The English language is a vast restaurant kitchen

posted on: blog.oregonlive.com

The English language is a vast restaurant kitchen. New words and phrases are brought in, cooked up, served to customers and thoughtfully chewed. Most are quickly spit out in disgust. But sometimes an offering is tasty enough to add to the menu.

Wordspy.com collects some of the more popular selections. So take a nibble.

downager: A person who acts younger than his or her age.

meh-sayer: A person who expresses indifference or apathy toward something.

sexsomnia: A sleep disorder in which a person engages in sexual behavior while asleep.

recombobulate: To recover from a state of confusion or disorganization.

jihobbyist: A person who is interested in and sympathetic to the goals of radical Islam, but who is not a member of a radical group.

nutritarian: A person who chooses foods based on their micronutrient content.

auto-eating: Eating without thinking or being hungry.

hurry sickness: A malaise where a person feels chronically short of time, and so tends to perform every task faster and to get flustered when encountering any kind of delay.

e-mail apnea: The unconscious and temporary suspension of regular breathing while checking and reading e-mail.

lucrepath: A person who is pathologically driven to make money.

churnalism: Journalism that churns out articles based on wire stories and press releases, rather than original reporting.

misery lit: A memoir or novel that focuses on extreme personal trauma and abuse.

thumbo: An error made while using the thumbs to type, particularly on a mobile device keypad.

infoganda: A fake or misleading news story designed to further a hidden agenda.

What do top English words tell?

Ten years ago, no one had heard of “H1N1″, “Web 2.0″, “n00b”, or talked about “de-friending” someone on “Twitter” or “Facebook”.

Now these are part of people’s everyday vocabulary.The world is changing. Inevitably, so are our words.The English language is going through an explosion of word creation. New words are coined – some, like “n00b”, may not even look like words; old words take on new meanings – “twitter” today bears little relation to the Middle English twiteren. According to the Global Language Monitor (GLM), in 2009 the English language tipped the scales with a vocabulary of one million words. Not good news for the 250 million people acquiring English in China.

GLM, the San Diego-based language watcher, publishes annual lists of top words and phrases by tracking words in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, blogs, and social media such as Twitter and YouTube.

Each year’s list reflects major concerns and changes taking place that year. For instance, from the 2009 list, we have to acknowledge the fact that technology is reshaping our ways of living (twitter, web 2.0).We need to face up to the after-effects of a “financial tsunami” (stimulus, foreclosure), a pandemic (H1N1), the death of revered pop icon (MJ, King of Pop) and the debates over “healthcare reform” and “climate change” that mark the year.A quick rundown of GLM’s top words/phrases of the decade is precisely like watching clips of a documentary of the decade. From the lists we are reminded of the series of world-shaping events from 9/11(2001), tsunami (2004) to H1N1 (2009), and we see the huge impact the Internet and new technologies have made on our lives, from the burst of the “dot.com bubble” (2000) to blog (2003), Google (2007) and Twitter (2009), which represent a new trend in social interaction.The lists are also witnesses of the influences of entertainment sector such as the film “Brokeback” (2004) a new term for gay to “Vampire” (2009), now a symbol of unrequited love. Michael Phelps’s 8-gold-medal accomplishments at the Beijing Olympics had created a Phelpsian (2008) pheat.

yes but.. what does N00b mean?

N00b: a derogatory term to define either a new user to a game/forum or someone who acts stupidly regardless of account age or time played.. not be confused with "newbie" 
a person who is just new to a game, concept, or forum.


Sources: Global Language Monitor, Urban Dictionary

Globish: the worldwide dialect of the third millenium

published on: Guardian

More than a lingua franca, the rapid adoption of 'decaffeinated English', according to the man who coined the term 'Globish', makes it the world's most widely spoken language.
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has just published a report Global Security: UK-US Relations whose headline conclusion (The "Special Relationship" is Dead) interests me. This, it seems to me, is potentially another milestone in the evolution of the phenomenon I've occasionally referred to on this blog as "Globish". Full disclosure: for the past four years, I've been working on a book, Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language, which argues that a seismic shift in the foundations of our lingua franca has transformed it from an expression of Anglo-American cultural sovereignty into a supra-national phenomenon, with its own powerful inner dynamic. Penguin Books will shortly publish this in the UK, and I'm on a state of alert for examples of Globish, because as I see it, this is a breaking story.What is Globish? For me, it's not just linguistic, and it all began in 2005. In September that year, Jyllands Posten (the Jutland Post), a culturally influential Danish newspaper, published a sequence of satirical cartoons poking fun at the prophet Muhammad, which provoked riots in which 139 people died. Possibly the most bizarre response to the affair, which surfaced again in January 2010 with an assault on the home of the artist, Kurt Westergaard, was a protest by Muslim fundamentalists outside the Danish embassy in London. Chanting in English, the protesters carried placards with slogans such as "Vikings Beware!", "Butcher Those Who Mock Islam", "Freedom of Expression Go to Hell" and (my favourite) "Down with Free Speech".This collision of the Koran with Monty Python, or perhaps of the OED with the Islamic Jihad, was the moment at which I began to reflect on the dramatic shift in global self-expression (I didn't have a word for it then) that was now asserting itself in this crisis, through a world united by the internet. What more surreal – and telling – commentary on the anglicisation of the modern world could there be than a demonstration by devout Muslims, in London, exploiting an old English freedom, and expressing it in the English language, to demand the curbing of the libertarian tradition that actually legitimised their protest?Then, in 2007, still puzzling over the phenomenon of British and American English as an evolving lingua franca, I came across an article in the International Herald Tribune about French-speaking retired IBM executive Jean-Paul Nerriere, who not only described English and its international deployment as "the worldwide dialect of the third millennium" but also gave it a name.In a posting in Japan in the 1990s, Nerriere made an important observation. He noticed that, in meetings, non-native English speakers were communicating far more successfully with their Korean and Japanese clients than British or US executives, for whom English was the mother tongue. Standard English was all very well for Anglophone societies, but out there in the wider world, a non-native "decaffeinated English", declared Nerriere, was becoming the new global phenomenon. In a moment of inspiration, he christened it "Globish".

Facebook speak: Teenagers create secret online language

Teenagers on social networking sittes are creating a secret language to stop adults knowing what they are up to, researchers say.

published on: Telegraph

The teens are using it to stop parents and employers judging them by their social activities such as partying and drinking.Instead of writing they are drunk, teens post 'Getting MWI' - or Mad With It.
Being in a relationship is known as 'taken' or 'Ownageeee', and 'Ridneck', a corruption of redneck, means to feel embarassed.
Meanwhile, girls posting 'Legal' are indicating that they are above 16 and legally allowed to have sex.
Lisa Whittaker, a postgraduate student at the University of Stirling, who studied teens aged 16-18 on Bebo in Scotland, said the slang had been created to keep their activities private, and cited the example of one young girl who was sacked after bosses found pictures of her drinking on the website.
"Young people often distort the languages they use by making the pages difficult for those unfamiliar with the distortions and colloquialisms," she said.
"The language used on Bebo seems to go beyond abbreviations that are commonly used in text messaging, such as removing all the vowels.
"This is not just bad spelling, which would suggest literacy issues, but a deliberate attempt to creatively misspell words.
"The creation and use of their own social language may be a deliberate attempt to keep adults from understanding what is written on the page.
"By doing this they are able to communicate with their in-group and conceal the content from the out-group. This further adds to their online identity."
She said that one reason for encoding their messages was to keep adults in the dark about their drinking or smoking. She is due to present her research at a seminar at the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data and Methods in Cardiff on Tuesday.

A God-given way to communicate

Fears about the demise of Arabic are misplaced

published on: Economist

THE Arabic language is dying. Its disloyal children are ditching their mother tongue for English and French. It is stagnating in classrooms, mosques and the dusty corridors of government. Even such leaders as the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, and Jordan’s foreign-educated King Abdullah struggle with its complicated grammar. Worse still, no one cares. Arabic no longer has any cachet. Among supposedly sophisticated Arabs, being bad at Arabic has become fashionable.
That, at least, is an opinion prominently aired in the National, an English-language newspaper in Abu Dhabi. It reflects a perennial worry in the Arab world about the state of the language. Classical Arabic, the language of the Koran, and its modern version, Modern Standard Arabic, known in academia as MSA, are a world apart from the dialects that people use every day. Spoken and written in the media and on stuffy occasions, this kind of Arabic is no one’s mother tongue. It is painfully acquired through hours of poring over grammar textbooks and memorising the Koran. Could it one day become obsolete?
Arabic certainly faces competition. Clive Holes, a professor of Arabic at Oxford University, concedes that learning formal Arabic tends to be undervalued by students in the Middle East, many of whom increasingly see it as divorced from success in the real world, especially in the international sphere, where English prevails. A lack of investment in education by Arab governments means it is often badly taught. In the Gulf countries Westerners and Asians, neither with much Arabic, far outnumber native speakers.
But that hardly means the language is dying. Arabic is the essence of Arab identity. Arabs are inordinately proud of their linguistic heritage. Handed down by Allah, many believe the Koran must be read only in the classical mode in which it was written. Even non-Arabic speaking Muslims force themselves to learn enough of it to read it. Stumble though they may, Arabs from different countries are enabled by MSA to communicate.
The popularity of a recent television programme beamed from Abu Dhabi in which people competed to see who could best recite traditional Bedouin poetry suggests there is plenty of appetite for Arabic in all its forms. In the absence of an authentic Arabic word, people may instead use an English word like “zip”, as the writer in the National laments. But such changes and borrowings are inevitable and may be quite healthy. Arabic will evolve from the prescriptions of the grammar book, taking in new words and discarding obsolete ones. But as Mr Holes points out, this is a sign of dynamism rather than demise.