The millionth word in the English language was added last Tuesday morning, at exactly 10:22 am GMT. Well, no it wasn’t, but that didn’t stop Paul Payack of the Global Language Monitor claiming it was: at 10:22 am “Stratford-upon-Avon time”, the millionth word in the English language was announced to be the convenient-for-marketing-purposes phrase web 2.0.
If the outlandish claims of accuracy made by Payack didn’t already induce scepticism—he managed to measure this to the minute?—then the “word” which preceded the millionth should do so. Beating web 2.0 to the punch was the phrase jai ho!, a phrase which apparently gained “popularity” through the film Slumdog Millionaire (the word slumdog itself was apparently word number 999,997).
A quick comparison on Google suggests that web 2.0 is about 100 times more popular than jai ho!; a search on Nexis UK gives around 1,800 citations for jai ho in the year up to 7th June 2009, whereas web 2.0 is used over 2,000 times in the last month alone. It’s hard to see, then, what could cause jai ho to be recognised as entering English before web 2.0, unless, of course, it’s all made up for reasons of publicity and marketing.
For this reason, it was an enjoyable piece of schadenfreude to see Payack being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight who, to Payack’s seeming surprise, opens his questioning with “well this is rubbish this idea of yours, isn’t it?”, and gets more aggressive from there.
You did get 'twazmuppet' into the dictionary for me, right? It is in there? I've been using it for about six months, so it should be. Just slip it in; no-one will notice.
It's probably about as popular as jai ho, so I don't see why not!
[...] I do – their claim is meaningless – but clearly lexicographers think in packs, because two former colleagues of mine from the OED have already said it perfectly, so I’ll defer to [...]
[...] Want to be notified about new posts? You can subscribe by email or by RSS.I know a bit about science, certainly enough to be aware that media coverage of science is on the whole terrible. I used to think that this was a specific problem with science coverage; however, now that I know a little bit about language, I find that the media coverage of this is also, in general, crap. [...]
[...] to be notified about new posts? You can subscribe by email or by RSS.After the Global Language Monitor, following numerous publicity-maximising delays, finally announced they’d spotted the [...]