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Podcasting Officially a Word

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-consider-myself-a-wordsmith dept.

goldseries writes "The BBC is reporting that the New Oxford American Dictionary is adding podcasting to the dictionary. A year ago it was rejected because not enough people were reading it, but, in a ode to the speed of technology's growth, it is being declared the word of the year. Podcasting has been in the Oxford Dictionary of English since last summer. Podcast beat out words such as lifehack and rootkit for inclusion in the dictionaries. I guess no one needs to know what a rootkit is."

20 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Food for thought... by Antony-Kyre · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It may be a word now, but will anyone still be using it 50 years from now?

    1. Re:Food for thought... by cjb-nc · · Score: 4, Insightful
      "I got your memo, would you go Xerox 10 copies for me for my next meeting?"

      There's a word that was ubiquitous some number of years ago. Can't say I've heard anyone use Xerox as a verb in quite a while. Now it's copy or photocopy. Podcasting will go the same way, eventually. I seriously doubt it will take more than 10 years, much less 50.

    2. Re:Food for thought... by meringuoid · · Score: 4, Insightful
      It may be a word now, but will anyone still be using it 50 years from now?

      Quite possibly. Remember how 'Hoover' became a generic term for a vacuum cleaner? How 'walkman' became a generic term for a portable personal cassette player?

      I would not be surprised to see 'iPod' becoming a generic term for digital audio players - or, if Apple defends its trademark as well as it probably will, the obvious corruption to just plain 'pod'. The increasingly widespread currency of the word 'podcast' might well cause this to happen more quickly. If you can listen to podcasts on it, it's a pod, right? Not an iPod, because that's only the Apple ones, but a pod nonetheless...

      --
      Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
    3. Re:Food for thought... by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It may be a word now, but will anyone still be using it 50 years from now?

      Marry N'uncle, a swivven'd comely wench shall tell thee by the nonce.

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    4. Re:Food for thought... by Golias · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you didn't know, here is a clue: some people don't care to be lost in some fanciful world and would rather be engaged with other people in some form of itneraction.

      The way everybody was so close and friendly with each other on New York subways before the invention of the Sony Walkman? The world you live in sounds like it must be really nice. I wouldn't know, as I've never seen it.

      Seriously, you sound like a total ass when you assume that you KNOW the reason why other people bought their iPods. I can only speak for myself and those close to me: We buy them to listen to music on, and don't care what the fuck people think about them. When they are not in use for the stated purpose of listening to music, they are hidden away in pockets, glove boxes, handbags, etc.

      Why would anybody think of a small hunk of personal electronics as a "status symbol" anyway? It's barely visible, cheaper than jewelry, and usually tucked out of sight. You might as well try to convince me that women who buy expensive vibrators are only getting them because they want to be part of the "in crowd." My first guess is that they are getting them for their own personal satisfaction, and don't really care whether they impress anybody or not.

      --

      Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

    5. Re:Food for thought... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Oooooooh!

      Here I thought you actually believed that. Now I understand. You're bitter because you're the only kid on the block with a cheap-assed iPod knock-off, and rather than acknowledget that you are insanely jealous of the iPod's remarkable ease of use, handy click wheel, compact size, wide array of accessories and add-on features, etc. You see those people having oodles of fun with their MP3 players, to the point that they are unable to contain their elation about finally getting one, and it hurts that you are not having that kind of fun owning yours... so you redirect your bitterness into convincing yourself and others that yours is actually better because it's something different than the iPod.

      It's not possible that their player is more popular because it's actually better in some ways. It must be because it's "in." How it got to be "in" to start with, when it's so obviously not as wonderful as yours, is a mystery which will endure for the ages, but now that it's "in" the reason why everybody wants one is that it's "in." Yeah. That must be it.

  2. Pah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'll stick with audio download.

    1. Re:Pah by baryon351 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Right. can someone explain to me the difference between new trendy "podcast" and the old "ftp" or "scp" or "http" that we use for everything else? It's the same old technology just dressed up

      Convenience. Back in the early 90s, I remember many remarks like yours about the new WWW. "Can someone explain to me the difference between this new trendy "world wide web" and just downloading files by ftp? It's only text and gifs anyway". Yes podcasts are all just mp3s and xml. They're also one hell of a lot more convenient, in the same way that anyone sane would rather go to www.site.com/index.html instead of manually downloading some text with references to half a dozen images and then go hunting down the images it referred to.

      Podcast = find a show you like, subscribe. listen.
      Audio Download = find a show you like, find how to download it from that particular site, find how often it's updated to know when to check again, download it, move it to your player/audio device, listen.

      Admittedly neither is much different to the other for one single download of one episode. or two. perhaps three, but when you find ten separate podcasts you quite like listening to each episode of, you're bound to just throw it in the too-annoying-to-continue-with basket. This kind of automation benefits the listeners who keep getting their shows easily, and the casters themselves who don't have to continually get their audience to go through a rigmarole of steps just to hear the show. Radio doesn't make you do that.

    2. Re:Pah by Rude+Turnip · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Apple didn't invent the word "podcast." As to what "should" or "should not" be part of a language, that wreaks of the same elitism that leads the French government to have a ministry of language. Language is what the people speak, period. Language is descriptive, not proscriptive.

      --
      Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
  3. Re:Why does podcasting need its own word? by Iron_Yuppie · · Score: 1, Insightful
    "Saveable webcast" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

    It's unfortunate that podcast implies you need an iPod to use it, but you don't. Most audio podcasts can be played on any mp3 capeable device. I'm not too familiar with video podcasts but I assume you can watch them on most PSPs, Archos hardware, or other portable video players.

  4. Excuse me? by springbox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's just a fad word for downloading audio from the Internet. This pretty much summarizes it. How did it get added to the dictionary so fast? It's not even generic - it was created in part based on a modern day product. If anything, it should be going into a slang reference guide not a dictionary.

    1. Re:Excuse me? by SandSpider · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Specifically, it's a word for downloading binary content (generally large binary content, usually audio, video) from the internet in a way that doesn't require active user intervention after subscribing, using a pull model rather than a push model. So emailing an MP3 would not be a podcast, because it's a push technology, but if you use a pull technology such as RSS, Atom, or some manner of SOAP application to direct the download, then it would be a podcast. (Of course, people misuse the word, so it may become more generic than that, but properly, it's as I've written above).

      The point is that it's such an easier interface for the end user that it has become popular in its own rights. Technically, television is movies, just in your home and not in a movie theatre, but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be another word describing it because the interface is different.

      And what's with the attitude that a dictionary is some sort of sacred document that should only include words that you think means something special? Is it the third-grade teacher mentality, which says that "ain't" isn't a word, despite its common usage? The great thing about dictionaries is that they can include all forms of words, and give you the proper instances for use. In the example above, the Oxford English Dictionary says:
      ain't - informal contraction of
        am not; are not; is not : if it ain't broke, don't fix it. [ORIGIN: originally representing London dialect.]
        has not; have not : they ain't got nothing to say. [ORIGIN: from dialect hain't.]

      USAGE The use of ain't was widespread in the 18th century and is still perfectly normal in many dialects and informal contexts in both North America and Britain. Today, however, it does not form part of standard English and should not be used in formal contexts.


      A proper dictionary should include words that people want to understand the definition of. If everyone is using the word podcast, and you don't know what it is, a dictionary might be a good place to look it up, especially nowadays when dictionary information is available online so can be distributed faster.

      =Brian
      --
      There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
    2. Re:Excuse me? by BodhiCat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's not even generic - it was created in part based on a modern day product. If anything, it should be going into a slang reference guide not a dictionary.

      There are many words in the English language that started out as brand names. Common examples are kleenex and band-aid. Its not surprising that words based on brand names for computer hardware, software, or processes have made it into the Oxford dictionary.

  5. Re:Product word? by Duckz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's no different than Google being in the dictionary.

  6. Re:What!? by 1u3hr · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I can't believe podcasting got into the dictionary before rootkit did!


    Results 1 - 10 of about 74,600,000 for podcast.

    Results 1 - 10 of about 8,480,000 for rootkit. So obviously podcast has more currency, and I think in the non-tech media the ratio would be much higher.

  7. You are oh so right.... by spectrokid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I guess no one needs to know what a rootkit is."
    No, no non-techies should have to know about this. They ought to live in a world where it is ok to listen to a CD you bought legally in a normal shop.

    --

    10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then

  8. Please kill me now... by jonr · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Podcasting... Can I throw up now?

  9. Re:Why does podcasting need its own word? by NevDull · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Podcasting isn't a "webcast" that you can save. It's not streamed, it's downloaded. ...and webcast is an emptier word than podcast.

  10. Dictionaries don't OFFICIALLY make things words. by httpamphibio.us · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Dictionaries just report on current usage of groups of letters that have meaning. They don't officiate anything. That's one of the problems with things like acrostics and Scrabble, they don't care if things are actually words or not, just that they are in the dictionary. There is a vast portion of language that manifests itself in words that has never and will never be in the dictionary.

    --
    sig.
  11. Podcasting is a temporary solution by GauteL · · Score: 2, Insightful

    .. to the iPod and most other mp3-players not having any radio tuner or internet access when you are on the road.

    When iPods and other mp3-players have constant Internet access, "podcasting" will be about as common as people taping radio feeds on their cassette deck to play later. Hardly something requiring a new word.