Tag: mobile

Dictionary Gone, Dictionary Still to Come

The changing nature of English vocabulary has been neatly summed up by two recent stories from opposing ends of the linguistic spectrum. Both give us an insight of how our dictionaries might look over the next few years, but reached their conclusions in contrasting fashions.

The first was research by Disney’s Club Penguin into the language used by teenagers online. The result, unsurprisingly, is that for the most part, their parents don’t understand it. So Disney has published a Digital Dictionary as part of its overall online safety campaign as a way of helping parents to understand what their offspring are actually talking about.

So no longer will words like Keed, Dub and Derp be mystifying, while parents will be able to understand that in this context, Sick is good and Jelly is bad, and that is not just because of the after-effects of eating too much trifle.

The interesting thing for language watchers of course is whether the words in this specific dictionary have enough staying power to cross over into mainstream dictionaries, and whether this listing is just a passing fad that will fade into history, or is instead a tantalising glimpse of the OED in 50 years’ time.

And talking of 50 years, research by Lancaster University has given us an idea of how much language has changed over the last 50 years. They analysed millions of books, articles and speeches to come up with a list of the 2,500 most common words in the English language, and compared it with a list compiled half a century ago.

The results were not necessarily that surprising. Marriage, Religion and God are all on the decline, Sex and Celebrity are on the increase. Words such as Mobile, Internet and Computer are fairly obvious new arrivals.

The list of disappeared words really does capture the imagination and speak of a world now disappeared. Servant, Plough, Gaiety, Telegraph, Mill, Coal – all are redolent of times gone by. It is good to see Hunger going, but maybe the departure of Handshake points to a decline in manners.

So while the lexicographers of the future consider adding Yolo, Spinout and Noob to their pages in years to come, if they have to make space in printed editions, will Grammar, Comb and Bless be the things that make way? It is a sneak peek of the dictionary of tomorrow.

Have You Ever Made a Throne Call?

UK supermarket chain Asda has coined a neologism in an attempt to drum up interest in its range of mobile phone tariffs.

It has commissioned research into phone usage and discovered that nearly one in five men admit to making a call on their mobile while in the toilet. They have dubbed such communications Throne Calls.

It’s quite funny. But that’s about it. It’s a pretty blatant attempt at new word creation with the sole aim of garnering publicity for Asda products, rather than a move to enrich the language. I don’t think it has a long-term future as a new word. It’s hardly fulfilling a crushing chasm in the language, while few people are likely to own up to making throne calls. And the Urban Dictionary did it four years ago, but it seems to have had absolutely no usage since then, so that kind of proves the point.

And if it did catch on, who knows what might follow? All suggestions for what SMS could stand for are gratefully accepted.

Mobile Users Having A Smishing Time

You can always tell when a new word hasn’t caught on – two or three years after it is first coined, it still has inverted commas around it when hits the headlines.

So it is with Smishing, the mobile cousin of phishing. It is the practice of sending bogus text messages to people in order to con them and was actually coined in 2006 in a blog on the McAfee website. But six years later, it has still not shed its inverted commas or the sense that people are seeing it for the first time.

Smishing is currently in the news in America because of an outbreak of fake Wal-Mart related text messages. It has led to much coverage of a new type of cyber attack but all the articles confirm that despite its few years of linguistic existence, it is a term that none of us have ever heard of.

Which begs the question of why. Smishing is derived from SMS and Phishing, and simply conflates the two. Phishing is itself a conflation, though not an obvious one. It takes fishing and combines it the ph from phone phreaking, which is the art of cracking the phone network.

Despite its rather convoluted derivation, phishing works as a word. You can immediately understand it as it has the element of fishing for something until you get a catch, in this case a cyber one, and the ‘ph’ spelling makes it seem kind of techy, even if you have no idea why it is actually spelt like that.

But smishing? It doesn’t have the benefit of sounding like another word. It actually sounds pretty daft. And because of its slight ludicrousness, it is hard to imagine it being talked about with the same seriousness as its email ancestor.

So even though there is a growing problem of spam text messages landing on people’s mobiles around the world, I don’t expect to see Smishing finding its way into common vocabulary any time soon.