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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."

9 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!
  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.

  3. 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.
  4. 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.