Puns, put-down and fresh coinages from the white-hot furnace of e-culture

What do you call the loss of productivity caused by too much time spent on Facebook? "Social notworking." A steeply devalued retirement account? "201(k)." A painfully obsolete cellphone? "Brickberry."

These linguistic dispatches from the land of cooler-than-you come courtesy of wit-mongers Cramer-Krasselt, a Chicago-headquartered full-service agency with a tidy billion dollars in annual billables. C-K's notable accounts include Corona beer, AirTran Airways, Levitra and Porsche -- which sounds like a recipe for a wild weekend in Fort Myers, Fla.
For the second year, the firm has published its Cultural Dictionary of the zeitgeist-iest words and phrases, pulling together -- as only an office full of droll and snarky hipsters can -- the slang, puns, put-downs and freshly minted coinages from the white-hot furnace of electronic culture. It's pretty hilarious.
To wait impatiently while the SMS system catches up, for example, is to be "textually frustrated." "Baling out" is F-bombing a helpless underling a la Christian Bale; "Blago" here appears as an expletive, as in "Holy Blago, Christian Bale really Blagoed the pooch!" Some entries are simply Web wastrels, such as "pwn" (to triumph utterly over another) and "gr7" (pretty good, but not gr8). Hit your teenagers with these and watch their eyes narrow with suspicion, or is that respect?
And yet many of C-K's entries offer real insight, even wisdom, to a consumer culture constantly trying to figure itself out.
The first question, though, is why an ad agency would bother. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure famously wrote, "There is no thought without words" . . . sort of. Actually, he wrote, "La pensee, chaotique de sa nature, est forcee de se preciser en se decomposant." Which I translate as, "Thought, naturally chaotic, becomes concrete and precise in the framing of language."

Source: Ihavenet

Getting a handle on the language

Thanks to the economy, technology and fashion, there are so many new words being created you'd have to be a "didiot" not to notice them. As a didiot myself, I assumed didiot means someone who's an idiot with digital technology (that would be moi), but no: It is a hybrid of "damn" and "idiot." A "yoot" sounds like either a Dr. Seuss character or the way your cousin Vinny would pronounce "youth," but instead it is a person young enough not to remember life before youtube.
Men were already suffering in the "mancession" -- meaning disproportionately more men are unemployed due to the languishing of traditionally male trades like construction. Now they have to cope with the "Tiger effect," too. That's newly alert wives checking up on them through cellphone, GPS, and e-mail records. And by the way, a GPS is not just a gizmo but also a driver that gives too many directions. I have just bought a GPS myself and love it, but wish that instead of the bossy female voice directing me this way and that, I could have mine programmed with Colin Firth telling me in his posh British accent, "Oops! This is a one-way, ducky!" or "Wait 'til the light goes green, love."
Anyway, the Tiger effect must be the downside of "funemployment" for some, that is, enforced time off work that might as well be used to do long-postponed enjoyable things. With today's technology, can cheaters of either gender really be dumb enough to think they won't get caught, or on some level do they want to be? Nah, that's giving them too much credit for psychological complexity. Sex addicts, my Aunt Mabel! They ain't nothin' but hounddogs.
Other new words for males include "hegans," men who are vegetarians but not necessarily sissies, and "heavage," for the male cleavage that Simon Cowell shows off so proudly. Back, too, is the "pornstache," the full luxuriant moustache of the 70s that was especially popular with newsmen and porn actors. Maybe someday the five o' clock shadow that lost Tricky Dick the presidential debate -- but that many women now inexplicably find sexy -- will also seem quaint.
We have the recession to thank for the lack of a "speeding cushion," that is the five miles above the speed limit that a nice ossifer used to let you get by with; now more tickets are being written as cities and states try to rev up their revenues. That "incentifies" drivers to follow the limits. I've been seeing "incentify" a lot in the business world; it's one of those conversions of a noun to a verb that drives traditionalists and grammarians crazy. Sure enough it sounds dopey, but I have come around to the belief that in language, change is inevitable and correctness rests mostly upon usage; it's like a river because it is never the same twice.
From my kids I've picked up "meh," which signifies profound indifference. An exchange might go like this. Question: "Do you want to rent Al Gore's documentary about climate change?" Answer: "Meh."
A neologism that strikes my fancy is "Nocialism," that is, the denial that a policy or law being proposed is an example of Socialism. In politics closer to home, I keep hearing Gov. Culver referred to regularly, but not affectionately, as "the big lug," a signal that his jig is up come November.
From the travel industry comes the word "yotel," very small but sometimes very fancy accommodations that originated in Japan, allowing people to experience luxury for less. From fashion this spring comes "the shoe boot," a warm weather version of the boot. For me, it conjures up a surprisingly tender "All in the Family" episode in which Archie recalls how other kids called him "shoe bootie" because he was so poor he had to wear one shoe and one boot to school. If you remember that episode, too, kid, you're no "yoot."

This post appeared originally in the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa.

K.I.D.D.E.R.S.

Kids In Debt, Diligently Eroding Retirement Savings.

According to Australia’s Sunshine Coast Daily, solicitor Paul Brennan is responsible for this improbable initialism: Mr. Brennan said an increasing number of his cases involved parents wanting to ease their child’s financial strain. He has even coined a phrase to describe the trend: KIDDERS, which stands for “kids in debt, diligently eroding retirement savings.” Mr Brennan tells his clients they need to exercise some “tough love.” He said parents getting involved could compound the problem by giving creditors a new target with perceived deep pockets.
Incidentally, in 2005, the BBC reported on the trend of KIPPERS.:… the drain on finances created by grown-up children is a financial burden that exacerbates the difficulties posed by longer life expectancies.
The modern-day dilemma has spawned the term kippers, standing for “kids in parents’ pockets, eroding retirement saving.”

published on: Schott's Vocab

Playbor

The increasingly blurred distinction between online play and labor. Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are pulverizing the final distinctions between work and play.

As Rob Horning noted on his blog Marginal Utility last month, “social networks are harvesting and reselling the details of our cultural cry of self, conveniently translated already by our volunteer labor into terms of brands and trademarks already on the market. "This process even has a cute neologism – playbor, which was the focus of “The Internet as Playground and Factory,” a recent academic conference in New York. “Social participation is the oil of the digital economy,” explained organizer Trebor Scholz on the conference website. “It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor.”Writing recently in Wikinomics, Naumi Haque contributed some examples:The simple idea driving the playbor discussion: What happens when we collapse the often conflicting interests of work, personal ambitions, and entertainment into a single activity? We already see examples of this happening on the Web. Consider Google’s Image Labeler, which creates a game out of the legitimate task of tagging and creating metadata for Web images. A less contentious example is Free Rice, which hosts a word game and has sponsors donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme for every right answer submitted by players. Media theorist Julian Kücklich, who has written about how computer game modifiers (“modders”) contribute unpaid labor to the gaming industry, defined playbor thus: Like other forms of affective or immaterial labour, playbor is not productive in the sense of resulting in a product, but it is the process itself that generates value. The means of production are the players themselves, but insofar as they only exist within play environments by virtue of their representations, and their representations are usually owned by the providers of these environments, the players cannot be said to be fully in control of these means. Playbor is suffused with an ideology of play, which effectively masks labour as play, and disguises the process of self-expropriation as self-expression.


published on: Schott's Vocab

Which words make you merry?

So we know you hate 'moist' and 'stakeholder' and 'nice', but which words do you love?

Words with soft sounds such as "l", "m" and "n", and long vowels or diphthongs, reinforced by a gentle polysyllabic rhythm, are interpreted as "nicer'" than words with hard sounds such as "g" and "k", short vowels and an abrupt rhythm.

There are always two reasons why people love or hate a word. One is the meaning, the other is the sound, and it's difficult to disentangle the two. Concentrating on the sound can best be done when meaning is taken out of the equation, by comparing synonyms.

Some inveighed against clichés ("solutions'"), Americanisms ("math"), Latinate words ("defenestrate"), colloquialisms ("like", when used for, like, quoting), political correctness ("chairperson"), nouns as verbs ("critique"), irregular spellings ("inveigle") and much more. Only a minority actually focused on the phonetics, and when they did, Gratak-sounds ruled.The vast majority of the hated words were short - one or two syllables - with short vowels and hard or hissing sounds: "crotch", "sac", "fiscal", "gusset", "nappy", "gutted", "rectum", "gash", "pustule". Slightly longer hates were "obligate", "spatula", "privilege"' and "masticate". The most interesting suggestions were those where the meaning of the word was pleasant, or at least neutral, but the sound still got on someone's nerves: "kudos", "bap", "boobs", "feisty", "veggie", "kooky", "pasty", "pamphlet", "spouse'" and - ironically - "poet".The forum started off with someone hating "moist". That's an interesting one, because it begins with soft sounds and a diphthong and ends with hissing and hard sounds. I'd expect opinions to be evenly divided there - and indeed, it wasn't long before "moist" had its defenders. "Flange" was another that brought divided opinions.Did anyone restore the balance, sending in words they liked the sound of? Yes, a few: "miasma", "lilt", "eland", "bland", and the mouth-watering "oligopoly".

published on: Guardian

Twenglish Police: The self appointed Twitter Scolds

published on: NYTimes


JOHN CUSACK tweets with his iPhone and, much like the characters he plays, his style is fast and loose. “I’m pretty new to it, and if there’s a spell check on an iPhone, I can’t find it,” he said by telephone. “So I basically get in the general ballpark and tweet it.” Consequently, Mr. Cusack has birthed strange words like “breakfasy” and “hippocrite” and has given a more literary title to his new movie: “Hot Tub Tome Machine.” Most of his followers ignore the gaffes. But a vocal minority abuse him about it nonstop, telling the star that as much as they liked “The Sure Thing,” his grammar and spelling sure stink. “If you’re going to be political, maybe learn how to spell Pakistan, and all words in general,” wrote one supposed fan. “The vitriol was so intense that at first I didn’t think they were serious,” Mr. Cusack said. “Because, like, who would care?” They do. A small but vocal subculture has emerged on Twitter of grammar and taste vigilantes who spend their time policing other people’s tweets — celebrities and nobodies alike. These are people who build their own algorithms to sniff out Twitter messages that are distasteful to them — tweets with typos or flawed grammar, or written in ALLCAPS — and then send scolding notes to the offenders. They see themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette. “It would be kind of nice if people cleaned up their grammar a little bit and typed in lowercase, and made the Internet a little bit smarter,” said one of them, Nate Fanaro, a 28-year-old computer programmer in Buffalo, whose Twitter handle is CapsCop. Last October, Mr. Fanaro wrote a simple program that detects tweets written in capital letters and automatically sends one of several snappy responses, like “This isn’t MySpace so maybe you should turn your caps lock off.” So far, he has issued more than 130,000 of these helpful reminders, including at least 205 to one particular user, a woman in Singapore. (Oddly, with little effect.) “Some people don’t really understand that it’s just not good Internet etiquette” to type in all capital letters, Mr. Fanaro said.