Wednesday November 25, 2009

Words of the decade

By GRANT BARRETT

Many new words and phrases this decade are related to technology.

THIS year will close out 10 years of the first decade of this millennium, so I thought I would review some of the language which characterised it.

Much of it is, to no one’s surprise, technology related, as technology continues towards what will ultimately be its invisibilisation. That is the gradual tendency of technology to become so pervasive, and so sophisticated, that it is rarely noticed, and when it is noticed, to be taken for granted.

Google is foremost on the list because the company really came into its own (acquired a lot of abilities and power). It has its fingers in many pies (it does business in lots of areas): Internet search, programming, e-mail hosting, chat, phones, publishing, advertising. Google has been a large part of revolutionising my work and the work of my dictionary-editing colleagues. For other people in the English-speaking world, to google is the standard generic term meaning “to search the Internet”.

Global war on terror, GWOT, or just plain war on terror has been a part of our lives for many years, since the events of September 11, 2001. It has even grown in significance as the American Government has tried, in various roles and ways, to find peace with the world and with its own citizens. September 11 and 9/11 are terms that are now so solidly in the lexicon as referring to specific events on a specific day that it feels like they could never fade from our language.

Social networking is another term important to the last 10 years. It refers to the relationships of people to each other online and, by extension, to other people not known to them. I’m a member of several social networking sites. At the very least, they make great environments for finding and tracking new language. One of those decade-long terms is to friend, which means to connect to someone on a social networking site in a way that everyone knows that you know and like (or at least respect) each other. An example: “He went around friending all the pretty girls he knew, but once they all found out about the others, they de-friended him.”

Texting, too, really covers a lot of the decade, and, with the other technological terms, shows that our desire to be connected and to communicate via those connections is strong to the point of being overwhelming. We smother each other with chatter. I lived in Paris for much of 2000 and 2001, which was when and where it really hit me that text messaging was going to be huge. I’ll never forget the two deaf men sitting next to each other in a bar, texting away to each other as fast as their fingers could go. We Americans used to mostly call it SMS-ing /ess-emm-essing/ (for short message service), but now, for most people, it’s just to text.

Green deserves a place in the rundown of the decades most important words, for the greening of commerce and consumerism really took life then, though it had been decades in the making. We are still a wasteful culture, consuming far more energy and resources per capita than any of our peer countries, but the green language that appears makes me feel like there is a drive forward, an inertia, that will see this greening through to a good place.

Blog is another one of those Web/tech terms that is all pervasive now, even though many people don’t like the sound of the word. It is short for web log and refers to a web site that features regular, dated entries about a specialised subject, from something as simply as oneself, to one’s work, one’s hobbies, or even the broad category of “things of interest.”

I started blogging myself in 1999 and I am constantly amazed at how far it has come, though the language of blogging has changed.

A blog used to just be the website where the entries are posted. Now a blog can be the entries themselves. Blog has also taken on the ability to form plenty of other words, such as blogosphere (the whole universe of blogs); blognoscenti and bloggerati, the most well known and respected bloggers; and blogarrhoea, the tendency of one to write too much, even to the point of embarrassment. It’s a blend of blog- and diarrhoea.

Podcast is a term that I thought would die. In 2004, it seemed to be mostly just bad radio in a downloadable file format. Now it looks, at least from a public radio point of view, like an incredible way to reach a highly selective audience that might otherwise never hear the programmes.

One last term: sudoku! The number puzzle that has taken the world by storm.

On to the next 10 years!

Grant Barrett is editorial director of the online dictionary http://www.Wordnik.com.