DailyDirt: Making Up Words

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Wed, Dec 5th 2012 5:00pm — Michael Ho

The English language creates new words all the time and steals words from other languages to bulk up its vocabulary. Maybe it's not fair to other languages, but then the consequences are that English grammar is highly irregular and correct spellings sometimes require knowledge of the word origins. Here are just a few interesting tidbits on creating new words.

The usage of "OMG" apparently dates back as far as 1917 -- when Lord John Fisher used it in a letter to Winston Churchill. However, the Oxford English Dictionary only added OMG to its lexicon in 2011. [url]
How many words exist in the English language? Unabridged dictionaries have hundreds of thousands of entries, but scientific estimates put it closer to a million. A 2011 Culturonomics paper suggests the English language is growing at a rate of about 8,500 new words per year, but that rate is actually slowing down. [url]
Lingodroids are creating new words that humans might be able to use. Perhaps fittingly, these bots are generating a whole lot of new 4-letter words. [url]

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Filed Under: culturonomics, english, language, lingodroids, omg, words

7 Comments

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Reader Comments

The First Word

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wave of the hand

These are not the lingodroids you are looking for

—Anonymous Coward

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Anonymous Coward, 5 Dec 2012 @ 5:08pm

*wave of the hand*
These are not the lingodroids you are looking for
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Anonymous Coward, 5 Dec 2012 @ 6:13pm

http://phys.org/news/2012-11-spaun-human-brain-simulator-tasks.html

Who said computers can't emulate brains?

"The most surprising feature about Spaun, according to Prof. Eliasmith and colleagues is that it has human-like flaws. For example, it has trouble remembering lists of numbers when they are too lengthy, and is better at remembering numbers at the beginnings and ends of lists. It also hesitates before answering questions, just as humans do. These flaws may be useful in future robots, Eliasmith said, as they would make robots seem more human-like and therefore easier to interact with."
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silverscarcat (profile), 5 Dec 2012 @ 6:30pm

English language
Isn't it said that the English language takes other languages out on a date, then slips them a mickey, takes them out back, does horrible things to the language before walking off, whistling?
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- Anonymous Coward, 6 Dec 2012 @ 2:27pm
  
  Re: English language
  First I've heard of it. I still don't see how they get "kernel" out of c-o-l-o-n-e-l.
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MikeVx (profile), 5 Dec 2012 @ 7:54pm

Extreme Making Up Words.
A friend of mine has gone on an extreme kick of making up silly words with sillier definitions and has even published them in an e-book dictionary. He's trying the tactic of promoting on Facebook with iffy results.

I'm not sure if it would be appropriate to name it here (I'll check back later for comments) but I will say that if you are curious, visiting a popular sales site named for a large river and searching on "very silly words" makes it easy to find. Getting it on other e-book sites is being worked on, but if nothing has gone wrong, there is no DRM to interfere with migrating it to your choice of reader. I was able to convince the author that irritating your customer base was not a great idea.

So far the CwF is going well, the RtB, not so much, but this is an experiment. Whether it works or not, we'll find out.
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- Michael Ho (profile), 6 Dec 2012 @ 10:07am
  
  Re: Extreme Making Up Words.
  Feel free to name this ebook of silly word definitions... it reminds me of "Sniglets" from the 80s, and those were kind of a brief fad.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sniglet
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  - MikeVx (profile), 6 Dec 2012 @ 6:05pm
    
    Re: Re: Extreme Making Up Words.
    Thanks. I've actually told the author that there was some overlap on the Sniglets audience into his sort of craziness. He thinks this is a totally different target. We'll see.
    
    The title is:
    
    Goofilinguage - A Collection of Very Silly Words by Bruce Jaffe.
    
    At the moment, only on Amazon, other outlets being worked on.
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