…but is it a word?
w00t—pronounced as if it rhymes with boot. But what does it mean? It’s the Merriam-Webster 2007 “word of the year.” It’s spelled with the letter “w”, the number “0″, another “0″, and finally a “t”. It more of less means “Yay!” and apparently it originated as an acronym for “we own the other team,” but it came to be spelled with two zeros instead of with a pair of the letter “O” and it’s now quite popular with gamers on the Internet and is merely an expression of joy. For example, one gamer might text another, “I just reached Level 12 in Blow the World to Hell. W00t!”
Runner-up for word of the year was facebook, which is a verb among whose various meanings is “to upload a person’s photo to the website facebook.com.” E.G., “I’m going to facebook that cute girl I met this afternoon when I get on line, tonight.” And then there was another word being considered, blamestorm, which means more or less what brainstorm means, but it’s a brainstorming session whose sole intent to to find someone to blame when things are going wrong. At one time or another, we’ve all been there for such a blamestorm session, now we have a name for it.
These aren’t the only words popping into—and often out of—the vernacular.
In the past I’ve heard people use conversate, which means to have a conversation with; and flustrate, which is a combination of “fluster” and “frustrate”–you can imagine how it’s used. I hate the word, but it describes the way I feel when I hear a friend use it.
The question is, are any of these words? Many ask that question. I even saw a segment on the evening news where a trio of newscasters debated that very question in regards to “w00t”, with the distaff member of that trio asking, “But is it a real word?”
How you answer that question—whether any of these are real “words” or not—says a lot about you. First, it reveals whether you think dictionaries are prescriptive or descriptive. If you view them as prescriptive, then you believe a dictionary describes how you should speak and write. It’s kind of what the French do. They—or at least those Frenchmen who think their language should be kept pure, such as the 40 members of L’Académie française, the so-called guardians of French—are convinced the language should be regulated, and that neologisms, especially those coined from other languages (and the French seem to have a special problem with words coming from American-English) should be exorcised. On top of that, there are even French laws mandating French be used, or at least used in conjunction with other languages, for many purposes. One American company, GE Medical Systems, found itself fined 500,000 euros, plus another 20,000 euros a day, for having the temerity to have violated laws guarding the language because of some documentation and software it provided to its French subsidiary, despite the fact only technical people were going to see or use it. I guess they gotta protect the children.
The problem with this French approach (and the French approach is a prescriptive approach) is that when you use it, you are always fighting a losing battle. As words (especially those damned American words) survive attempts to expunge them, the guardians of that language find themselves having to give many of the offensive words an official stamp of approval. This gesture allows them to save face rather than having to admit that they can’t win. Just consider the fruits of their labors: what did they do with American words like e-mail, golden boy, and stock-option? They turned them into le email, la stock-option, and le golden boy. Yeah, now they’re French words. Le bullshit. In the meantime, they’ve tried to keep words like “software” out of their language by substituting “logiciel,” but with only limited success.
Likewise, in this country, many take the same prescriptive approach the French take and deem a neologism “not a word” if it doesn’t appear in a dictionary.
Of course, there are some logical problems with this approach. One is that of the approximately 6,800 languages in the world, about 3,400 are unwritten. To deem a word as a “real” only if it appears in a dictionary, means that none of those languages have real words. It also denies there were any “real” words in English before Samuel Johnson created the first English dictionary. Another problem concerns words that are part of the vernacular or slang that do make it into a dictionary. Do they appear there because the makers of the dictionary recognize them as “real” words, or does their appearance somehow magically and mystically transform them into “real”? Another problem is, what happens to the words that are dropped from dictionaries (and they are generally dropped because dictionaries have limited space and real production costs)? Are they no longer words. Another problem I’ll mention is what of the thousands of words used everyday, names of, e.g., chemical compounds that will never appear in a dictionary—even chemical dictionaries? Last, with today’s Internet, and the appearance of online dictionaries, new words are appearing in these dictionaries almost as fast as they are coined. So the prescriptive approach is dead–or, a least, severely limping.
On the other hand, if you view dictionaries as “descriptive,” you are not passing judgment on a words status as “real” or not and you see the dictionary as merely describing usage of those words the editors chose to include. But, taking the descriptive approach doesn’t mean you intend ever to use any of those words.
I, myself, prefer the descriptive approach. My reasoning, which is not without merit, says that no one owns the language. Not Congress, not your high school English teacher who always corrected you, not the folks at Merriam-Webster (who, by the way, take the descriptive approach). It also admits to the language’s malleability and the fact that it grows, shrinks, and otherwise changes no matter what any of us, as individuals, thinks.
The closest you can ever come to owning any part of a language is to trademark a word. And, even then, you only own a particular word, or combination of words, in a particular context. For example, I can’t go out and start another magazine and call it Time, or market another laundry detergent and call it Tide. At least not in this country. Those names are taken. On the other hand, neither Time Warner, the publisher of Time, nor Procter & Gamble, the manufacturer of Tide detergent, own the words when they are used in their general linguistic senses. “Time and tide wait for no man.” Those two words are not “owned” in that sense.
So, where do most new words come from? Until recently, from the black and gay communities. However, nowadays, many come from technology, especially the computer world. Words like software, Internet, freeware, website, blog, and laptop are new and are now indispensable to the English language, as are words like window, Windows, and hacker, which have taken on new meanings not intended when those words were first coined.
But who was the greatest single inventor of words in the English language? Most likely, William Shakespeare. Yes, The Bard invented at least 1,700 words (some say as many as 10,000) and lent new meanings to countless other words that already existed in his time. He did so because English, which was considered a backwater language until his day, didn’t have enough words for him to express himself. Today, English just wouldn’t be the grand language it is without him and the countless others who, down through the ages and even today, have molded it and taken into directions that could not have been imagined in the 16th century.
Will I use any of the words recently coined? Usually, I don’t. Like the word snobs, I feel uneasy with them. Many are just fads and will be gone with the crew cuts, bell-bottoms, and bubble hairdos of yesteryear. (Bubble hairdos are gone, aren’t they? Tell me they are.)
But I will admit that, after having resisted using one word for years, when I finally did say it, the webmaster of this site told me it was already passé. That was over 30 years ago. The word? “Groovy.” May I be struck dead if I ever use it again.
On the other hand, I find it very easy to use the word “google” to mean I looked something up on line, regardless of what search engine I used. It’s a good word. Everyone knows what I’m saying when I say it. Will it be here 10 years from now? No one knows.
However, I do not use the word “xerox” indiscriminately. I say “photocopy.” So, I have my limits.
Now, I’ll answer the question I asked earlier in this post and say w00t is a word. I’m not going to use it but, yeah, it is a word. Will I ever use it? Dunno.
Last, have I, myself, ever invented a word or introduced a new meaning to an already established word? Yes. When I’m trying to summarize something, instead of telling my listener that I’m going to give an abbreviated, abridged, or shortened version, I often say, “Let me give you ‘the Reader’s Digest’ version,” meaning I’ll “cut to the chase” and give only the pertinent facts. I don’t know if anyone else has ever used it, but when I preface what I’m going to say with those words, everyone has understood what I mean.
Long post? Yeah. Too bad I didn’t give you the Reader’s Digest version.
