Over the past few years it's been great fun observing how the English language has morphed a little to accommodate our 'online lifestyles' – a concept that, until about 15 years ago, was a difficult one for many to comprehend.
So here we are today in 2011, ready to FB, Twit and FourSquare ourselves away on various iDevices at the drop of a hat. And what about flash compugeekspeak? Yep that's changed along with us. One would need to be firmly placed under a rock to have missed Google's ascent into transient verbdom. Google it, I'll Google you, we're Googling – phrases quite a few of us are familiar with.
The formidable Oxford English Dictionary, which adds new words to it's stable four times a year, presents a charmingly amusing list of recent entries, most notably those which recognize the growing influence of social media interaction and mobile phone texting. OED's very recent March 2011 update has some real zingers. Popular abbreviations such as OMG (Oh My God), FYI (For Your Information) and LOL (Laugh Out Loud) are some prime examples.
Other words and phrases include Bloggable(self explanatory), Party-Crasher (an unwanted and uninvited person at a party), Whassup ('What's Up' for those unable to enunciate), Smack Talking (to speak ill of), Rumping (apparently this is a dance move that involved vigorous shaking of the rear end), Sexting (texting messages or images of an adult nature), Domestic Goddess (thank you Nigella Lawson), Yuck Factor (a feeling of disgust) and Dot Bomb (a failed internet company) – to name but a few.
It makes sense that most of these words and terms are added, and rightly so given their popularity and high usage amongst a relatively wide audience. However the addition of the term Heart took many by surprise – as in I Heart You – the symbol is now a verb that carries the exact same meaning as the word Love. CNN explains that this definition is given a new 'sense' and Oxford's press release states that "it may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper-stickers." Graeme Diamon, Chief Editor of new words for the dictionary explains: “Our earliest quote for this use, from 1984, uses the verb in ‘I heart my dog’s head’, a jokey play on bumper stickers featuring a heart and a picture of the face of a particular breed of dog (expressing a person’s enthusiasm for, say, shih-tzus) which itself became a popular bumper sticker. From these beginnings, heart v. has gone on to live an existence in more traditional genres of literature as a colloquial synonym for ‘to love’.
A complete listing of OED's list of new words can be found on www.oed.com
Sources: OED.com, CNN.com, telegraph.co.uk
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