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"New" Words From the Geek Culture
thatskinnyguy sends news of Merriam-Webster's 2008 list of new words and, to no-one's surprise, a good number of them come out of geek culture: words like webinar, malware, netroots, pretexting, and fanboy are now official words according to M-W. The CNet article pulls out one "new" word for special appreciation — mondegreen — and, while the article gets the origin right, it ends with a lame call for readers to send in their favorite mondegreens. (CNet does have the good grace to link the Kiss This Guy site.) SFGate columnist Jon Carroll has been collecting readers' mondegreens since 1995 and his list is bound to be better. Quoting Carroll, in a prophetic mode: "This space has been for some years the chief publicity agent for mondegreens. The Oxford English Dictionary has not yet seen the light, but it will, it will." Would you believe, Merriam-Webster's?
Webinar : Seminar on the web, usually using youtube, flash or some other video/podcast like medium.
That's because the summary is wrong; "webinar" does not come from the geek world. It comes from the Dilbert world, where marketroids are compelled to make up stupid names for every mildly novel thing. Also, "pretexting" comes from the worlds of crime and espionage. The submitter learned about it in a geeky context (hacking) because the submitter is a geek and learns about most things in a geeky context.
The Miriam-Webster folks document its first /recorded/ usage as early as 1919. Presumably, it had been in used in spoken form even earlier. So this is a case of the IT crowd adopting pre-existing slang rather than IT speak making its way out into the general culture.
I gleaned this from the AP article. The interesting thing to me is how old some of these new words are, like usage of wing nut to describe a radical out in the far wing of a political party dates back to 1900.