Are you a crunkster or a fanboy? Uberbuff!

Are you a crunksteror a fanboy? Uberbuff!
LONDON -- Crunk is good? Among the hot new words, it's ova-wicked, even uberbuff. They're just some of the entries in a book published today that lists newly coined words as well as jargon used in technology, politics and the media. Crunk -- the American hybrid for crazy and drunk -- is an example of how words evolve from popular culture, according to Susie Dent, author of "Fanboys and Overdogs: The Language Report." "Crunk is generating all sorts of offshoot terms in the U.S. -- crunk 'n' b, crunk rock, crunkster -- and looks set to catch on in Britain, too," Dent said. "New words travel from one variety of English to another and at a rapidly increasing rate, thanks to the way language is exchanged today over e-mail, chat-rooms, TV, etc." Dent's new book also discusses the tendency "big up" our language. Nothing is ever good or even great anymore -- instead, we opt for ova-wicked and uberbuff. Government appointees are tsars, and experts are meisters. Job titles also reflect this kind of inflation. The head of verbal communications is really just a receptionist, while stockboys have been promoted to stock replenishment executives, she said. As for the "fanboys" in the book's title, Dent said they're guys who are absorbed by a passion for comic books or computer games. The book also looks at vocabulary shifts from the past century. The year 1905 saw the introduction of peace economy. With the next year came tyrannosaurus. Many words on the list are related to events -- 1940 introduced Jim Crow and 1980 brought Reaganomics. Podcasting was last year's word. The front-runner for the 2005 word of the year is sudoku, the logic puzzle that has replaced crosswords as a favorite way to kill time over lunch break.
Former head writerfor Muppets dies at 67
SAN FRANCISCO -- Jerry Juhl, the Emmy Award-winning former head writer for the Muppets who provided much of the heart and soul to Jim Henson's iconic troupe of fleece and foam puppets, has died. He was 67. Juhl, who also co-wrote most of the Muppet feature films and wrote for "Sesame Street" during its early years, died of cancer Sept. 27 in a hospital in San Francisco, said Arthur Novell, executive director of the Jim Henson Legacy. Juhl, who was semiretired, lived in the northern California town of Caspar. Juhl co-wrote "The Muppet Movie," which marked the Muppets' move to the big screen in 1979. He later wrote the screenplay for "The Muppet Christmas Carol" and co-wrote "The Great Muppet Caper," "Muppet Treasure Island" and "Muppets From Space." He also served as head writer and creative producer on the award-winning "Fraggle Rock," Henson's 1983-87 TV series about a race of small creatures that live underground. "So much of the humor, irreverence, caring and heart that has been central to our work for 50 years began with Jerry Juhl," Lisa Henson, co-chief executive of the Jim Henson Co., said in a statement. "He was -- in many ways -- the real voice of the Muppets and of every project from the Jim Henson Company." Frank Oz, the director and veteran Muppet performer whose characters include Miss Piggy, said Juhl "brought tremendous soul" to the Muppets. "He was the person responsible really for the heart of the Muppets," Oz told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday.
Report: Disabled childrenstill are institutionalized
GENEVA -- Many disabled children in the former communist countries of eastern Europe and Central Asia are being put in institutions, perpetuating the old Soviet practice of "child abandonment," according to a UNICEF report released Wednesday. Instead of integrating the children into general schools, these countries still employ a policy of "defectology," a leftover Soviet discipline in which disabled children are put in institutions that separate them from society and their families, said the study by U.N. Children's Fund's Innocenti Research Center in Florence, Italy. "These children want to be given a chance to grow up in a family," said Maria Calivis, UNICEF's regional director. Attitudes toward disabled young people are getting better in these formerly communist regions, but improvements in state support are lagging behind, the 64-page study said. As of 2002, some 317,000 children in these countries lived in such separated institutions, a number largely unchanged since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the report found. By contrast, the rate of institutionalization in Western countries is up to three times lower. "The prospect for these children is to graduate to an institution for adults and to face a pattern of denial of human rights," the study said. The countries studied included eight former communist states that have since become members of the European Union -- Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia -- and two others scheduled to join soon -- Bulgaria and Romania.
Combined dispatches