It's not even a word, is it?

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Anonymous wrote:
It's not even a word, is it?

There is no central authority, at least in US English, that decides what is a word or not. Common usage of a certain utterance makes it a word more so than some dictionary committee.

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Guest wrote:
It's not even a word, is it?

People, including myself use it in writtan communication. That makes it a word. Plus it is just another way of writing out Woo-Hoo, a well established expletive. Commen usage plus a standardized spelling; I think that would qualify.

<pardon the spelling. I'm stuck using @&$!!* IE7 with no checker)

Elite didn't used to have real letters in it. It was originally just symbols put together to make letters. Therefore "Elite" would be spelled 3|_1+3. I don't think words like w00t (or "\/\/00+") even existed. Elite was purely an alternate alphabet.

Interesting what happens to language by bringing it online...

I think it is a lack of discipline in our education system, i.e. schools, that allows the young folks to turn their little invented slangs into common use.

It is all about being 'cool', sad as that is.

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Anonymous wrote:
I think it is a lack of discipline in our education system, i.e. schools, that allows the young folks to turn their little invented slangs into common use.

It is all about being 'cool', sad as that is.

Kind of like using i.e. instead of spelling out id est, or e.g instead of exempli gratia.

Young people are the main source of language change. This is true across cultures and across time. This is well established in the field of historical linguistics. Young, hip people coin new words, vary pronunciation, even "break" the "rules" of grammar. I put those in quotes because, from a linguistics perspective, language is always in flux, and the only real test is whether a speaker is understood and accepted by their audience. Prescriptive grammar, which is what we learn in school, becomes quickly out of date as language changes and moves around it, so to speak.

Some of the changes young speakers make spill over into common practice. That's just the way it goes. It's why we don't speak the same English as we did in the 1700s.

Sometimes old farts like me like neologisms as well.

W00t!

The next new word in the dictionary will be "Emo". Which is short for emotional. The youngsters nowadays love this word and I hear it everywhere.

I think it a great day for this word . it is highly expressive ' w00t ' !
i think it can be used in just about any context you want ;

W00t you doing ?

Shock / surprise BOOM ' w00t '

Personally i like the way it sounds , I think it is highly expressive !

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Guest wrote:
The next new word in the dictionary will be &quot;Emo&quot;. Which is short for emotional. The youngsters nowadays love this word and I hear it everywhere.

I think it's a bit more specific than that. The way I hear it, it refers to a subculture of fashion and music (and shameless self-pitying, but I guess that's just what the people who hate them say). Like goth only...not.

If the test as to whether or not new words are acceptable in language is whether the audience can understand the speaker, then wOOt, emo, pwned and many other new words fail the test for a large portion of the English speaking population.

I have found various definitions for all three of the new words mentioned above. They appear to have different meanings depending on who you ask.

No wonder the United States scores so low in education compared to the rest of the developed world. We not only don't encourage proper linguistics, we actually condone and even encourage cutesy, ambiguous drivel.

I propose that we just toss the entire English language out the window and make all new words. We will start off with wOOt, emo, whatup alot and pwned. Another 10 or 20 words ought to be enough to express ourselves adequately considering the general level of intelligence which seems to prevail, at least within the culture of our youth.

With their clothes and their hair. Older people always think younger people are degenerate, uncultured fools. And part of that is because kids don't bother to talk the way older people want them to talk.

Hell, when I was a kid, teachers were obsessed with not using the word "kid" to mean child. "Kids are baby goats" was all I ever heard back then. Now "kid" to mean child is prevalent. Language and culture change. Get used to it or you just sound like a codger.

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Anonymous wrote:
..Language and culture change. Get used to it or you just sound like a codger.

Firstly, I am a codger. A codger is "an elderly man, esp. one who is old-fashioned or eccentric : old codgers always harp on about yesteryear." according to the first dictionary I looked in.

I am old fashioned. That is not a bad thing. Acting my age is also not a bad thing. Trying to destroy established norms is also not a bad thing if the purpose for doing so is to improve things. Modifying the English language solely for the sake of being different seems to suggest that you dislike the established norm but without even offering a suggestion for improving it. It just makes you appear to be insecure and need to 'one-up' the old codgers but for no reason.

Consider the apparent need that young folks have for acceptance. They have not been taught how to earn and therefore have self respect. Rather they have been taught to go out and tell the world that "I am better than you". Hence the need for being cool, hip etc. It is all phony, everyone knows it, yet it is still not only accepted in our culture, it is encouraged.

It is not the fault of the young people though, it is the fault of the old people (parents, teachers) for allowing them and even encouraging them to behave this way.

There, now you know everything that I know.

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Guest wrote:
If the test as to whether or not new words are acceptable in language is whether the audience can understand the speaker, then wOOt, emo, pwned and many other new words fail the test for a large portion of the English speaking population.

By that logic, supersymmetry, rheology, creatinase, hypoplasia, hypertrophy, objectivism, and reductionism are not acceptable, as they "fail the test for a large portion of the English speaking population." The audiences to whom those words are usually directed will generally understand them, of course. (The audiences are probably not the same.) That is true for the language of youth. The audience CAN understand the speaker. Just because you cannot doesn't mean that someone else cannot.

A few others that once were not understood by "a large portion of the English-speaking population":

byte (most probably still don't know what this means)
hard drive
floppy disk
thumbdrive
spreadsheet
flash memory
iPod

"A few others that once were not understood by "a large portion of the English-speaking population":

byte (most probably still don't know what this means)
hard drive
floppy disk
thumbdrive
spreadsheet
flash memory
iPod"
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Ah Yes, but there is a BIG difference regarding your word list above. These are all words to define NEW things. Obviously new words needed to be created.

By contrast, what our youth want to do is to alter existing words (emo) or create new words for things that already have a number of words to describe them (wOOt).

wOOt not only is unneeded, it also does not even have an agreed upon definition. It has been brought into the lexicon of the youth solely for the purpose of them trying to distance themselves from their elders and thus be 'cool'. Not a very impressive behavior is it?

When I see W00t, I think woot.com