Bibliofreakblog

Iye iz in ur dictionry, countin ur wordz: Web 2.0 Becomes English Language’s Millionth Word

Well, I already knew that English was freakin’ awesome.  I’ve been saying it for years.  Some people complain about the fucked-uppedness of its rules, but I’ve always countered that it’s just because of the inclusive nature of English.  We don’t translate; we adopt.

The Global Language Institute has an algorithm (don’t ask me anything about that–I get linguistics, but not math) purporting that a new word is added to the English language every 98 minutes, which means we lucky speakers get 14.7 new words a day.

But what is in a word?  It brings back the age old linguistic debate of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism.  The Global Language Institute culls through some 5,000 word banks to find new, broadly used words.  A word has to appear 25,000 times before they accept it.  

Beyond just prescriptivism vs. descriptivism, though, one must ask, what’s in a word?  Ostensibly, the words “web” and “2.0″ (as in two point oh) are each their own words.  Because English is such a flexible language, many of our seeming words are multiple words strung together, and sometimes made into acronyms (do you know what hell it is for medical translators to have to keep saying things the long way because you can’t translate MRI, HIV, or OB/GYN?).

Example: PMS is used instead of Pre-Menstrual Syndrome.  But PMS is also now a verb.  I might say, “I feel like crap because I’m PMSing” but I wouldn’t say “I feel like crap because I’m Pre-Menstrual Syndroming.”  So, therefore, is PMS its own word, or is it still just an acronym?

I bring this up because the much hallowed Oxford English Dictionary disagrees with the Global Language Monitor.  The OED–according to what they said on CNN since I can’t afford their $300/year subscription fee and will have to take their word for it, and trust me that pun was far from intended–has 600,000 entries.  They gave a couple of examples of where it gets difficult to decide which words to include:

For example, Sheidlower said “great-great-great-great grandfather” could be considered a word, but wouldn’t be in the dictionary. There’s a similar problem with numbers, which may be counted up by their pieces — “twenty” and “three” — but not always as a group, as in “two-hundred twenty-three.”

Granted, if every language counted each individual number, then they’d all have…trillions (I can’t count higher than that…what comes after trillion?)

In the meantime, one thing is for sure.  The English language is the largest (and therefore bestest) language around.  We even beat out Chinese, and left the French in the dust centuries ago.

Check out the CNN Article and the website for the Global Language Monitor and then you can decide for yourself just how many words we all know.