Tech Buzzwords Added to Dictionaries

Mark Owen writes "With technology buzzwords becoming so commonly used in daily life, Webster and Oxford have both begun to include some new terms in their latest editions. Some of their newest additions include: adware, biodiesel, codec, digicam, google (as a verb), geocaching, hacktivism, mash-up, rewriteable, ringtone, spyware, and texting."

'Texting' is a Noun?

[eldavojohn]

texting, n.

I thought 'texting' would be a verb. As in, "I just got an $1800 ticket for texting while driving" or "my teacher sent me to the principles office for texting during class."

Maybe I'm wrong, I'm a better ones-and-zeros-smith than a wrodsmith.

from the don't-forget-web20 dept.

What the hell is web-twenty? Is that the time of day when all the pot heads get off their asses and sit at their iMacs and work on their crappy Phish tribute GeoCities site with flying toasters and images of Jerry Garcia?

Paper Dictionaries

[neonprimetime]

Who uses Paper Dictionaries anymore? I mean seriously, you have all the online resources you need in wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and google [google.com]. You have PDA's and cell phones that will hook you up to the internet, so that's not an excuse anymore.

OED first

[sane?]

But as the article mentions, the OED was updated to include many of these terms earlier - and inclusion in the OED is much more the definition of if a word has arrived than Merriam-Webster.

Why both reporting the also ran?

Re:Paper Dictionaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of people.

I for one don't pause in the middle of a game of scrabble, open google and type in the decidedly dodgy word put down on a triple word score. I pick up my trusty OED and look it up!

Re:Mash-up

[dbcad7]

I have similary unexplainable feelings about the phrase "my bad".

Why

[AlpineR]

1) It's not really that big of a deal. This is a summertime Friday on Slashdot. There is a small possibility that there will be an article posted here with less than Earth-shattering consequences.

2) When a word appears in the dictionary, it's usage and spelling are defensible. You should no longer be considered illiterate if you write "adware" in a school report or magazine article. And the next edition of your word processor should stop trying to correct "adware" to "aware".

3) As you say, the dictionary is a record of how people use words. It has sociological value. I didn't realize that anyone was actually using the terms "cybrarian" or "mouse potato". Apparently somebody is.

Re:Why?

[EggyToast]

Now the word is officially "archived." Without some historical archive on words and the uses of words, the idea of language changing over time could be easily overlooked by some in the future. Think about young kids whose only use for "gay" is for homosexuality and "bad." Without some archive that actually defines the word, the idea that at one point it meant "happy" could be forgotten. Looking back at historical text from the 30s and 40s, without that understanding one would end up quite confused.

Besides that, dictionaries do have some authority that people put trust in. As you mention, it's already colloquially used, but that only helps for people in those circles. Now that there's a trusted resource, people outside of those lexical circles can peer inside and figure out what those words mean, without getting a run around online. A parent hearing their kid use these words may feel stupid asking the kid what those words meant (and wouldn't likely get a straight answer), but now, rather than trying to do searches online (since their lack of understanding means they likely don't get a lot of internet exposure), they have a trusted resource they can refer to.

You may not care since you see these words all the time, but it's like any archiving; it's there for people who need it.

since google is now an 'official' verb

[MECC]

Since google is now declared a verb, will that weaken the value of the word 'google' as a trademark? If I register 'googlearound.com' as a domain (not that I would do something so stupid, since godaddy, the Internet's official domain slut, already has), would it be harder for google to sue me?

just wondering

Re:'Texting' is a Noun?

[plumby]

Erm, no.

Texting, as in "I am texting" is simply a continuous tense (in this case, present continuous) of the verb "to text".

"I was running" and "I was texting" are both past continuous tense.