It’s official: English is now a dead language.
Merriam Webster announced its pick for “Word of The Year” today. Beating out facebook (as a verb meaning to add someone to a list of friends on facebook.com or to search for friends on a similar social networking site), surge, and bluetooth, this year’s winner w00t marks the demise of English and the rise of…something else.
I’m all for a living language and can get squarely behind Oxford’s choice of “locavore” as a solid portmanteau (local+omni/herba vore = locavore (someone who cooks with mostly locally grown ingredients that do not require extensive shipping or preservatives)) but the inclusion of a word that, yes boys and girls, has two numbers in the middle of it signals to me the death of actual language and the first step into our move toward textlish(TM).
Granted, w00t (an exclamation of joy or excitement) came not out of the global SMS/cellphone world but out of the gaming world, and circa 2002 at that, and while the use of numbers to substitute for letters becomes a weeding out mechanism, the proper substitution is known only to the elite (or l33t), including such a “word” in the official lexicon isn’t proper recognition of a living language it’s the sinking of lexography and the rise of slanguage.
Of course, given that in American parlance it has become common to refer the totality of a woman’s genitals as her vagina I’m not really surprised by M-W’s choice. We clearly can’t use the language we already have.