The Amateur Etymologist

Oxford Word of the Year 2009: Unfriend

With the Internet being such an integral part of life, it's not surprising how it is changing and influencing the English language at an unprecedented rate. The types of experiences that are being created on the Internet are unlike any other and the English language is exploding with new words to describe these new phenomena. I still remember talking about how the noun access had become a verb when computers started becoming commonplace.

The other phenomenon I've noticed is that really old words have resurfaced with brand-new meanings. Take daemon for example. It used to mean an evil spirit but in the world of computer software, it means a background process. Most people see it when the mail daemon tells them they got an email address wrong.

One other word that has grown on me is interestingness. It's the quality of being interesting. To my knowledge, it first appeared on Flickr. It is used to describe how their algorithm decides which were the most interesting photos of the moment. "Our photos are ranked by their interestingness." Honestly, it's an ugly word, but even ugly can be cute sometimes.

This year's Oxford word of the year is unfriend. It's a verb that means "to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook". It's the case where a noun has been transformed into a verb. But in Singapore, we've been using it for years without the prefix.

"I friend him but I don't friend you," is what a Singaporean child may say to someone he doesn't want to befriend any longer. It's complete broken English, Singlish really, but a term everyone understands. And now, it's actually English! Well, sort of, if you add the prefix.

Read the rest of the Oxford blog entry to find out what the other candidates were. Personally, I like intexticated.

Best English ever!

While on a trip to Jeju, Korea, I came across this sign in the lift of a hotel. I just had a to take a photo of it. I don't even know where to begin to correct this. I guess it would help if I knew what it was trying to say!

English approaches one million words

According to the Global Language Monitor, the English language is rushing headlong towards it's millionth word in about 38 days. One million words! Goodness. That's more than any other language. But hang on a minute. What is a word? For example, AskOxford asks, should dog be counted as one word or two words? That's because it is a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently'. And should hot dog be counted as a new word or counted as a construction of hot and dog and therefore not a new word. And what about borrowed words from Latin, Japanese, French and so on that we use but aren't really English words at present? Do we count those?

Some more commentary from AskOxford:

The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

According to the Economist, the Merriam-Webster lists about 450,000 words in its lexicon. That count is very different from the OED. Ah! What's a word lover to think? It appears that counting up the number of words in a language is futile. But it's exciting to see English, grow, transform and change over time.  This means we never stop learning about the English language. It also means we need to discard old usage as the language evolves. English is truly is a living language. Every day, some new aspect of it amazes me.

Yoroshiku onegaishimasu

English is such a wonderful language and has such amazing ability to describe the depth and breath of human experience. It is also such an adaptable and inclusive language in the sense that it can absorb words from other languages and it continues to morph and change. It's a living language.

Some times though, it utterly fails when you try to find an equivalent English phrase to match a foreign expression. The Japanese phrase "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu" is one such phrase. There is nothing like it in English. "Yoroshiku oneigaishimasu" literrally means "I humbly ask you to be kind to me." But the beauty of that phrase is that it means so much more than that. Generally, the phrase connotes good but ambiguous feelings. And you can use it in great variety of situations.

For example, when you first meet someone for the first time, you say, "Yoroshiku oneigaishimasu." Here it means "Nice to meet you." When you first join a company, you can use the phrase to mean, "Please be kind to me and mentor me well." You can say the same thing when joining a group. In a business context, when you say it to a potential partner, it means "I look forward to doing business with you."

When you assign someone a task to do or ask a friend to do you a favour, the phrase then means, "I'll leave it to you" or "Please take care of it". The phrase can also mean "Please take care of me", "Please remember me" or "I hope we get along well". Between close friends, you can even use the more casual form "Yoroshiku". In this short form, it can also mean, "Say hello for me".

What an amazing phrase. By it's ambiguity, "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu" is such a catch-all phrase that helps you convey respect and courtesy when you are short of something nice to say. If only there were such a phrase in English.

Erotourism

Okay, the term erotourism isn't as bad as it sounds. From the Greek word eros, combined with tourism. Coined by the French writer Joel Henry, it's a holiday where the two people in a relationship travel separately to the same holiday destination. They don't tell each other where they are and they don't make any contact with each other. Instead, they try to find each other based on what they know of each other's preferences, habits, interests and dislikes. Talk about putting a relationship to the test. I'm not certain the word will survive as the phenomenon may not last (especially when couples fail to find each other!) but while it's in vogue, it's an interesting word and an even more interesting challenge to undertake.

Living dead win Oddest Book Title award

This has got to be one of the best awards to win:

Living dead win Oddest Book Title award

LONDON (Reuters) - The living dead beat rhino horn to be named Oddest Book Title of the Year.

Bookseller magazine gave the award on Friday to a self-help book on being haunted entitled "People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It."

In a close fight, the runner-up was "Rhino Horn Stockpile Management: Minimum Standards and Best Practices from East and Southern Africa."

Previous winners have been "Bombproof Your Horse" and "Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers."

What's the Size of Your Vocabulary?

Here's an interesting test to figure out the size of your vocabulary. It's taken from a book called "Words Words Words" by David Crystal. He claims the results will surprise most people because the results generally show your vocabulary is larger than you realise. Ready to try it? Then take the test to determine the size of your vocabulary.

My Favorite Word

Thanks to Yahoo! Picks, I stumbled onto a great website called "My Favorite Words". It's a site where users tell others what their favourite word is and why. It's a fun site that not only lets you get a glimpse into why people like language so much but it's a great way to expand your vocabulary too.

What's my favourite word? It's assignation. I not only love the sound of it, but I love its meaning too: a secret arrangement to meet, especially by lovers.

New Words in the Oxford Dictionary of English

The Oxford web site published a list of new words added to the next edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English (Revised Second Edition). It's a fascinating list. Several of the words are pretty cool, several just sound plain dumb.

I like chugger (a person who approaches passers-by in the street asking for donations or subscriptions to a particular charity), retail politics (a style of political campaigning in which the candidate attends local events in order to target voters on a small-scale or individual basis.) and wiki (a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content.), to name a few, because they describe new objects or phenomena. But words like clueful (having knowledge or understanding of something; well informed: clueful helpline operators) and overdog (a person who is successful or dominant in their field) are silly.

But who am I to stand in the way of the evolution of English. That is what impresses me about English--how it grows, expands and discards words over time. I think though, that the rate of change is going faster than ever before and the poliferation of online media and micro-publishing has created a devil-may-care attitude toward good grammar and punctuation. While I am all for new words entering the lexicon, we should still strive to maintain consistent standards of grammar to aid in the use and understanding of English. After all, what is a language but a means of communication. If the rules become garbled, then how can I communicate effectively with you and you with me?

A Word a Year: 1905-2005

If you could sum up the entire year with just one word, what would it be?

In her book Fanboys and Overdogs, Susie Dent selects a single word to represent each of the last hundred years. She surveyed new words from the last 100 years and discovered how words have the ability to capture the emotion and history of its era. And language has a way of evolving quite rapidly. But what was really interesting to me was how many of the words we consider as modern creations actually stem from an earlier era.

So what's the word for 2005? It's su doku. To review the complete list, see the Fanboys and Overdogs feature on AskOxford.com.