You have to find their histories to see how they came about."

RS: "Come on, give me a favorite."

GARG: "One word that really resonates with people is 'mondegreen.' A mondegreen is when you mishear something. A lot of songs, when we hear, we mishear them. There is one song, a lot of people hear it as "there is a bathroom on the right.'"

MUSIC: "Bad Moon Rising"/Creedence Clearwater Revival 9

RS: In this 1969 classic by John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival, the phrase is not "there's a bathroom on the right." The phrase is, "there's a bad moon on the rise." The song is called "Bad Moon Rising."

AA: To learn how to sign up for A.Word.A.Day, you can go to Anu Garg's Web site. It's wordsmith dot o-r-g. And he's collected some of his words into a book called "A Word A Day."

RS: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.