Backdated: Verb: It's What You Do Online

Adding a word to the English language is incredibly easy. The method?

1: Invent a word.
2: Use it in everyday conversation.
3: Use it enough that everyone around you starts using it in their everyday conversation.
4: Wait a few years.
5: ??????
6: PROFIT! Receive a notification from Oxford stating your word has been added.

All internet memes aside (because that’s a subject for another entry), the proof is in the proverbial pudding: several years ago, the word Muggle, a term created in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series to describe someone with no magical powers, was added to the Oxford dictionary.

Bit of a popularity contest? Sure. Makes sense? Much as I can’t stand popularity contests, I have to admit it does. After all, if no one uses a word, why add it?

But I’m getting further into my English major side and away from the purpose of this blog, so let me rein it back in. Here’s a question: when somebody needs to know something, do you tell them to 1) look it up, 2) Google it, or 3) Wiki it? Think about this one. Likely the answer is 2 or 3.

And just how many internet verbs have come into being in just the past few years? We have:

Email
Blog
Instant message/IM
Surf (which may or may not count, seeing as it’s an updated meaning of an extant verb)
Upload
Download
Link (in the same category as surf)

Let’s narrow it even more: how many webistes have become their own verbs? We have:

Wiki
Google
Youtube
Twitter/tweet
Facebook
Myspace

About the only widely popular social networking website I can think of that hasn’t become its own verb yet is LiveJournal, potentially because it’s still considered a blogging site more than a social networking site.

It says something about the English language that it can absorb and use new words so quickly, and it definitely says something about technology that it advances enough in the space of a few years to require new entries in the dictionary. Whenever I start telling my parents how to work a program or simply talk about computers in general, I get the owl look and a request to speak English, please, despite the fact that I already am – an updated version of English, one that includes terms the earlier generation hasn’t heard and generally doesn’t understand. Given this trend, how long until the English language becomes so jargon-intensive that it may as well no longer be English to anyone beyond their early thirties?

I suppose that’s a question I’ll just have to google.

Originally posted 9/25/09