“w00t,” an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.
Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster Inc. said “w00t” — typically spelled with two zeros — reflects a new direction in the American language led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text-messaging.
It’s like saying “yay,” the dictionary said.
“It could be after a triumph or for no reason at all,” Merriam-Webster said.
Visitors to Merriam-Webster’s Web site were invited to vote for one of 20 words and phrases culled from the most frequently looked-up words on the site and submitted by readers.
Runner-up was “facebook” as a new verb meaning to add someone to a list of friends on the Web site Facebook.com or to search for people on the social networking site.
W00t! or to actually use the full l33tspeek: vv00+!
As I was saying about American slang, it used to be our language’s most vigorous set of complex metaphors, now it has become the evanescent natter of adolescents. That a dictionary should take such ephemera into its texts tells how how badly some dictionaries have failed at their task. Larry
! r4+h3r l!k3 l33+ $p34k. 3v3n !f !+ !$ p4$$e.
😉
Larry,
I wouldn’t worry too much about this. I’d encourage you to explore some no-holds barred forums frequented by younger folks where you see a lot of this thing, and you will also find the exchange of ideas far more robust and invigorating than anything going on in the PC concentration camps of academe and news media.
I am disturbed that I actually understood mousestalker’s comment.
#5: What’s it mean?
#4: Well, I have been and it is most discouraging. They have been noisy, uncivil and painfully vapid. Now, to be sure, undergraduates, heavy with great ideas, tend to babble nonsense, and the newly graduated, tend to use documentation for such infantilisms. To give myself insight into what the young are doing, I have been to a number of poetry slams (which now may be sooooooo yesterday). There was no poetry to be met with anywhere, but a lot of overacting of the worst kind. Tiresome is the right word. Pretentious is another.
Nevertheless, technoslang is childish, the equivalent of pig Latin.
Real American slang is a kind of poetry for it arose from the people and has a racy vigor about it because its images are vital – sort of like the graffitti on box cars, which is often brilliantly inventive.
Larry
What I wrote was: “I rather like leetspeak, even if it is passe”.
As fads go, I found that one fairly harmless.
Larry,
I am sorry your experience has been a negative one. FWIW, my experience has been that a lot of young adults are beginning to wander off the cultural Marxist reservation and questioning a lot of society’s current assumptions.