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'w00t' Named 2007 Word of the Year

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the still-waiting-for-slashdotted-as-a-verb dept.

bukharin writes "'w00t', the "small word that packs a pretty big punch", has been named Word of the Year for 2007 by dictionary gurus Merriam-Webster. Visitors to the Merriam-Webster website were asked to vote for one of 20 commonly searched words and phrases. Facebook was the runner-up. Previously honored geek words include google (runner-up in 2006) and blog (winner in 2004)."

7 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. What? by Gigiya · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I haven't seen anyone use "w00t" in about three years.

    1. Re:What? by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's definitely on the decline in nerd culture. I guess the rest of the world is picking through our discards.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    2. Re:What? by Elemenope · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A friend of mine's license plate is w00t. And he's a geek but by no means a cripplingly stunted one. Then again, the fact that the license plate was available says loads about just how important this word is to geek culture...not very.

      re: Dictionaries jumping the shark...no kidding. Then again, dictionaries aren't supposed to be up to date so much as a conservative normalizing force in language usage. IIRC, the first dictionaries were intended to regularize spelling variations, more so than be comprehensive catalogues of words in usage.

      --
      All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
  2. WTF? by Cleon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Leet-speak from 2001 gets named "word of the year" in 2007? How does that work?

    Next year I suppose it'll be "pwned."

    £4m3.

    --
    Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
  3. At least it's not... by foniksonik · · Score: 2, Insightful


    Bling
    Jiggy
    Fresh
    Bad
    Gnarly
    Dude

    or any of the popular slang words from our childhood... of course those were all 3-5 years old by the time they reached nationwide popularity too..

    It does represent the shifting focus of teen age pop culture however... surfer, skater, rocker, DJ Mixer, hip-hopper, Rap Star, Nerd, Hacker

    What's next? ask the kids... they know.

    --
    A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
  4. Merriam-Webster needs to leave the house more... by Loosifur · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Pecksniffian? Pecksniffian was in the running??

    Seriously???

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  5. Re:Didn't get the Memo by digitig · · Score: 3, Insightful

    e.g. love: "a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend", instead of lust: "sexual passion or desire". There, fixed that for you.
    --
    Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?