oh noes!!11111one!!
The men of Webster's could save a lot of time by just copying out most of icanhascheezburger. One day there will be a backlash, and we'll all start saying prithee and wherefore again. Good day to you.
w00t voted 'Word of the Year'
The truly repulsive "w00t" has been crowned Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2007 - based on "thousands" of votes from visitors to the dictionary's website. According to the official announcement: This year's winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t ("leet …
-
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 13:05 GMT James Pels
Verbification, cntd...
While it pains me to see made up words (w00t, etc.) being added to a dictionary (even ones that don't count, like American ones!), 'verbification' has been going on for a long time, and not just in IT.
Take 'Hoover', 'Xerox' and 'Velcro', for example - these are all brand names (I am probably in breach of something-or-other for not including the odd TM or (R) in there) that have become popular as verbs.
I just 'Googled' for similar things and there appear to be several sites dedicated to the concept. For starters, try this list... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks.
-
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 13:25 GMT Rob
Ironic, today of all days....
.... that this story has come up, it was only an hour ago I was arguing with someone about the poor reading and writing skills we equip our students with when they leave school.
Let's use a more precise term to describe this than "verbification", it's more appropriate term is Bastardisation.
Just goes to show that the poorly educated, now feel they have to create words as they don't seem to know enough of the original ones. I already ignore people that use L33t as it's not a language I'm familiar with, if they talked English or French then fine.
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 13:36 GMT J Thompson
as a verb
Is this w00t a new super verbified version of w00t? As in, "I think I'm in for a serious w00ting here"?
As for Facebook as a verb, I will admit to using it, every now and then. It's not much different from using Google as a verb. Whilst that might not lend any strength at all to my argument (!), I'm able to use Facebook as a verb without sounding like I'm trying hard to use Facebook as a verb.
A bit like being able to use the word cool, despite the fact that millions of parents, the world over, will never be able to do so.
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 13:52 GMT Eric Olson
Wow... bunch of old farts here...
I realize some comments above may have been made with sarcasm and/or ironic intent... but remember that doesn't translate well via text.
But seriously. Does everyone who is freaking out about this realize how old they sound? You seem just a step away from sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, yelling at those whipper-snappers to get off your lawn. You realize that language evolves, and what we might consider "proper" English (American English in my case), would have been seen as base and disgusting in the Victorian era instead of the "proper" Latin or French origin words? And further back, we would have been hard pressed to understand a typical conversation? We should decry the structure, and the intelligibility that comes with it, that might be lost over time with casual usage, but not the addition of words into vocabulary. I mean, English couldn't even agree on a spelling system until, what... 150 years ago? Well... we still can't completely, but at least it's closer.
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 13:57 GMT John
facebooked ?
lolwtfbbq, someone call the roflcopter
ROFL:ROFL:LOL:ROFL:ROFL:
______/\_______
L / [] \
O=== \ \
L \_______________/
.___I_________I_____,
seriously though, I have *never* seen Facebook used as a verb anywhere, even for leet speak it just simply breaks the laws of acceptable. Is someone at Merriam Webster trying hard to get there own word into general use?
"I facebooked;" jesus wept, its not verbification, its bastardisation.
While 'w00t' may have somewhere very very far back in its (no doubt) CS roots have meant "We owned the other team", it really hasn't been the general use of it for oooh, 3 or 4 years. Its just used as an exclamation of joy, such as finding epicz lootz in WoW, or downing some boss etc, its origins do precede WoW by some considerable measure ofc.
Paris icon as I'm feeling saucy.
-
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 13:57 GMT BoldMan
Its not w00t, its woot
and it isn't an acronym its a exclamation of pleasure, a substitute for "woohoo"
I've been using it in conversations in online games since EQ in 2000.
If its been hijacked by 1337 speak then that happened later, bit its first origins that I came across was dinging in Crushbone ("Dvinn Train to zone!!!")
"WOOT, DING!"
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 13:57 GMT Adrian Jackson
Re: In my experience
True, but as Calvin points out, verbing weirds language.
As for those complaining about the age of the word, this is a 'word of the year' award, not a 'new word of the year' award. Other nominees included 'quixotic', 'apathetic', 'hypocrite', 'charlatan', 'sardoodledom' and 'Pecksniffian' - all of which are considerably older than 'w00t'.
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 14:10 GMT Mike Flugennock
Hey, what's wrong with "blamestorming"?
I wouldn't be surprised if this term was originally coined by some pissed-off office grunt who worked for some shithead boss who couldn't wait to slough off the responsibility for his piss-poor performance on to someone else...which, I guess, would take in about 99% of corporate/office environments on both sides of The Pond™.
For nearly twenty years -- before I went independent -- I worked in graphic design shops in ad agencies and in in-house corporate shops where, as in most departments, there'd always be those meetings after proposals and projects went out the door..."post-mortem" was always the official slang, although if I recall the actual meetings -- especially if things went badly -- it was a solid hour's slagfest, like Christians and Lions, except that one or two people at a time had to take a turn at being the Christians.
Just because this corporate-image boutique outfit is claiming ownership of the term "blamestorming", that doesn't necessarily mean they _originated_ it; they more than likely overheard some grunt in the office using it. It just doesn't sound "contrived" enough, if you know what I mean...conceptually and phonetically, it comes out really naturally...not like, say, "team-building exercise".
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 14:15 GMT conan
Stop it
Why is everyone here so against the development of new aspects of language? it is annoying to have somebody talking in l33t-speak on forums all the time, but the odd word making it into the dictionary is all part of the evolution of language, surely? I like new words - they give me more to say, and I do love saying stuff...
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 14:31 GMT Spleen
im in ur dictionary, making up ur utter shite
I like how they even included a stupid backronym definition just to make sure that nobody took them seriously. I suppose they think "chav" comes from "Council Housed And Violent" rather than Romany as well.
"Woot" is just "Woo" with a consonant on the end to round it off. Nothing more, nothing less. It's no different from yeah/yep or no/nope.
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 15:51 GMT Hollerith
Blamestorming -- kewl
I rather like 'blamestorming'. So descriptive. in fact, I love all business-speak. It's a mixture of trying to make something sound cool and important when it's not (e.g. teleconferencing for a group phone call) and efforts to carefully avoid offending (from 'lessons' to 'lessons learned' to 'learnings' and now, since' learnings' suggests a deficiency, 'takeaways'). Words such as 'skill-set' make my day. You can see a middle manager or consultant suddenly thinking of 'let's take this off-line' and being totally, totally thrilled. Bless them, every one. Heck, I remember when 'liaising' was heard with a swift intake of breath; there was no verb variation of 'liaison', but suddenly 'liaison' was a word business people spoke, so a verb was required. (Liaison replaced, I believe, 'meeting with' .)
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 17:14 GMT Guy
Its Good to See
Personally I think this is great, all our younguns are getting back in to doing algbra again, w00t seems to be a splendid equation. I would like to question the advisability of putting in a dictionary though, surely the maths text book would be a proper place
yours
the Apathetic Charlatan
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 18:13 GMT John F***ing Stepp
Well it is an English term. . .
It actually comes from those dreadful British mystery novels from about 100 years back, I even knew someone in the 1970s that used the term woot in conversation.
Applying the term woot to gaming and going all 3l1t3 spelling as w00t is not even a paradigm shift from the original meaning; which was a kind of (great + hurray + I am a tree frog)
(Okay, I am kidding about the tree frog, kinda.)
It is sort of like how you all (English) lost track of the word octocet and had it hijacked as octothorp by some uncaring corporation with massive #age.
You should keep better track of your language.
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 23:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Leetspeak...
... is an "esoteric computer hacker language"?
WTF LOL? More like a low-down lamer gamer language that is fracking annoying.
Apparently we have entered the end times where being able to type stoopid in gamerZ chatZ in order to look kewl (i.e. not living in the parent's bedroom) is the sure indicator that one has some technical skillz.
That should shorten thos job interviews nicely.
"Do you speak l33t?"
"YO, D00D"
"Great. When can you start?"
KILL!! KILL!!!!
-
Wednesday 12th December 2007 23:53 GMT Captain DaFt
Signal Cancelling Technology
"Woot" has been around at least since the'70's. At least that's when I first encountered it.
"Ut", "Woot". and "Zut" were the three most used exclamations by the Super Hero the Flaming Carrot, "The strangest man alive", written and illustrated by Bob Burden.
(Both the artist and his creation were my childhood heros, which probably explains a lot)
-
Thursday 13th December 2007 03:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
All this type of
thing was designed to defeat word matching ala carnivore (FBI) or to allow gloating in on line games which the moderators wouldn't tolerate stuff like yeah beat the shit out of you, we own you etc, w00t and pwnd came from that so since none of you ever heard of a mud or were worried about having your doings indexed by the FBI you know absolutely nothing doesn't surprise me a bit.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
