Nice series in the New York Times Magazine yesterday on different perspectives on teaching today.  There’s a nicely-detailed article on a multi-cultural negotiations workshop, and another on lectures on YouTube.

There’s also an interesting William Safire article on changing trends of slang expressions on campus.  Evidently “hot” isn’t hot anymore, and “fierce” is.

Fast-changing slang usage made me wonder…do corpus researchers limit date ranges when doing statistical modeling of lexical frequency?  I ask because I’m (very) peripherally involved with a project re-purposing a “corpus-informed” coursebook for online delivery. The corpus influence on the coursebook series is actually very well done and useful, but I wondered about a section titled “Posting to a website”…do 22-year-olds post to a “website” (more importantly, do they say they do)? Or do they post to a MySpace “page”, or a “forum” or “thread”, or their Facebook “page”, or their “blog”?

I wonder about the relative frequency of these collocations, and how this frequency changes over time, and how the the corpora analyses are time-bound to follow fast-changing language about uses of technology and slang.