Thursday, December 13, 2007

N07 L337: Word of the year

Merriam-Webster every year holds a contest to see what should be the 'Word of the Year'. Who votes on these things? I haven't actually checked yet, but I am willing to bet very large sums of money that the vote is on the net, and that English professors don't vote much.

This year's word is: w00t

Don't be confused, those are indeed zeros. Yes, the time has come. L33t speak has made it to mainstream. Is it so elite now? The funny part is that this word hasn't even made it into the dictionary yet. The word of the year isn't even a word yet.

If they start adding l33t words to the dictionary, how will they be listed alphabetically? Things could get very complicated... for example, if a l33t word begins with E, we would instead use 3, but if a l33t word begins with A, it will use 4 (or sometimes on rare occasions @). But 3 comes before 4 in the standard alphanumeric, but A should come before E...

Runners up to the word of the year contest include: facebook, conundrum, quixotic, blamestorm, sardoodledom, apathetic, Pecksniffian, hypocrite, charlatan

What a fascinating list of words that is! I would classify all but facebook as being rather pessimistic words. They are so very 'glass is half empty', and some of them are a tad 'glass is empty because I threw it at the fucking wall'.

I think this clearly shows the direction that the world is going in... The words we use to signify this year are mostly pessimistic. However, the winning word is a neologism that signifies happiness, in a way that is young, upbeat, and digital. As a side note, in the unpopular MMORPG known MxO (Matrix Online) I played a hacker called: n07 l337 (yet everyone insisted on calling me 7, or Number 7... some even thought it was a reference to 7 of 9).

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