Tuesday, February 23, 2010

'Kollifying'English

Q : What do people do on twitter?
A : They tweet!

Q : What are people who tweet called?
A : Tweeple.

Q : And where do i get all these information from?
A : Tweetipaedia

In the past few years , perhaps, more words have been added to our lexicons than before.Though only a few have made their way into the official lists others still find their place in our conversations.
Words like orkutting,tweeting are still informal while those like Banglored have made their way into the Oxford dictionary.

With new inventions and changed lifestyles came either new words or new contexts for many already existing words.
Like 'to chat' might have been used only to mean 'to converse' till sometime back.But today it largely means to chat on the 'net'.



Also words like 'padipist'(to mean a nerd) led to the development of regional variants of English like 'Monglish'and the like

English evolved from the German and latin languages and borrowed into its arsenal a whole load of foreign words and phrases.It developed for itself a grammatical structure and absorbed into it all the new terms that were popularly used.Just when we thought nothing could harm its newly acquired status there lay another axe waiting to slay it.

With service providers competing with one another for charging lesser and lesser per alphabet,the mobile users have been chopping the language into tinier and tinier bits.The complete jargon of letters,yet succeed in making their point.



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ADDENDUM
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This is in the context but slightly stretched out.But I am adding it for the lighter touch ;-)
I am reminded of two words whose usage I have been able to put in new contexts over the years.
The first one would be 'bit'.
I graduated from the 'bits' of paper in the nursery classes to 'bits' as units of digital information in my engineering college(GEC).
But GEC also taught me another bit. A bit which I could use in exams! ;-)

'Release' is another such word of interest for me.
We all know what the verb means.
Since my college days,again,they held a new meaning to me.Specially on fridays.That of a movie being 'released'.
The niceness about the word ,however, vanished soon. ;-(
It held a different meaning for me in Bangalore,and that too, coincidentally on the same fridays!!
My weekly software release!And it came to be a dreaded verb.
Thankfully,I am 'released' from that scene.

As I rack my brain,perhaps, more such 'bits' would fall down.I shall be updating this blog as and when I encounter them.
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2 comments:

Hash said...

dont forget ur masterpiece
"backot" (u were asking me to turn the knob backwards on a signal generator) :O

lee said...

dont rack ur brain hard. sometimes the remaining screws and nuts may fall down :)