Tech & Biz

Web 2.0 as Millionth English Word? Could've Been Worse

by Truemorist | June 10, 2009 at 10:19 am

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So, Web 2.0 has been crowned the millionth word in the English language. Surprise, surprise. What were you expecting it to be? "Newspaper"?

“As expected, English crossed the 1,000,000 word threshold on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 am GMT. However, some 400 years after the death of the Bard, the words and phrases were coined far from Stratford-Upon-Avon, emerging instead from Silicon Valley, India, China, and Poland, as well as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK,” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor.

Emphasis on "Silicon Valley". In my not-so-humble opinion, Merriam-Webster et al. will soon have the tweeting, (de)friending, In-Linking, real-time hypercommunicating not-quite-masses to thank for words 1,000,002 (1,000,001 was "financial tsunami") to 2,000,000.

And approximately 500,000 of those will begin with "tw".

The other 500,000 will involve composites of "stalking", "creeping", or "crack" and any social media platform or device.

In fact, I'm calling it right now. The 2,000,000th word in the English language will be Twebcrack 2.0: a multiplatform OS combing Twirefox, Twoogle, Facetweet, and SkyTwiews, among others, which will be installed on all manner of iPhones, Blackberrys, and notebooks.

Of course, by then society will have evolved a new language in which words are more easily understood when spoken while the faces of both speaker and listener are turned down and exposed to radiation from a small screen.

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