The millionth word to enter the English lexicon is pure geek-speak, the Telegraph reports: Web 2.0 was entered this morning by Global Language Monitor, which recognizes words once they’ve appeared 25,000 times in the media, blogs, and social websites.
The linguistic cataloger estimates that a new word is generated every 98 minutes.
Jai ho—Hindi for “may you be victorious”—came just one word too early. Gaming term n00b, financial tsunami, and octomom were also recently added. “Some 400 years after the death of the Bard, the words and phrases were coined far from Stratford-upon-Avon, emerging instead from Silicon Valley, India, China and Poland,” says a word analyst. 
The Global Language Monitor, however, accepts as a word any coinage that has gained sufficiently wide usage: this includes hybrid words in Chinglish (Chinese English), Hinglish (Hindi English), Spanglish (Spanish English), Hollywords (terms created by the film industry), computer jargon and words forged by the internet
Appropriately enough, the 1,000,000th word accepted as genuine yesterday was “Web 2.0” which was defined as “the next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you”.
The language of the internet has itself evolved, with words that were once preserve of the cyber-boffins gaining universal acceptance: blog, byte, e-mail, spam, twitter and so on. Ancient or Classic Geek has evolved into Modern Geek.
The spread of English in the 20th century was remarkable enough: in the first decade of the 21st century, however, it has evolved and expanded more rapidly, and more strangely, than any language in history. Jai Ho!
Thursday, June 11, 2009
English acquires its millionth word
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Comments :
0 comments to “English acquires its millionth word”
Post a Comment