lingual luke loves liminal language

as we run toward the end of the year, the mass of printed and digital media becomes overrun with lists: the oddest, the best, the worst, the newest, the most confusing, the cringeful, the other. but two additions to this efflux which caught my eye over the last couple of days have been contributions regarding the state of the english language throughout 2007.

first we have ben schott's (he of the miscellanies and almanacs) appraisal of the neologisms (new words) bequeathed to us by the media in 2007. you can find the full listing here, but these are some of my favourites

Pitch Beast • animals used in advertising: usually cute, for example penguins. (or crocodiles)

Ghost Flights • empty aircraft flown only to keep key airport ‘runway slots’. (seems environmentally sound)

Pansurgency • global terror threat, defined by the US National War College as a strategy to ‘incite worldwide insurgencies to overthrow Western ideals and replace them with a new world order under radical views of Islam’. (i get the feeling that me and the good people at the US National War College could differ on certain fundamental precepts of the international order)

Podslurping • illicit copying of data to a portable storage device (eg, iPod). (i can't think of too many people who could actually fill their ipods without it)

Folksonomy • user-generated index to online content, created by linking descriptive tags to content. Thus Tagging • adding descriptive tags to online content to aid searching. (this consumed at least 2500 words of my thesis)

Cyber-vetting • using the web to assess the (inter)Net Rep(utation) of potential employees/employers/lovers. (yeah... if a prospective employer ever chose to casually browse through my myspace/facebook pics, i can't help but feel it would be that much harder for me to secure employment...)

[courtesy of the times]

and second we have merriam-webster's recent declaration of their new word of the year: w00t. yes, that's right, w00t. from abc news (in america):

"W00t," a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in the Springfield-based dictionary publisher's online poll for the word that best sums up 2007.

Merriam-Webster's president, John Morse, said "w00t" was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology.

i'm so glad that he used the word 'whimsy'

[seen at neatorama]

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in totally non-self-conscious fashion, i'm going to throw up a few of my own lists over the next few days. expect albums, artists and youtube vids. in five or ten entry format. depends how hard i find it to whittle down.

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had another dose of chemo yesterday and still seem to be remarkably unaffected. no nausea, no disintegrating nails (yet), no rashes, no cramps. moreover, thanks to the immune boosting super shot from last week, my white blood count is through the roof, making me feel lightly invincible. so much so that i just bought myself a ticket to daft punk.



oh. fuck. yeah.