If ya gotta ask you'll never know.

A riposte often attributed to Louis Armstrong, when he was asked what jazz is, that flip phrase would appear rather snobbish from the lips of lesser mortals. It is tempting to invoke it when (as often happens) I'm asked, "Why should I be on the Internet?" But a few examples are worth 1000 arguments.

One of the more foolish ideas about the Internet is that it wastes time. An otherwise intelligent friend says he is afraid of becoming so absorbed that he'll have no time for "more serious" pursuits. I would like to say to him, "Nem veszi be a gyomrom." In case your Hungarian is a bit rusty, that means, "I can't stomach it." I don't speak Hungarian, but it only took me a few seconds to translate that phrase using a cool tool I found at www.voycabulary.com.

VoyCabulary is a free service that transforms any web page -- or indeed almost any text at all -- into links to dictionary or thesaurus lookups. Type a web address (URL) into their lookup box, then select definitions from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a thesaurus, or a medical or computer dictionary. VoyCabulary loads the page, transforming every word on it into a hypertext link to the definition in the selected dictionary.

Or choose from language dictionaries including French, German, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Swedish, Welsh or, of course, Hungarian. I just typed in "word" and found that in Welsh it is "gair." Maybe I'm easily impressed, but I think few homes or offices would have Welsh and Hungarian dictionaries to hand when they need them.

Of course, few of us have much call for such exotic translations. But if you're tracing your family's roots in Europe you may find that the sources are in your grandmothers' mother tongue, and tools like VoyCabulary can help make up for your lack of attention to her when you were a child.

While we're on the subject of words, I don't know anyone whose vocabulary can't stand improvement. A kind soul on the Internet will send you a new word definition every day, along with pronunciation (by a real human) in Real Audio or WAV formats. Subscribe for free at http://wordsmith.org/awad.

I've often discussed the many valuable Internet search engines, which are themselves sufficient reason to be online. An excellent new one, Google, was launched recently by Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Stanford University. Google is so confident that it will come up with the right results 1st that it includes an "I'm feeling lucky" button. For simple searches, at least, pressing that button takes you not to a listing of addresses, but directly to the relevant page.

I entered the name of NNN's own "www" (wild, wacky and wonderful) film critic, Bob Blackwood, and was whisked to the World Science Fiction Convention page, where Bob was a participant. (Google hasn't had time to index Bob's new home page, http://www.blackwood.org/films.htm.

You may find the same information in the library as on the Internet, but it may take you until next Michaelmas -- September 29, as I found out at http://olympus.athens.net/~hartman/words.htm.

You could look that up in your Funk and Wagnall's. But you won't find Bob Blackwood there. Yet.

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