'w00t' Named 2007 Word of the Year 244
bukharin writes "'w00t', the "small word that packs a pretty big punch", has been named Word of the Year for 2007 by dictionary gurus Merriam-Webster. Visitors to the Merriam-Webster website were asked to vote for one of 20 commonly searched words and phrases. Facebook was the runner-up. Previously honored geek words include google (runner-up in 2006) and blog (winner in 2004)."
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Next year I suppose it'll be "pwned."
£4m3.
At least it's not... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bling
Jiggy
Fresh
Bad
Gnarly
Dude
or any of the popular slang words from our childhood... of course those were all 3-5 years old by the time they reached nationwide popularity too..
It does represent the shifting focus of teen age pop culture however... surfer, skater, rocker, DJ Mixer, hip-hopper, Rap Star, Nerd, Hacker
What's next? ask the kids... they know.
Merriam-Webster needs to leave the house more... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously???
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
A friend of mine's license plate is w00t. And he's a geek but by no means a cripplingly stunted one. Then again, the fact that the license plate was available says loads about just how important this word is to geek culture...not very.
re: Dictionaries jumping the shark...no kidding. Then again, dictionaries aren't supposed to be up to date so much as a conservative normalizing force in language usage. IIRC, the first dictionaries were intended to regularize spelling variations, more so than be comprehensive catalogues of words in usage.
Re:Didn't get the Memo (Score:4, Insightful)