Category — English

The American Dialect Society just came out with its 2007 words of the year. Subprime is this year’s winner. The rest of the list is a great read. View the press release containing the full list.

I love wrap rage, defined as “the anger brought on by the frustration of trying to open a factory-sealed purchase.” If there’s a word of the year for parents, that would be it.

Senator Larry Craig has the dubious honor of inspiring two less-than-complimentary words on the nominees list. Not the sort of mark you’d like to make in the annals of linguistic history.

Free Rice

Now you can play the most addicting vocabulary game in the world and help donate rice to the hungry at the same time. For every word you can define correctly, 20 grains of rice are donated courtesy of the site’s advertisers.

The maximum level you can attain is 50. Getting over 40 is quite doable for anyone with a decent vocabulary as the levels jump up quickly at first. Once you get over 42 or 43, it takes a lot of words to move up one level. It gets exponentially harder to move up a step as your score increases, and the words get much harder as you go. Miss a word and your score drops.

I have no idea how much this equals in real terms, but all the various players helped donate 7 billion grains of rice in December. It’s a brilliant achievement in just three months.

Visuwords – online graphical dictionary and thesaurus

Now visual thinkers and learners have a dictionary just for them! Visuwords is so cool it defies description. Instead of typing in a word and getting a definition or some synonyms, Visuwords shows words and concepts related to your keyword in graphical form. You have to see it to believe it.

You may have to scroll down a little to see the key to the colors and arrows, but it’s quite intuitive without it.

Merriam-Webster selected w00t – an interjection that conveys celebration of an accomplishment, like ‘yippee’ – as its Word of the Year for 2007. The purist part of me feels like this is another sign of the apocalypse. The rest of me is proud of M-W for being creative and open-minded.

It feels like the modern equivalent of Whitman’s barbaric yawp. When anything reminds me of Whitman, that’s a good thing. After M-W posted the award, I realized how much I use w00t in everyday speech, so I’m onboard.

Even though w00t evolved from a hacker-invented language called l33t (pronounced ‘leet’), in my mind I connect it with its evil twin, ‘IM speak’. It’s no secret to people who know me that I despise all the abbreviations used in text messaging. I know writing messages on a microscopic phone keyboard is hard, which is why I don’t bother with it.

When used in e-mail, I think it’s just plain lazy writing. If you type with any real speed, the amount of time you’d save by using it is negligible and hardly worth the hit your credibility as a writer takes from it.

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