On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Davis, Iain E. wrote: #Hmm. Define "online". # #If it means "at a computer", It's probably something close to 100 #hrs/wk for me. I certainly wouldn't call it that, any more than being in a room with a radio -- not necessarily turned on -- counts as listening to the radio. "Online", to me, means actively using the Internet (including its subset the WWW). Well, I guess it could depend on context. If my machine is connected to the Internet and I get an alert when email arrives, even if I'm using a local app, then I could say that I'm online in the sense of being accessible by Internet, but not in the sense of where my attention is. I find this question interesting linguistically, and I'm bcc-ing this post to the American Dialect Society's discussion list. -- Mark A. Mandel Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania