"New" Words From the Geek Culture 191
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:Google?? (Score:2, Interesting)
What about Google? It has almost replaced 'search this on web' phrase.
To a geek, 'google for SSL' makes sense.
Google's lawyers are hard at work to make sure that their trademark doesn't become a verb and fall to common use status (nullifying the trademark).
Re:Is it wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if you can guess what it means, it's always good fun to pounce on neologisms and jargon and grill the user why they are using them instead of a more traditional word. My Dad told me a great story. He worked for the University which was under pressure from its new Thatcher appointed Vice Chancellor to be more 'commercially oriented' while no one really knew in practice what this meant. The VC gave a speech full or management consultancyisms and uses the word proactive. Someone stood up and asked him if he meant active. The VC blusters and the questioner keeps arguing. After a very long time the VC says "ok, you win I meant active". The questioner sat down. The VC delivered the rest of the speech without much enthusiasm and left without allowing questions from the floor.
Re:Webinar? WTF? D'Oh! (Score:3, Interesting)
Although, of course, the latter could be used as a cynical way of describing what social engineering is...
Missing a word (Score:3, Interesting)
slashdot
Re:in one day, out the next (Score:3, Interesting)
Very little.
I remember the first year I read about this trend. They were inducting "bootylicious". During the same induction, they were also putting in some slang term from the 50s which actually had staying power.
it was apparent then that it was pure attention-whoring (if you look this up in MW you'll find a link to MW). People shouldn't be giving dictionaries which include these types of words the time of day.
Re:Is it wrong... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are lots of words that marketing drones create that are irritating, but "webinar" has a purpose.
A webinar -- in the context my company uses it -- is more like a web-based seminar. Both a seminar and a webinar are targeted to an external audience (outside the company), have a moderator (usually a third party person), and may be hosted by more than one company. A webinar is more expensive than just a regular "web presentation" since there's some logistics involved (hiring a third party to set it up and manage it, managing invitation lists, having an operator manage who joins the bridge, etc.), but it's not nearly as expensive as a seminar.
A webinar is different from a web presentation in that the seminar (or webinar) are intended to be informative speaker-lead discussions for a relatively open audience. A web presentation would be more generic, and could encompass an internal meeting, a sales presentation, or something else.
So I think "webinar" is reasonable because it conveys a specific, useful meaning.
Re:meh, Webster's (Score:2, Interesting)
Rather like the words "jazz" and "hiphop", and the usage of "cool", "chill out", "hip", "dig" to refer to things other the temperature, anatomy, and holes.
The "Black American" dialect (call it "African American Vernacular English", call it "ghetto talk", whatever) has long been a primary source of new words and inventive uses for old ones.
Mondegreen has been around far longer than 1995 (Score:3, Interesting)
I recall reading a Jon Carrol column in the SF Chronicle about mondegreens in about 1986. IT was at the least no later than 1987. And now that I look in Wikipedia, the word was coined in 1954:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen
Some people just take a very long time to catch up with the cool kids :)