The language of tomorrow’s today

In the days of being a kid, oops, I meant child, I remember making up words that fit the context of what I was talking about. Nevertheless, I was consistently corrected by my English teachers and parents: “If it’s not in the dictionary, it’s not a word.” Did that stop me from making up words that fit the needs of my sentence? Ah, no. I was going to be an active participant in evolving the English language.

The classic word that I am sure everyone could agree with as being not a word is “funner”. Examples of this misuse have been “It’s funner than that.” But, wait! “funner” is a word! It’s defined as “one who funs cloth”.  Maybe one day, the dictionaries would include this new definition into their books just like Merriam-Webster included “staycation” or “frenemy” into theirs this year.

Since my childhood, there has been so many new words in my everyday communication. The majority of those words festered from fast paced communicative world of computers, the internet, and various telecommunication methods. The very minute tip of the New Words iceberg include words such e-mail (electronic mail), CC (carbon copy), Bcc (blind carbon copy), snail mail, and texting.

Oh, texting, how did thee create a new alphabet known as Leet (a.k.a. leetspeak). Yes, leetspeak, a term derived from “elite” using specialized forms of symbolic writing in various letter combinations to replace traditional Latin/English characters. These combinations would phonetically form words. Many of these words included “u” instead of “you”; “n00b” for newbie; or another one you may be more familar with: “lol” which means “laugh out loud”.

And throughout of all of these evolutions of the English language, there’s the whole transformation of giving existing words a new meaning. Let’s take “tweet” for instance. The Merriam -Webster & Oxford dictionaries both have an entry for tweet: a chirp of small or young bird or a chirping note. Now today, you may have heard the word “tweet” used in a completely different context — a context not relating to small young bird or of musical quality. So, if there is not a definition for “tweet” in the dictionary relating to a 140 character long status update on Twitter, does that mean “tweet” is not the correct use of the English language? Maybe. Maybe not. But for this discussion, I will go with yes it’s a word.

Within the past day, there has been news about Google & Bing each combining their efforts with Twitter to make Twitter’s tweets and microblogged content searchable via the two search engines. One of the new articles entitled “Up Close with Bing’s Twitter Search Engine” written by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land was chocked full of these new words. I didn’t think anything of it. I knew what these new words were meaning until I read one line that just made me stop dead in my thoughtful tracks : “Freshness of a tweet”.

How could a chirping noise of a small bird be fresh? Oh wait, you mean a recent status update.