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Apple Businesses News

Podcasting Officially a Word 281

Posted by samzenpus from the I-consider-myself-a-wordsmith dept.
goldseries writes "The BBC is reporting that the New Oxford American Dictionary is adding podcasting to the dictionary. A year ago it was rejected because not enough people were reading it, but, in a ode to the speed of technology's growth, it is being declared the word of the year. Podcasting has been in the Oxford Dictionary of English since last summer. Podcast beat out words such as lifehack and rootkit for inclusion in the dictionaries. I guess no one needs to know what a rootkit is."
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Podcasting Officially a Word More

Podcasting Officially a Word

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  • Food for thought... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Antony-Kyre ( 807195 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:06AM (#14209522)
    It may be a word now, but will anyone still be using it 50 years from now?
    • I'm sure the durable plastic casing will make good fishing bait for years to come.

    • Re:Food for thought... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cjb-nc ( 887319 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:24AM (#14209600)
      "I got your memo, would you go Xerox 10 copies for me for my next meeting?"

      There's a word that was ubiquitous some number of years ago. Can't say I've heard anyone use Xerox as a verb in quite a while. Now it's copy or photocopy. Podcasting will go the same way, eventually. I seriously doubt it will take more than 10 years, much less 50.

    • Re:Food for thought... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:37AM (#14209667)
      It may be a word now, but will anyone still be using it 50 years from now?

      Quite possibly. Remember how 'Hoover' became a generic term for a vacuum cleaner? How 'walkman' became a generic term for a portable personal cassette player?

      I would not be surprised to see 'iPod' becoming a generic term for digital audio players - or, if Apple defends its trademark as well as it probably will, the obvious corruption to just plain 'pod'. The increasingly widespread currency of the word 'podcast' might well cause this to happen more quickly. If you can listen to podcasts on it, it's a pod, right? Not an iPod, because that's only the Apple ones, but a pod nonetheless...

      • Blame the mongers. They are the ones that came first with 'pod'.
      • >I would not be surprised to see 'iPod' becoming a generic term for digital audio players

        I would, simply because there is one already that everyone uses: "MP3 player". Wherever it plays MP3s or not (the Sony ones that played only their craptastic format were still generally called MP3 players). Surprising maybe, since it's two words and MP3 isn't exactly a wizbang-cute sounding word, but there you go.
      • Who calls their vacuum a Hoover? That's almost as bad as some Southerners calling Mountain Dew "Coke".

        Hi can I get a coke?
        What kind?
        Mountain Dew, please.

    • Re:Food for thought... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ObsessiveMathsFreak ( 773371 ) <obsessivemathsfreak.eircom@net> on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:50AM (#14209742) Homepage Journal
      It may be a word now, but will anyone still be using it 50 years from now?

      Marry N'uncle, a swivven'd comely wench shall tell thee by the nonce.

  • Pah (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:07AM (#14209529)
    I'll stick with audio download.

    • Re:Pah (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > I'll stick with audio download.

      Right. can someone explain to me the difference between new trendy "podcast" and the old "ftp" or "scp" or "http" that we use for everything else? It's the same old technology just dressed up and marketed by Apple under another name. Hell, you don't even need Apple or an iPod to be involved in listening to these audio broadcasts.

      It's a marketing gimmick.

      • Re:Pah (Score:5, Insightful)

        by baryon351 ( 626717 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:47AM (#14209728)
        Right. can someone explain to me the difference between new trendy "podcast" and the old "ftp" or "scp" or "http" that we use for everything else? It's the same old technology just dressed up

        Convenience. Back in the early 90s, I remember many remarks like yours about the new WWW. "Can someone explain to me the difference between this new trendy "world wide web" and just downloading files by ftp? It's only text and gifs anyway". Yes podcasts are all just mp3s and xml. They're also one hell of a lot more convenient, in the same way that anyone sane would rather go to www.site.com/index.html instead of manually downloading some text with references to half a dozen images and then go hunting down the images it referred to.

        Podcast = find a show you like, subscribe. listen.
        Audio Download = find a show you like, find how to download it from that particular site, find how often it's updated to know when to check again, download it, move it to your player/audio device, listen.

        Admittedly neither is much different to the other for one single download of one episode. or two. perhaps three, but when you find ten separate podcasts you quite like listening to each episode of, you're bound to just throw it in the too-annoying-to-continue-with basket. This kind of automation benefits the listeners who keep getting their shows easily, and the casters themselves who don't have to continually get their audience to go through a rigmarole of steps just to hear the show. Radio doesn't make you do that.

    • This is the first time I've posted a MOD PARENT UP post... but this one certainly needs to be done. I'm absolutely sick of terms made up by marketing people, especially one so product specific as this.
      • Of course, if you or the parent poster realized that Apple had absolutely nothing [wikipedia.org] to do with creating the term (and that the people who did were a bunch of geeks who almost certainly have no background in marketing, and completely certainly weren't marketing iPods), maybe you'd be less sickened.

    • Re:Pah (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      audio download? how lame. why not call it what it has been called for over 7 years now...

      internet radio or webradio.

      podcasting is kind of funny to me. 2600 and other have been doing it for much longer than podcasting has even been thought of.

      what kills me is the lamer Adam Curry still tries to claim ownership of it. Yay a washed up hasbenn VJ that is trying to hijack something that has existed for a long time now.

    • Re:Pah (Score:2, Troll)

      by jbn-o ( 555068 )

      I see no reason to litter my language with advertisements for what I maintain is a poor product (runs on proprietary software, lacks important features, remarkably expensive, Apple's terms of service with iTunes—what is commonly used with an iPod—change after the purchase [eff.org]).

    • i'm not going to defend "podcast" - i very much wish the term which became dominant for this thing wasn't a walking (er, whatever) advertisement. however...

      a "podcast" is not an "audio download". or rather, that's only part of it. it's also important that it be potentially time-shifted, (at least sorta) subscription based, and automated downloads.

      now my real questions is: what do we do when they get it wrong? they've defined it as explicitly being music; i'm subscribed to several podcasts, and only one ha

  • Including rootkit would be more consistent (Score:5, Funny)

    by dascandy ( 869781 ) <dascandy@gmail.com> on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:07AM (#14209531)
    > ... but we found that not enough people were using it, or were even familiar with the concept ...

    Thanks to Sony and the like, there are more than enough people running a rootkit, so include the word already...

  • New Oxford Japanese Dictionary (Score:3, Funny)

    by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:08AM (#14209536) Homepage
    I guess no one needs to know what a rootkit is.

    Needed in the Japanese version for the Sony employees (music/CD division).

  • Why does podcasting need its own word? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tpgp ( 48001 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:12AM (#14209559) Homepage
    It's just a webcast you can save.

    There's nothing particularly special about it.

  • $sys$ROOTKIT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:16AM (#14209572)
    Now noone will ever know what a rootkit is.

    FYI, if you anagram Podcast, you can come up with 'Stop a CD'

  • Other Technical Words.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Digital Warfare ( 746982 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:20AM (#14209580) Homepage
    I always wondered why other technical words such as "bollocks" never made it in..

  • Rootkit is in the New Oxford American Dictionary.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Afecks ( 899057 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:21AM (#14209587)
    ..you just can't see it ;)

  • Excuse me? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by springbox ( 853816 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:22AM (#14209590)
    It's just a fad word for downloading audio from the Internet. This [uncyclopedia.org] pretty much summarizes it. How did it get added to the dictionary so fast? It's not even generic - it was created in part based on a modern day product. If anything, it should be going into a slang reference guide not a dictionary.

    • Re:Excuse me? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SandSpider ( 60727 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @10:03AM (#14209842) Homepage Journal
      Specifically, it's a word for downloading binary content (generally large binary content, usually audio, video) from the internet in a way that doesn't require active user intervention after subscribing, using a pull model rather than a push model. So emailing an MP3 would not be a podcast, because it's a push technology, but if you use a pull technology such as RSS, Atom, or some manner of SOAP application to direct the download, then it would be a podcast. (Of course, people misuse the word, so it may become more generic than that, but properly, it's as I've written above).

      The point is that it's such an easier interface for the end user that it has become popular in its own rights. Technically, television is movies, just in your home and not in a movie theatre, but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be another word describing it because the interface is different.

      And what's with the attitude that a dictionary is some sort of sacred document that should only include words that you think means something special? Is it the third-grade teacher mentality, which says that "ain't" isn't a word, despite its common usage? The great thing about dictionaries is that they can include all forms of words, and give you the proper instances for use. In the example above, the Oxford English Dictionary says:
      ain't - informal contraction of
        am not; are not; is not : if it ain't broke, don't fix it. [ORIGIN: originally representing London dialect.]
        has not; have not : they ain't got nothing to say. [ORIGIN: from dialect hain't.]

      USAGE The use of ain't was widespread in the 18th century and is still perfectly normal in many dialects and informal contexts in both North America and Britain. Today, however, it does not form part of standard English and should not be used in formal contexts.


      A proper dictionary should include words that people want to understand the definition of. If everyone is using the word podcast, and you don't know what it is, a dictionary might be a good place to look it up, especially nowadays when dictionary information is available online so can be distributed faster.

      =Brian
      • I was taught by my english teacher in high school that ain't was a perfectly valid word as long as you are using it in the "am not" sense, where it originated. He said that this was because there is no other way to form a contraction based on these words ( amn't? ).

        I dunno if he is full of crap or not, but at least he wasn't anal about it. It makes sense too, there is no reason to use ain't for 'is not' when isn't is just as short and is more proper.

        • I take a similar stance on "Y'all", because English doesn't otherwise have a third-person plural pronoun.

          "Youse", on the other hand, drives me nuts. It's y'all or nothing.

    • Re:Excuse me? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by BodhiCat ( 925309 )

      It's not even generic - it was created in part based on a modern day product. If anything, it should be going into a slang reference guide not a dictionary.

      There are many words in the English language that started out as brand names. Common examples are kleenex and band-aid. Its not surprising that words based on brand names for computer hardware, software, or processes have made it into the Oxford dictionary.

  • You are oh so right.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by spectrokid ( 660550 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:29AM (#14209620) Homepage
    I guess no one needs to know what a rootkit is."
    No, no non-techies should have to know about this. They ought to live in a world where it is ok to listen to a CD you bought legally in a normal shop.

  • podcast or blogcast? (Score:5, Funny)

    by hutteman ( 909420 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:30AM (#14209625) Homepage
    I guess Microsoft employees can now stop calling them blogcasts [com.com]

  • Please kill me now... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jonr ( 1130 )
    Podcasting... Can I throw up now?
    • Go for it; the world will just continue on without you.

      What's the big deal anyway? The ubiquity of MP3 players, the invention of RSS, and the ease with which a person can record audio/video makes the invention of an online audio feed inevitable; it has to be called SOMETHING, and podcast is as good as any.

      A podcast is the online equivalent to an independent newspaper, except that the delivery mechanism, the medium, and the subscription are all online.
  • It is about time that podcasting aka Personal On Demand Casting is added to the dictionary. Though I haven't yet managed to find any podcasts. Everytime I try to find one, I end up with MP3 files, sometimes a video file. Well, perhaps someday I'll manage to download a podcast file.
  • Dictionaries never were and never will be a source of information about the english language, expecially not about what words /don't/ exist.

    if you think to yourself "He can't possibly have an argument to support that statement!" You probably misread the statement.
    • ...thank god podcasting is "officially a word". Now I can utter it in speech without fear of spontaneously combusting because I hate it when that happens.

    • Dictionaries never were and never will be a source of information about the english language, expecially not about what words /don't/ exist.

      "never" is an absolute that isn't true about your statement.

      Why? It works fine for Scrabble(TM).
      • Do you speak Scrabble, or do you speak English?

        In order for the game to be played, there is only one baseball. Does this mean footballs do not exist?

        "Never" is factual. The exaggeration comes from not having placed limits on what constitutes "information" (though from the context of the article, it can be derived by anyone). The purpose of the second sentence seems to have been lost on you.
    • Wow, if that's true, it should have it's own Slashdot headline, and we should probably notify the entire population of the planet:

      "Dictionaries never were and never will be a source of information about the english language!"

      Good thing they're useful as firestarter!

      By the way, it should be "English" language...look it up if you don't believe me. =)

  • Different Strokes (Score:4, Funny)

    by scottennis ( 225462 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:36AM (#14209659) Homepage
    I always thought "podcasting" sounded like a euphemism for masturbation.

  • News (at least for me) (Score:3, Funny)

    by trollable ( 928694 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:39AM (#14209680) Homepage
    In the USA, words are created by companies.
  • Podcasting has to be the most useless word ever. Last year we were "downloading audio", this year we're "listening to podcasts" - right.
  • Am I the only one who's never heard of this term?

  • Depends which country (Score:5, Funny)

    by nighty5 ( 615965 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @09:57AM (#14209799)
    Not so the US, but the word 'root' in Australia is slang to have sex.

    Rootkit - sounds like some sort of fuckfest preparation guide!

    • Smurf #1: Hey, did you have a good time last night? Smurf #2: Smurf-tacular! Smurf #1: Yeah, I saw you leave with Smurfette. Smurf #2: Oh man, as soon as we got out of the bar, she started smurfing me. Smurf #1: Shut the Smurf up! Smurf #2: Yeah! Smurf #1: Right in the Smurfing parking lot? Smurf #2: Smurf-Yeah! Smurf #1: Oh! That is freaking Smurf!

  • Dictionaries don't OFFICIALLY make things words. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by httpamphibio.us ( 579491 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @10:02AM (#14209834)
    Dictionaries just report on current usage of groups of letters that have meaning. They don't officiate anything. That's one of the problems with things like acrostics and Scrabble, they don't care if things are actually words or not, just that they are in the dictionary. There is a vast portion of language that manifests itself in words that has never and will never be in the dictionary.
  • Because, really, I didn't know until I looked it up:

    Dictionary.com Main Entry: podcasting
    Part of Speech: noun
    Definition: the Web-based broadcast of music which works with software that automatically detects new files and is accessed by subscription
    Etymology: 2004; iPod + broadcasting

  • Podcasting is a temporary solution (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @10:28AM (#14210038)
    .. to the iPod and most other mp3-players not having any radio tuner or internet access when you are on the road.

    When iPods and other mp3-players have constant Internet access, "podcasting" will be about as common as people taping radio feeds on their cassette deck to play later. Hardly something requiring a new word.
  • to keep 'rootkit' out of the dictionary this year?

  • Yay! (Score:2)

    by kuzb ( 724081 )

    Congratulations Slashdot, yet again you've fallen victim to the Apple marketing machine. Podcasting wasn't invented by Apple [wikipedia.org], they just want you to think it was. Even Oxford terms it "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player". The word itself is stupid; you don't need an iPod to podcast (even though many are going to think the 'pod' part is refering to an iPod, it means any portable media player) and you don't h

    • You are quite correct. Podcasting is a slightly misleading term, that seems to give undue credit to Appple. But, from a marketting standpoint, it's a great word (which is why it is used so much). It's short, it's catchy, it's fairly understandable (although it tends to lead people to think iPods are the only audio player the technology works with), and most importantly, it relates to ideas people already are familiar with and use on a daily basis.

      Most people listen to broadcasts, so listening to 'podcasts'

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