Frenemy, Flash Mob, and Other New English Words

Posted by Alex in Book & Lit on July 12, 2009 at 1:37 pm


Friend/Enemy Ambigram, by Naguib and Fadilah of Nagfa

English, she’s a’changin’. The latest edition of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary are 100 words that you may already be using:

There are words such as locavore (one who eats foods grown locally), frenemy (someone who acts like a friend but is really an enemy), waterboarding (an interrogation technique use to induce the sensation of drowning), vlogs (a blog that contains video material) and webisode (a TV show that can be viewed at a website).

There’s also flash mob (a group of people summoned electronically to a designated spot at a specified time to perform an indicated action before dispersing) and green-collar (involving actions for protecting the natural environment).

Some words that just now made the cut have been around for generations. The term "sock puppet" — a false online identity used for deceptive purposes — was tracked to 1959 but has taken on new popular use with people using fake IDs on social networking sites.

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The Millionth English Word: Web 2.0

Posted by Alex in Book & Lit on June 10, 2009 at 1:33 pm

A new English word is created about every 98 minutes, according to the website The Global Language Monitor. Based on that rate, English passed the millionth word mark earlier today.

Here are the 10 latest words in the English language:

1,000,000: Web 2.0 – The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.

999,999: Jai Ho! – The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as “It is accomplished”. Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire”.

999,998: N00b — From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term.

999,997: Slumdog – a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India.

999,996: Cloud Computing – The ‘cloud’ has been technical jargon for the Internet for many years. It is now passing into more general usage.

999,995: Carbon Neutral — One of the many phrases relating to the effort to stem Climate Change.

999,994: Slow Food — Food other than the fast-food variety hopefully produced locally (locavores).

999,993: Octomom – The media phenomenon relating to the travails of the mother of the octuplets.

999,992: Greenwashing – Re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly.

999,991: Sexting – Sending email (or text messages) with sexual content.

For the full story, visit the GLM website: Link

 
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The Oldest Words in the English Language

Posted by Alex in Book & Lit on February 26, 2009 at 3:13 pm

Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, and colleagues have identified some of the oldest words in the English language using computer analyses:

Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years. [...]

At the root of the Reading University effort is a lexicon of 200 words that is not specific to culture or technology, and is therefore likely to represent concepts that have not changed across nations or millennia.

"We have lists of words that linguists have produced for us that tell us if two words in related languages actually derive from a common ancestral word," said Professor Pagel. [...]

For example, the words "I" and "who" are among the oldest, along with the words "two", "three", and "five". The word "one" is only slightly younger.
William the Conqueror (Getty)
Time-travellers would find a few sounds familiar in William’s words

The word "four" experienced a linguistic evolutionary leap that makes it significantly younger in English and different from other Indo-European languages.

Meanwhile, the fastest-changing words are projected to die out and be replaced by other words much sooner.

For example, "dirty" is a rapidly changing word; currently there are 46 different ways of saying it in the Indo-European languages, all words that are unrelated to each other. As a result, it is likely to die out soon in English, along with "stick" and "guts".

Verbs also tend to change quite quickly, so "push", "turn", "wipe" and "stab" appear to be heading for the lexicographer’s chopping block.

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