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Slang Gets Seal of Approval

Language purists may fume but any "dipstick" can tell them to "chill out" with the approval of Penguin, the publisher, when its new dictionary is published on Thursday.

Hundreds of words, classified as slang when the last edition was published 14 years ago, are now classified as "informal English".

They include "freebie" and "dosh" and phrases such as "on the take" and "brewer's droop".

Nigel Wilcockson, editor of The New Penguin English Dictionary, said: "When Penguin last published a dictionary, all these words were listed as slang. This warned people not to use them when they wanted to be taken seriously in mainstream society.

These words are now classified as informal, which shows a major shift in our attitudes.

You might still be unwise to use these words in a business report or a lawyer's brief, but essentially they're now part of general English."

Television, cinema, newspapers and magazines have helped popularize slang vocabulary, especially among the young. The frequency with which each word appeared in print or on screen determined its status, compilers said. Other promotions to the dictionary's hallowed pages include "blubber" to describe a fat person and "crumpet" in its Carry On sense.

John Lister, of the Plain English Campaign, said: "A lot of the time you do find that dictionaries can be a little hasty in adding new words, especially when you consider language changes so quickly now that words risk becoming passe before the end of the print run."

Perhaps Penguin would say that was "fad-surfing", meaning "the persistent and often meaningless following of the latest trends".

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The Rebirth of Web Analytics

The largest online seller of bags is betting Web analytics will help it keep up with the latest consumer buying trends and help it choose the right advertising schemes over the holiday season. Using Web analytics, eBags has identified the colours that consumers are looking for, as well as determined other baggage-related trends.

For example, Chris Seahorn, director of business development for eBags told the E-Commerce Times that Web analytics clued the vendor that iPod cases would be a hot item this shopping season.

Based on that information, eBags quickly built out a "digital lifestyle" page that features cases for all types of electronics. That's not the only way analytics have helped.

"The search terms help us scale," Seahorn said. "By knowing what the trends are ahead of time and by adding new key categories, we've literally generated thousands of new dollars per week. I think those would have been lost sales otherwise. I think going into the holiday season, it will be tens of thousands of dollars."

John Mellor, vice president of marketing for Omniture, the software vendor that provides Web analytics tools to these and other top Internet brands, told the E-Commerce Times that Web analytics is becoming mainstream in the online retailing community.

"Some of our sophisticated customers are using Web analytics 10 optimize their sites all the way through the final days of the buying cycle," Mellor said. "Web analytics is becoming more of a have-to-have technology because you can't improve what you can't measure."