"New" Words From the Geek Culture

thatskinnyguy sends news of Merriam-Webster's 2008 list of new words and, to no-one's surprise, a good number of them come out of geek culture: words like webinar, malware, netroots, pretexting, and fanboy are now official words according to M-W. The CNet article pulls out one "new" word for special appreciation — mondegreen — and, while the article gets the origin right, it ends with a lame call for readers to send in their favorite mondegreens. (CNet does have the good grace to link the Kiss This Guy site.) SFGate columnist Jon Carroll has been collecting readers' mondegreens since 1995 and his list is bound to be better. Quoting Carroll, in a prophetic mode: "This space has been for some years the chief publicity agent for mondegreens. The Oxford English Dictionary has not yet seen the light, but it will, it will." Would you believe, Merriam-Webster's?

Re:Is it wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Webinar : Seminar on the web, usually using youtube, flash or some other video/podcast like medium.

Re:Webinar? WTF? D'Oh!

[try_anything]

That's because the summary is wrong; "webinar" does not come from the geek world. It comes from the Dilbert world, where marketroids are compelled to make up stupid names for every mildly novel thing. Also, "pretexting" comes from the worlds of crime and espionage. The submitter learned about it in a geeky context (hacking) because the submitter is a geek and learns about most things in a geeky context.

Re:Is it wrong...

[genik76]

Proactive is the opposite of reactive, which are both something else than "active". Maybe you could say that proactive and reactive as words are refinements of the word active, which the VC apparently failed to communicate.

another reference

[xalorous]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-07-06-new-words_x.htm [usatoday.com] (google was added two years ago)

Re:All perfectly cromulent words

[Anonymous Coward]

now all we need is to add "cromulent" to the dictionary.

I don't know why you say that, it is a perfectly cromulent word.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cromulent

Re:Google??

[Random Destruction]

Yes. By adding a familiarity to the brand name if nothing else.

`fanboy' didn't come out of the IT culture

[brokeninside]

The Miriam-Webster folks document its first /recorded/ usage as early as 1919. Presumably, it had been in used in spoken form even earlier. So this is a case of the IT crowd adopting pre-existing slang rather than IT speak making its way out into the general culture. I gleaned this from the AP article [google.com]. The interesting thing to me is how old some of these new words are, like usage of wing nut to describe a radical out in the far wing of a political party dates back to 1900.

Re:Oxford English

[argent]

Actually, the OED is a descriptive dictionary, and historically has had a habit of picking up words that prescriptivists would rather not see listed. It may be a little less likely to acknowledge gratuitous verbogeny than Webster, but the staff of the OED has always taken their job to be the documentation of English as it is actually used.

Re:Malware... how is this different than Bloatware

[mooingyak]

I've always understood the word malware to encompass actively malicious software. Bloat is annoying, a keylogger is malicious.