(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-14 07:51

New technology, new fashions, new problems and new attitudes. The world is changing all the time. So is the language.

"W00t", the pick in Merriam-Webster's online World of the Year poll, is a neat epitome of how far the Internet has dominated our life.

The Web has heralded a new era, the impact of which we are only just beginning to understand.

It has rewritten the rules of production and distribution. More importantly, it has brought unprecedented freedoms to millions of people worldwide - to create and communicate, to organize and influence, to speak and be heard.

There is an influx of words the netizens and gamers use in the traditional media.

"W00t" is a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph. In the computer age when people are communicating electronically, "W00t" reveals the online trends.

New words "pop" up in our dictionary.

Once a decade, Merriam-Webster updates its best-selling dictionary. The 11th edition, which came out in 2003, includes 10,000 new words and more than 100,000 new meanings and revisions among its 225,000 definitions.

Pop culture remains a vibrant source of new words, with such additions as "headbanger" (defined as both a hard rock musician and a fan), "dead presidents" (paper currency), "McJob" (low paying and dead-end work), "Frankenfood" (genetically engineered food) and "longneck" (beer served in a bottle with a long neck).

Some of the new words have been a longtime getting the widespread assimilation that merits a move to the dictionary. Others have zoomed into the language with the speed of the Internet.

The Web has spun the biggest influence on the language in the past decade both with the new words it has spawned and the speed with which they have been adopted by the general public.

Chinese is no exception. The 2005 edition of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary added about 6,000 new entries, with 2,500 outdated words deleted. The country has undergone rapid social change as economic reforms accelerate, Western pop culture invades, and English imported along with the Internet is widely used.

New words are a reflection of society's changes though they may not spread and last long.

(China Daily 12/14/2007 page10)