Texan wordsmiths at the
Global Language Monitor based in Austin, announced yesterday that the one millionth word in the English language was Web 2.0.
How they came to decide which word was one millionth is beyond our
grasp, but the organization claims a neologism is created every 98
minutes. At Fudzilla, it usually takes us less than 98 seconds to create one,
but that's beside the point.
To qualify as a new word, the newly coined term has to be used more
than 25,000 times in print, and it has to appear in more regions than
one. It has more than 1.53 billion speakers worldwide, and more than
600,000 words listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. Compared to
English, some other European languages look like instruction manuals
for USB sticks. French has 100,000 words, while the Spaniards can boast
250,000. The Bosnian language has about 350,000 words, but around
200,000 of those describe the physical act of love, while another
100,000 are various other profanities. (We made this bit up.sub.ed.)
Obviously some scholars are not thrilled about the choice, or the idea to choose a one millionth word to begin with.
David Crystal, professor of
linguistics at Bangor University, called the idea "the biggest load of
rubbish I've heard in years". "It is total nonsense.
English reached 1 million words years ago. It's like someone standing
by the side of the road counting cars, and when they get to 1 million
pronouncing that to be the millionth car in the world. It's
extraordinary."
Even the GLM admitted there was a shedload of words they didn't take into account. Paul JJ Payack, the president and chief word
analyst of the Global Language Monitor, emailed Crystal saying there was more than 600,000 species of fungus alone, and that's not even counting the inbred mutant ones on my shower curtain.
Anyway, some other candidates for the word were "coddies", "chengguan",
"fundoo", "slumdog", "sexting", "noob", "bangsters", "slumdog" and one
the guys at Nvidia would have loved, "greenwashing" which apparently
denotes
"re-branding an old, often inferior, product as
environmentally friendly, and quendy-trendy."