The Register reports that the Global Language Monitor estimates the English language will reach the one-million-word mark on June 10.
GLM adds a word to the vocabulary after its been detected 25,000times in media and social networking sites. A neologism (which is aneologism meaning “new word”) is added by GLM every 98 minutes onaverage.
Technology has been the culprit for many of the more uselessentries, and also some of the catchiest. In our long and not-so-storiedcareers in tech journalism, we’ve heard a lot of them. Here are some ofour faves (and least favourites):
Solutionize: If we had armed language police, the first person whouttered this would have been tasered mercilessly. Ditto “productize.”
TLA: Three letter acronym, used dismissively when tech types try tosnow under the business side with short forms, as in: “Don’t TLA me,tell me what’s really happening.” The irony being that neither TLA normost of the expressions it is used to abuse are acronyms. An acronym isa word; TLA, ERP, CRM, SFA and their ilk are abbreviations. (Unless youactually pronounce it “erp.”)
Friend (as a verb): Lay this one at the feet of Facebook. Can one enemy?
Chimping: A favourite. Refers to the act of checking the photo on adigital camera’s LCD screen after every shot. Named for the “oohs”provoked by admiring your own work.
Marchitecture: Electronic architecture produced purely for marketingreasons. For example, making minor tweaks to an infrastructure productto rebrand it as “cloud” something. Like anyone would do that.
Greenwashing: Positioning of a new product or service asenvironmentally friendly, although there’s really been no change fromthe previous iteration. A form of marchitecture.
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