Tag: english

Culturomics: The Challenge for Wordability

I have been thinking a lot about Culturomics recently. Frankly, it has given me a headache. But it has also reminded me that if Wordability were to be up to date with ever single new word that enters the English Language, I would be glued to my keyboard the whole time and would neither eat nor sleep.

Culturomics has existed as a word and a discipline for two years. It is a very exciting linguistic development, and one that is only possible because of advances in technology. With millions of books now existing in digital format, courtesy of Google, scientists are able to analyse this vast amount of data to derive conclusions about the English language that have never previously been possible.

The first paper, published at the end of 2010 in the journal Science (free log-in needed to view the link), analysed 4% of all published material and used this to give an indication of the number of words in the English language. The estimate came out at more than a million, far more than recorded by dictionaries.

This year, a new paper by Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin and H. Eugene Stanley has given Wordability something to think about. Rejoicing in the catchy title Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death, the paper applies science to the life of words and comes up with rules to explain the birth and death of words and the evolutionary processes that govern their existence.

Leaving aside the many complex equations and use of Greek letters, the writers come to some interesting conclusions. More than 8,000 words entered the English language last year, so you can understand why Wordability will only track those that really start to hit the headlines. It also says that there is a change in the rate at which words are born and die, with more words dying off and fewer words coming in, though it says that those that do arrive have greater staying power because they describe completely new things, such as in the field of technology.

What is particularly interesting is the way that evolutionary theory can be applied to words. As the authors say, “words are competing actors in a system of finite resources”. Factors such as being favoured by modern spell checkers can given a word “reproductive fitness” and allow it to survive against other words of a similar semantic bent.

I have thought about this paper quite a lot, and find myself wondering if it will actually end up marking a point in time and that the evolutionary rules are about to change. Is the technology which allows Culturomics to flourish and these observations to be made now going to be the agent which changes that evolutionary process?

The authors say that it takes around 30-50 years for a word to be fully accepted and to either make it into a dictionary or disappear into linguistic obscurity. I wonder whether this will now change, and a new pattern will start to emerge. I have bemoaned in the past how long it sometimes takes dictionary makers to recognise words which have gained significant currency. In our interconnected world, where ideas and words can fly across the globe and become accepted almost instantly, the evolutionary pattern identified by the authors may start to change. I suspect it may become quicker for words to become accepted, and that the survival characteristics that will govern this will also change. Words that are slightly silly, that have the capacity to be shared on social networks, that describe an action people can participate in, will be the ones that evolve rapidly and see off the other competing words around them.

It is a fascinating concept that words fight the same survival battles as species on earth. In the 21st century, it will be interesting to see what factors allow them to survive.

Why Dinosaurs and Birthdays are Banned

The New York department of education has been receiving a great deal more publicity than it could possibly have imagined following the release of a recent edict.

Officials have banned the use of 50 words from future tests in order to allow “students to complete practice exams without distraction”. And it is the nature and reason surrounding many of those bans that is causing, frankly, bemusement.

So exams will no longer be able to use the word ‘Birthday’ in case any Jehovah’s Witnesses, who don’t celebrate birthdays, are put off their work; ‘Dinosaur’ is out, not a word the creationists will want to see; ‘Pepperoni’, because it’s junk food; ‘Computers in the home’ and ‘homes with swimming pools’, as not every child could afford such luxuries; ‘Celebrities’, frankly, I haven’t seen any attempted explanation for this one. And so it goes on, and the complete list is quite something to behold.

Now I’ll admit, this type of thing is not normal Wordability fare, as it is not celebrating the creation of an entertaining new word. But language change is as much about words going out of fashion as coming into fashion, so I have found myself intrigued by this story.

And, to be honest, a little worried. New York officials have clearly defended themselves and even pointed out that words like ‘Hurricane’ or ‘Wildfire’ are banned in Florida because of local worries there. But banning words, proscibing language that is or is not acceptable, smacks of a dangerous level of control and a worrying sense of governance.

Language change is a natural phenomenon. It cannot be forced. Thankfully, people in the major English-speaking countries of the world do not live under a language policy that attempts to control people by making certain words illegal. We all come to know that some words cause offence and shouldn’t be used, but this kind of thing can be taken too far and can undermine efforts to outlaw words which are genuinely offensive.

The officials may also want to look at the nature of the criticism they have received, and what it says about the way language is actually used. People have been laughing at them. The reaction is one of derision. And that is because the words they are trying to ban are so basic, so fundamental to everyday conversation, that to ban them is almost to render language useless. Added to that the concepts are so normal that they cannot be banned, and it can’t be assumed that their linguistic removal will suddenly mean that children no longer know about them.

Issuing rules about banning words, when the words that are chosen are so grossly inoffensive to begin with, simply invalidates any reasonable message that people are trying to get across and confirms that people know how language changes – gradually, and not by force.

UPDATE: New York’s education officials have now changed their mind and ditched the banned word list following the raft of adverse publicity. I like to think that Wordability played a tiny part.

Marmageddon – You Either Love it or Hate it

There’s a crisis in New Zealand. The country is set to run out of Marmite. And the headline writers have dubbed it ‘Marmageddon’.

In the spirit of the famous spread, you either love or hate this bit of linguistic dexterity. My feelings towards it match my sentiments towards Marmite on toast. Love it.

I think the reason that it works linguistically is because it is knowingly ludicrous and is almost taking the mickey out of itself. Its in-built sense of irony makes it a success. Of course the disappearance of Marmite off supermarket shelves is not a real apocalypse, especially as it will come back this year once the factory damaged in last year’s earthquake is repaired.

But by being called ‘Marmageddon’, the situation not only becomes easy for headline writing but is also immediately defined as lightweight, an ‘and finally’ story for the end of the news that will make everybody smile.

I don’t expect Marmageddon to last for long or to leap Linsanity-like into official lexical recognition. But wouldn’t it be great if it left a legacy of -ageddon suffixes, to be applied to any suitable words engulfed by a catastrophe. The world’s population of Llamas is becoming extinct – Llamageddon, screams the world’s press. Cotton shortages are affecting popular sleepwear – it’s Pyjamageddon.

But it probably wouldn’t work if there was a worldwide ban on the playing of Bananarama records. After all, that would hardly be a crisis.

Chatterboxing is the New Way to Talk

The advent of Twitter has spawned many Twittish words, but the latest seems to be one of the more bizarre.

Second screens are one of the trendy subjects at the moment in the mobile phone and tablet worlds. This is the idea that while you are in front of the television, you have your second screen on your lap or in your hand and are merrily interacting with it while you watch.

One way that people interact is to chat to others on Twitter about the programme they are viewing, and this social interaction becomes as important to them as the programme itself. And what are they doing? They are chatterboxing.

It’s not clear to me how this word has come about. I think it is more than just taking the well-established word chatterbox and making it into a verb, because that implies excessive talking, and chatterboxing involves no talking at all. Instead, I suspect it could be a play on words, chatting while watching the box, an almost defiantly old-fashioned word to help with a new habit. But however it has come about, it is an activity that will stay and expand, and I suspect the word is here to stay.

Online dictionaries are not yielding definitions at the moment, though they’re soon likely to catch up. Having said that, there is a definition on the Urban Dictionary. It suggests that chatterboxing is “the act of talking shit”.

So it’s pretty accurate then.

Cyberchondria and Babe Magnets Come of Age

I read about a word this week and got very excited about writing about it. An article in London’s Evening Standard, about people self-diagnosing themselves on the internet, started with the line: “I have learned a new word this week: cyberchondria”.

Fantastic, I thought, your new word must be my new word, and what a great word it is. Except that the writer and I were both behind the times.

It turns out that cyberchondria has been around since the turn of the century. It appears to have debuted in 2001, with the BBC website writing about it, while by 2003 it had been discussed in The British Medical Journal.

So why am I writing about it, I hear you ask. You just write about brand new words and usages, and this is patently not new, so go and find something else. Well that’s true, but it seems that the wheels of the Oxford English Dictionary move a great deal slower than the wheels of Wordability.

I am writing about it because the OED has just announced the details of the latest quarterly update to its online dictionary, and guess what its headline is. Correct! Cyberchondriac has now been added to the dictionary.

Now I know that the OED has specific criteria for including a word in its dictionary, relating to length of time, frequency and breadth of use and an almost unquantifiable sense of currency, meaning that people don’t have to explain it when they use it. But I do wonder whether they are sometimes taking a bit too long to introduce things.

Wordability has recently written about Tebowing and Linsanity, both of which are already recognised by the Global Language Monitor as words because of their massive usage. Surely then, they should have been included in this OED update as they clearly meet all the criteria required for a new word, as discussed above. But they are not yet there, and it is impossible to say how long it might take for them to appear. And I will also be keeping an eye out for Ineptocracy, which is by some distance the most searched term on Wordability.

Cyberchondria is one of a number of words that I feel should have been included long ago. Others include: babe magnet, a man who is very attractive to women; vodcast, in effect a video podcast; and unspellable, which sounds like it has been around forever.

The OED is the ultimate arbiter of language and of course it has to be absolutely certain about a word’s validity before it will include it. Its quarterly updates allow it to respond to changes in language on an ongoing basis. But the speed with with words are consistently exploding around the world makes me think that their road to official acceptance is going to have to become shorter.

Brogrammers Making Computing Cool

There is a cliched image of computer programmers. It involves words such as geek or nerd, and images of quiet and bespectacled individuals sitting in corners, headphones plugged in, reams of code spiralling down the screen in front of them.

But no more. It seems there is a new breed of computer whizz, cooler and with attitude. These coding experts can drink heavily and party with the best of them, but they still work hard. And they are not programmers. They are Brogrammers.

The word, bringing the “bro” greeting together with “programmer”, is now beginning to gain currency across the internet, and there is a burgeoning Facebook group with more than 22,000 members. But it is not universally popular, with others criticising the term and worrying that it will make a male-dominated profession even harder for women to break into. And they argue that it is a terrible word.

Is it terrible? Well it is funny, and I can see it catching on in a niche way. However, the accusation of it being sexist is entirely valid. It could end up growing as a kind of polarising term for different kinds of coders, rather than as the joke that it clearly is now. Nevertheless, I think it is here to stay, for a time at least.

But I am much more entertained by the linguistic possibilities that it suggests for the future. What if we could apply this subtle change to a number of other words? Just think, we could have:

  • Advancing in your career while partying – Bromotion
  • Sleeping with a really cool guy – Brocreation
  • Dietary supplements taken by heavy drinkers – Brobiotics

I’d better stop now. You’ll soon be needing Brotection from any more of this nonsense.

Why Horsegate Should Ride Away

It must be obvious by now just how much I admire the English language and its regular diet of new words. But even I have my limits.

So what has promoted my ire? It’s very simple. It’s Horsegate. It’s the ‘scandal’ over the retired police horse cared for by Rebekah Brooks and subsequently ridden by David Cameron. The whole equine fiasco has been dubbed ‘horsegate’ by the media and the social media world.

And I hate it! Not the story, which is of course fascinating, amusing and worrying in almost equal measures. No, I hate the way that every vaguely salacious or scandalous story which hits the news and lasts for longer than about 20 minutes automatically receives a ‘-gate’ at the end of it as a word by which it will be referred to for evermore.

It’s lazy. It’s cliched. But above all, it offends my linguistic sensibilities. It is derived, of course, from the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. This has led to the belief that you can borrow the gate from the building where it took place and simply append it to anything. And it’s plain wrong. There is nothing inherent in the word ‘gate’ that means anything to do with scandal. Imagine if the Nixon scandal had centred around the Waterfish building, we’d all be discussing the horsefish story now.

Now I know what you’re thinking. I have continually espoused a theory of language growing and evolving, of words taking on new meanings, and if gate has grown to be imbued with scandal-related meaning when used as a suffix, surely I should applaud that, that is what language does. But on this occasion, I am going to stick to my guns. I think it is ugly and unnecessary. A glance down Wikipedia’s list of ‘gate’ usages convinces me I am right, so ludicrous are many of the entries. I think Fajitagate and Toiletgate are possibly the pick of an appalling bunch.

I love the ever-changing nature of English. But this constant neologism is almost scandalous. It’s just that you’ll never hear me refer to it as languagegate.

Is Ineptocracy the Future of Government?

Writing in the Guardian this week, sketch writer Simon Hoggart claimed that Labour MP Paul Flynn had invented a new word. He wrote: “11.55: Paul Flynn coins new word for what the coalition has created: “An ineptocracy of greed.” Won’t catch on.”

Unfortunately for Mr Hoggart, he was wrong on two counts. Firstly, Mr Flynn didn’t coin the word. And secondly, it already has.

Ineptocracy has been around very fleetingly for at least 10 years, but seems to have picked up a head of steam towards the end of 2011 and is now starting to increase in usage both in blogs and on Twitter.

It is not yet in any official dictionaries but is being defined by users as “A system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.” Other, simpler definitions, suggest it is simply a ruling government which is incompetent.

It is certainly gaining traction in the United States, and Googling “ineptocracy obama” yields quite a number of results, suggesting that opponents are beginning to fix on the word as a way of encapsulating their negativity towards his presidency.

Mr Flynn is possibly the first person to be using the word in the UK, and always in relation to the Coalition. As well as his mention this week, he also write a blog last October called Building the Ineptocracy, but it seems he was responding to the growing usage of it from across the Atlantic and wanted to see if he could tie the current UK Government into it.

So will ineptocracy stick? There are factors against that. On a prosaic level, it is difficult to say and even to spell. I find I keep stopping to think about it as I type this piece. The fact that it doesn’t easily trip off tongue or keyboard may limit its growth. It may also be limited because it sounds quite specialised and a word owned by political writers and experts.

But I can see it growing as a shorthand way for bloggers and commentators to describe what they see as failed governments, so I can see ineptocracy gaining some official dictionary recognition later this year. And if a campaigning politician should pick up on it and throw it into a speech, then that validation will be very rapid indeed.

Swapportunity Knocks for New Word

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset – Swapportunity is not a recognised word. But is its status about to change?

Swapportunity’s current emergence is an advertising executive’s dream. The word features in an American commercial for yoghurt company Yoplait. The ad revolves around an earnest boy taking part in a spelling bee and shows his horror when he is asked to spell the word ‘Swapportunity’. His ire is not helped when he is told that it is defined as “The opportunity to swap a higher calorie snack for a delicious Yoplait Light”. Affronted, he protests that it is not a real word. It’s very funny, and worth a look:

Clearly, swapportunity will not catch on as a genuine word if its definition is tied up with low calorie yoghurts. But it does have a chance as a more generic word, meaning the opportunity to swap something.

Now I know that this isn’t a yawning chasm of meaning crying out for a word to encapsulate it. But there is evidence that it is being used. An Atlanta fashion event, The Ultimate Swapportunity, has just taken place. Musician website The Gear Page has discussed using it to create a market for musicians to trade instruments. And there are isolated examples from the last couple of years to show that this linguistic innovation has been on the margins, with a Forbes piece about corporate bonds being the most high brow.

So while swapportunity will not be appearing in dictionaries in the next few weeks, I think it has a chance of not only growing online but also being used at trading events. I am sure it is an opportunity it would not want to swap.

Let’s Get Physible!

New technology always breeds new words. So I wonder if this one will catch on.

One of the newest developments in technology is the 3D printer. This device does exactly what you would expect it to, namely it takes a data file and ‘prints’ the object out as a physical item. OK, you wouldn’t have expected to be able to ‘print’ a doll or a shoe in your own home five years ago, but that’s progress for you.

So far, there hasn’t been a catch-all name for objects that you can create in this way. Until now, that is.

The Pirate Bay, an infamous piracy and file-sharing website, has now started hosting suitable files on its website, and has created a new category for them. It has dubbed them ‘Physibles’.

Will this word stick? In some senses, it already has. The Pirate Bay announcement has picked up coverage that is beginning to extend beyond the technology blogs. All are using the word ‘physible’, albeit in inverted commas. So it may not be long before the punctuation disappears and physible become the standard word for these files.

Except. The Pirate Bay has long been unpopular with makers of films and music for facilitating the illegal downloading and sharing of material. Model makers such as Games Workshop are already angered by the physible development as it could harm sales of their models.

So will the technology world allow the Pirate Bay to take linguistic ownership of this burgeoning development, or will someone on the more legitimate side of the fence suggest an alternative? This is a technology in need of a name. The question is whether the Pirate Bay’s Physible will be allowed to prevail.