Saturday, October 6, 2012

New Technology: New Vocabulary

You couldn't have asked someone in the '70s if they had the internet, nor if they had a PC... (personal computer, not police constable). With new technology comes new vocabulary. Here are some of our favourite words that didn't exist before the internet:

Internet - Where it all began. A word that is mentioned everyday, yet would not have been found in conversation twenty years ago.

There are 10 types of people in this world.
Those who understand binary and those who don't.

Retweetsexting, and cyberbullying - We like the words, not the activities... at least not cyberbullying.

Acronyms such as LOLOMG, BTW - Amongst other travesties against the English language...

Unfriend - You can remove someone from your digital life with a single click, but it isn't so easy in real life!

Dot-com - dot and possibly even com would have existed, but not in this context.

Blog - The word came from "web log", so you can thank laziness for it becoming blog... fun to say though. Blog, blog, blog!

Google - We're referring to the verb; the number existed long before that. They had a team counting to it... but many lost their lives in its pursuit.

w00t - This modern expression of excitement has even made it into at least one dictionary! The Concise Oxford English Dictionary added it in 2011... although they did replace the 0's with o's.

facebook - Again, as a verb; the words "face" and "book" clearly existed beforehand. Facebook the social networking site was launched in 2004, and has since stolen countless hours of our lives as we look at amusing images of cats.


How could anyone resist that adorable face
and impressive display of bipedalism? 

1 comment:

  1. Hello

    Nice post about new vocabuary!

    Adopting and widesreading new terms (real noums, acronyms or abreviations or even words from another language) means that people are able to integrate new tools, technologies and concepts/ideas.

    This is a challenging issue for translators as we are linking cultures through words.

    Best regards,

    Françoise

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