Urban Dictionary and Today’s New Words
The article “A Lexicon of Instant Argot” from the New York Times by Jenna Wortham explores how the website Urban Dictionary has grown and provided a place for anyone in the world to record the newest and latest words. The article is started with a reference to the singer Miley Cyrus “twerking” at the 2013 MTV music awards show and how the word “twerk” was the most searched term on Urban Dictionary for the whole year of 2013. Wortham then goes on to describe the beginnings of the Urban Dictionary website and its creator Aaron Peckham. According to Wortham, Peckham started Urban Dictionary while he was still a freshman in college as a satire of the website Dictionary.com after a failed attempt at a spoof of the search engine Ask Jeeves. He eventually quit his job at Google to work on his website full time. Although the site has had steady growth, it has not reached the mainstream. Since the content for the website is added by its own users, it is often unregulated and sometimes explicit. Even so, Wortham comments on how Urban Dictionary re...
The "Roaring Twenties" were a turbulent time in American history. The United States had just returned from the carnage of World War I and was ready to revolutionize their ideas, morals, and most importantly, their presidents. The presidential election of 1920 was a particularly integral election due to the introduction of the right of women to vote and America's social & political unrest. Warren G. Harding, a Republican, defeated Democrat James M. Cox, on a platform that urged Americans to "return to normalcy". Normalcy was a play on words of normality by Harding, which meant to conform to the norm. But the question that stood on many historians was: Why did Americans actually vote to "return to normalcy"? The simple answer was that the nation was ready to recover from their wartime anxiety and wanted a country without financial or political stress and Harding was the president that promised that to them.
Noah Webster—an 18th century American patriot, copyright pioneer and author of a dictionary that sustains his name centuries later. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1758, Webster is known both for fighting in the American Revolution and for his position as being a strong advocate for the Constitutional Convention. His admiration of valiant creative people and their regard for the preservation of their civil ideals was surpassed by the feeling of lament at how hesitant they could be when it came to the protection of their own interests. Intensely believing in the development of the United States’ cultural independence, he realized the necessity of a fundamental element of a unique American language with its own style, pronunciation and idiom (White 5). In 1806, Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, the first true American dictionary and Webster’s first small lexicographical work. Subsequently, he went to work on his classic masterpiece, An American Dictionary of the English Language. He learned a total of 26 languages—including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit—in order to research the foundation of his own country's native tongue. Published in 1828, this book embodied a new pattern of lexicography. Its 70,000 entries surpassed Samuel Johnson's 1755 British masterpiece not only in scope but also in authority (King 73).
Because of Twitter, new words, such as “tweet” and “twittering”, have entered into our dictionaries and mental lexicons as actual words. And it has also changed the meaning of other words, like the number sign. Before Twitter, the number sign was used for just that, to represent a number. But now, it is used to mark keywords or topics. The use was created by Twitter to help categorize messages, but it has grown to a global trend that generally all medias use. And lets not forget about the “text language”, where the majority of words are abbreviated to just a few short letters. With the limit of 140 characters, these abbreviations have become, in a way, new words
South Park is widely regarded as a contentious television program, but the season thirteen episode “The F Word” “was remarkable for breaking with the usual satirical format and proposing serious arguments for reconstructing the language we use to describe homosexuality” (Schulzke, 2012, p. 24). In his article on South Park, Schulzke argues that one of the show’s few unambiguous social positions is its stance on equal treatment for homosexuals, and that this specific episode makes a credible case to change how the word “fag” is defined and used. Many examples across multiple seasons, starting in the fourth episode, are explored to show the position that the program has taken on equality of rights and treatment for homosexuals. Later, when discussing “The F Word”, he suggests that although the writers may not have known it, they use multiple concepts, such as “meaning as use” and “social construction of meaning” (Schulzke, 2012, p.28) in an attempt to look at and redefine the hate word, and then acknowledge that the final value of a word comes from the linguistic community. Also suggested is the strength of the message inside of the episode, namely, that the multiple repetitions of the theme, whether blatantly stated by the characters or shown more subtly through different segments should more than suffice to display the message of the episode to a large majority of viewers.
In “Cyberspace and Cyberculture” Ken Hillis describes cyberspace as “imaginary and metaphorical” (Hillis 324) and cyberculture as “the cultural practices which occur in cyberspace” (Hillis 324). To which he claims that cyberspace and cyberculture are must exist as a pair. Because cyberculture must happen in a space, this space is by definition, virtual, and so it must have no physical dimensions (Hillis 324-325). Nevertheless, cyberspace is still space: A place where people can gather and share ideas. This is particularly true in reference to the Internet. Environments such as facebook.com, the fading Myspace.com, and specialty sites such as Last.fm, which cater to music enthusiasts, all operate in an effort to lubricate human interaction, and depend on those interactions to stay active. Their business depends on it. For example, Facebook.com is worth an estimated 300 million US dollars a year (Forbes).
Over the past several hundred years, our society has transitioned from an oral communicating world to a mostly literate culture. Only recently have we been exposed to the phenomenon of communication that utilizes both orality and literacy, better known to us as social media. With help from Walter Ong’s vast research, we are able to explore social media as a form of communicating and disseminating information. Ong’s thoughts of our embrace of a written-based society, coupled with our long history of orality, can help to explain the blending of both of these concepts under the umbrella of social media – the central communication tool of ideas, thoughts, and information in our modern world. Thesis Statement????
The article, “The Death of The CyberFlaneur” written by journalist Evgeny Morozov, discusses the social implications of technology. Morozov’s purpose is to inform the reader bout what a cyberflaneur was and how in 1998 some people believed cyberflaneur would progress and become known to many others. What is cyberflanuer, well cyberflaneur is a person who surfs the internet no intentions to finding something. Morozov demonstrates through ethos how cyberflaneur has declined. He utilizes a tone of credibility throughout his essay by quoting and naming important web sites and people.
In Johnson’s preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson argues the importance of preserving language. Other dialects had a produced their own dictionaries, such as the French and Italians. Various writers of the eighteenth century were alarmed at the fact that there was no standard for the English language, since there was no standard it could easily become extinct. Johnson explored many points, such as how and why languages change as well as how many words are formed.
Perhaps one of the most influential ways the printing press affected the development of language was with Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, written in the middle of the 18th century over a span of nine years. Johnson was a stickler for perfection, and took the time to define each word in detail, as well as providing the origin of the word and quotations from various other works using the word. Although he injected his own humor and biases into his work, the dictionary immediately gained a high reputation for being such a scholarly work of huge scope, and established the standard for dictionaries to this
When on “twitter” it is popular for teens to use phrases like “LOL”, meaning laughing out loud, or even “SMH” which means shaking my head. These short phrases are meant for one to be able to say what you need to in fewer characters. Using these remarks takes away from the opportunity to use more collegiate words to make one seem more intellectual. This generation is slowly losing its ability to write meaningful and educated pieces of literature. It has become too lazy to write out the whole word. Instead one abbreviates it so that one can communicate only slightly
People in the earlier years of language development would never have guessed that people would start using so much slang words as their daily vocabulary. For example; “Swag, YOLO, and Gay,” have been used frequently and they have multiple meanings. Swag can be used as a noun, describing a person's attitude, or what they look like in a physical manner. It has almost become a personality trait, or description. YOLO is an acronym meaning, “You only live once.” The word YOLO is used right before someone attempts something dumb. It is like a pardon upon themselves to give them the right to the ignorant act, without judgment. Gay is a word that has evolved over time with its definition. It used to mean happiness, and was a term of positivity. Now in modern times, people use the word gay as an insult, calling something dumb, or anything of that nature. These are just a few examples of how the English language has already changed. Not only are words being used that cannot
outlets. In the article, ‘Twitter Takes a Trip to College’ by Zach Miners, David Parry, a professor
English language has lately become the world’s lingua franca, making it one of the most spoken languages worldwide. An important feature that gives it a sustainable advantage over other languages is ability to easily adapt to changes. It is spoken in many dialects across multiple countries and continues to welcome new words while other words change meaning or are slowly abandoned. For instance, the word “abandoned” wouldn’t have made sense in the last sentence if an English man from the 14th century read it, because back then, it meant “to subjugate.” On the other hand, there are many English words that are added to official dictionaries at a yearly basis such as “tweep”, “selfie” and “hashtag”.
Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) stated that Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis were the first ones whom created the first system that allows people to post public messages in 1979. The worldwide discussion system was named Usenet by then. However, the era of social media only started about 20 years later. Bruce and Susan Abelson developed “Open Diary” at that time and were used to gather online diary writers into one community. At the same time, the term “weblog” was used until one blogger jokingly transformed the noun “weblog” into the sentence “we blog”. High-speed Internet access raised the popularity of the concept which later social networking sites we...
Shirky, C. (Producer). (June, 2009). Recorded at TED@ State. Clay Shirky: How social media can make history. Podcast retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html