And so, in the revised entry for rock included in the O.E.D.’s June 2010 update, Melle Mel trumps Big Bank Hank as the earliest known M.C. to “rock the mic.” Though fresh evidence could always push the usage back even further, there’s a certain justice to setting the record straight, more than three decades after the fact. Historical lexicography? It rocks.

From Ben Zimmer’s July 5 piece in the New York Times, On Language: When Did We First ‘Rock the Mic’?.

Zimmer takes a look at the use of “rock” as a verb as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, and particularly it’s use in hip-hop.

… Words become very important in the power relations between individuals and groups, in the exercise of law and democratic ideals. They help define the other: a member of a group with other religious, racial, gender, or biological affiliations.

A good example is the use of the five-letter English word tribe. The Western media’s analysis of events in Africa reveals the word as the main obstacle in the way of a meaningful illumination of dynamics in modern Africa. Tribe — with its clearly pejorative connotation of the primitive and the premodern — is contrasted with nation, which connotes a more positive sense of arrival at the modern. Every African community is a tribe, and every African a tribesman. We can see the absurdity of the current usages, where thirty million Yorubas are referred to as a tribe, but four million Danes as a nation. A group of 250,000 Icelanders constitutes a nation, while 10 million Ibos make up a tribe. And yet, what’s commonly described as a tribe, when looked at through objective lenses, fulfills all the criteria of shared history, geography, economic life, language, and culture that are used to define a nation. These critical attributes are clearly social and historical, not biological.

So says Kenyan writer, academic, and activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o in his Transition Magazine essay, The Myth of Tribe in African Politics. My own minor quibble: he uses Western rather than the less-popular, but in, my opinion, more accurate Northern (is South America not, geographically-speaking, ‘the west’?). But his essay drops all kinds of knowledge on language, the concomitant rise of racism and colonialism, and our post-colonial perceptions of Africa that are only slightly more evolved.

PC: Developing Web applications in Arabic requires special care. What are the most important concerns and what components do you provide to address those concerns?

KA: Besides the search issue presented above, some of Arab countries use Hijri calendar instead of Gregorian calendar. So I developed classes to convert dates between those two calendars, as well as an Arabic version from date and strtotime PHP functions. … Another issue that is handled in this project is related to rendering Arabic text correctly in some libraries like GD, PDF, SWF and even VRML.

This interested me simply because it raises awarness of cultural, linguistic, and character set challenges that monolingual developers, or Western character set developers don’t often think about. [Via PHP Developer]