Some people feel so strongly about the value to the human race of their coinages that they use them as much as possible in the hope that one day they will get into the dictionary. The words that are most likely to have this happen are those which are invented several times independently. Bag + agonise is a fairly obvious combination, and as the circumstance is repeated millions of times every day it has probably been repeatedly coined. It’s therefore only a matter of time before the word begins to appear in print. It already appears in the online Travel Industry Dictionary, labelled as ‘slang’. That’s a start. And in 2011 it had over 600 hits on Google. It’s bound to become standard English one day.
91. Webzine — an internet compound (20th century)
In 1998, the American Dialect Society named e- the ‘Word of the Year’, the one ‘most useful and most likely to succeed’ (§95). It wasn’t really a word, but they were right about its future. Thousands of e-coinages have since appeared, and many look set to be a permanent feature of the language, such as e-books, e-conferences, e-voting, e-cards, e-money and e-zines. Web was another success story, producing such phrases as web design, web address, web page and web publishing, as well as such compound words as webcam, webcast, webmaster and webzine. The proliferation began soon after the World Wide Web became public knowledge in 1991.
Webzine, for example, is recorded in 1994 — the latest in a line of other -zines, such as e-zines, fanzines, cyberzines and amazines (‘amateur magazines’). You can find them in zinestores and celebrate them at zinefests. If you are a regular reader, you are a zinester, and you may engage in zineswapping.
New compound words are one of the most noticeable features of internet vocabulary. Popular forms include click (clickthrough rate, cost-per-click, double- click), net (netspeak, netiquette, netnews), ware (firmware, freeware, shareware), cyber (cyberspace, cyberculture, cybersex) and bot (§78). Even the symbol @ has been made to do extra duty in word creation, both as a symbol and spelled out as a word (@-address, atcommand). Some very strange compounds have been created. If you look names up in a remote database, the usual instruction is whois. If you want to find a person’s e-address by entering a name and location, you type in whowhere.
The internet has also favoured a previously rare phenomenon called bicapitalisation (the use of a capital in the middle as well as at the beginning of a word), notably in company names. We find Alta-Vista, not Altavista — and similarly, AskJeeves, CompuServe, DreamWorks and GeoCities. Three capitals occur in QuarkXPress and aRMadillo Online. Sometimes just a middle capital is used, as in the i-prefix usages which have produced iMap, iPhone, iMac, iPad and other innovations — a pattern which has been picked up and used in a wide range of contexts, such as iDrugs, iDosing, iForms, i-Routes, iSense and hundreds more.
Domain names are likely to turn the world of lexicography upside down. Virtually every word in everyday English has now been bought, to be used as a domain name. Familiar compounds have gone the same way. To invent a new domain name these days you have to be really ingenious and play with spelling or unusual sequences, such as inventinganewword.com. These are all proper names, of course, so they don’t really count when it comes to vocabulary. But an unknown (and, I suspect, large) number will eventually develop general uses, in much the way that place-names have (§80). Do you wiki? Are you in a Mac-forum? Have you been Amazoned yet?
92. App — a killer abb (20th century)
In 1985 a writer in the trade newspaper Information World, describing a new kind of on-screen menu, used an abbreviation — and then felt he had better explain it: ‘apps’, he wrote, adding ‘for applications’.
Most people would have needed an explanation at the time. The idea of an application — a computer function designed to meet a specific user requirement — had been around for over twenty years, but shortening it to app was a novelty. The word had never been abbreviated in that way before. It immediately caught on. There was something phonetically appealing about the short, perky syllable, which seemed to suit the exciting quickfire developments in digital communication of the time. And soon after, the idea of a killer app arrived — a function which, in the dreams of the multimedia industry, would be so appealing or superior that people wouldn’t be able to do without it. If any word should achieve the status of a killer abb(reviation), it is this one.
There’s nothing new about abbreviations, of course. They’ve been in English since its earliest days (§3). But the Anglo-Saxon scribes could hardly have predicted the extraordinary increase in shortened words and names that has taken place over the past century or so. One collection (§79) has over half a million abbreviations, with new editions adding thousands more each year. And no wordbook should ignore the way that electronic media generally, and the internet in particular, have become one of the most fruitful sources of present-day growth, especially in abbreviations consisting only of initial letters (acronyms) — GPS (‘global positioning system’), SMS (‘short messaging service’), FAQs (‘frequently asked questions’) and so on. Most are short — three letters is the norm. Just occasionally we encounter longer sequences, such as WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you get’), or some of the humorous strings found in text-messaging, such as ROTFLMAO (‘rolling on the floor laughing my ass off’).
How many of these will last? Many, especially those used in texting, are likely to have a short life (§94). But app seems a safe bet for a permanent place in the language. The number of apps are now in the hundreds of thousands, and mobile phones are increasingly the technology of choice for internet connection, so this is plainly an abbreviation that is not going to go away. Who would use four syllables (applications) in everyday speech when they can use one?
93. Cherry-picking — corporate speak (20th century)
This chapter is going to bring to the table a brain-dump of buzzworthy outcomes.
By close of play you’ll have seen the value-added, the wow factor, of this joined-up state-of-the-art, blue-sky thinking. It’ll be a no-brainer, a win-win situation, a foot-on-the-ball result. I’ll be thinking out of the box. I’ll cherry-pick the low-hanging fruit so that you’ll see cutting-edge practice. Think synergy. Think mission. The bottom line is you’ll take ownership of my visioning.
Cherry-pick, meaning ‘choose selectively the most beneficial courses of action’, is,
