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.
Microsoft launched a new search engine this week named Bing. The name seems odd, but, Microsoft being Microsoft, there are a lot of marketing reasons why it is so – the most interesting for a lexicographer being the (possibly optimistic) hope that it will start to get used as a verb:
If Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
This verbification is an unusual thing for a company to want to one of its trademarks, for reasons explained by the Chambers Editors’ blog:
Becoming the generic term for a class of product is certainly confirmation of a brand’s dominance. However, if a trademark becomes genericized, the owners’ intellectual property rights to the word are threatened. Syntactic or morphological shifts such as verbification and pluralization can often signal a trademark’s demise and so are actively discouraged by the likes of Google™, Hoover™ and Xerox™ wishing to avoid the fate of escalator, kerosene, trampoline and yo-yo.
Google made the jump from noun to verb years ago: the verb is first attested in the OED with a quotation from a Usenet post from October 1999, made just over a year after the search engine itself launched. It remains to be seen if the verb Bing catches on in the same way, not least because Binged resembles a common spelling of the past tense of the verb binge – which might have what Steve Ballmer calls negative, unusual connotations.
The highlight of The Colbert Report the other night was obviously Stephen Colbert’s interview with Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter rant against dictionaries:
In the Wikipedia article on hypertext, I was glad to see dictionaries mentioned in the “early precursors to hypertext” section:
Other reference works (for example dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.) also developed a precursor to hypertext, consisting of setting certain words in small capital letters, indicating that an entry existed for that term within the same reference work. Sometimes the term would be preceded by a pointing hand dingbat, ?like this, or an arrow, ?like this.
What’s interesting to me is that, now that many old dictionaries have been digitized and put online, these pre-hyperlinks have now been converted into actual hyperlinks, fulfilling their original function in a way far more elegant than the original makers of the dictionaries could ever have imagined. Go, the future!
