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Banned Words List Carries Its First Emoticon
DynaSoar writes "Lake Superior State University in Michigan's Upper Peninsula ('The land of four seasons: June, July, August and Winter') has just published its 34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. Besides such unsurprising inclusions such as 'green' corporations being 'game changing' due to concern with their 'carbon foot print,' this year's list contains an emoticon for the first time — not a smiley face or variant, but the 'heart' symbol made from the characters 'less than' and 'three.' It's perhaps a sign of the evolution of language, or at least of this volunteer linguistic watchdog group, that a symbol compounded of two characters, neither of them a letter, is considered not only a word, but a particularly egregious one."
Or maybe ban the losers who constantly spell lose as loose.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Cue a bunch of humor-impaired Slashdotters exploding in 5...4... Shit, too late.
8====D
Some no-name college makes a list of phrases that they think are stupid and they get on the news.
Someone sees '<3' and nerdgasms. The aftermath is left here on Slashdot.
This is not news, it's spam.
Move along please.
Americans leave out the "u" in colour, armour, neighbour, etc. We no longer pronounce "night" as [ni:xt] or [ni:t] (IPA). We could come up with a huge number of examples, but why bother? Language evolves over time, words lose or gain meaning. It's a natural process. You'd think an academic institution would understand this simple concept, but I guess grabbing headlines is more important than practicing proper academia.
Emoticons are just an evolution of a new language. It's actually quite extraordinary. We have now created symbols that can represent simple meanings cross-culturally and cross-linguistically, and these symbols are popularized in large part by the youth of the world. They are creating a whole new language right before our eyes. I wouldn't be surprised if we would soon be able to communicate simple messages between different cultures that speak different languages via symbols (some would argue we already can). It's a shame that institutions such as this one and the "get off my damn lawn" crowd are ridiculing such an extraordinary example of the human ability to adapt and break down communicative barriers.
What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
2!
Well, you're only half right...
"Hacker" still means what it used to mean, but only among the community of for-fun programmers. So those people who get incensed about it are half-right. They are generally wrong, however, because in the common parlance, it really does truly mean someone who breaks into computers. Context almost always clears up whether it is meant to be used in the common fashion or in the jargon fashion. "I spent all weekend hacking on my Perl module" is clearly positive (well, unless you hate Perl) and would only be used amongst people who know what any of that means anyways.
They appear to either hate political discourse or the sound-bite products of political discourse.
They clearly love irony though. A US university trying to ban words from the Queen's English?
The people running slashdot appear more interested in changing the "look and feel" than actually making it work properly.
Seems like they think it's a good idea to gradually turn the rest of Slashdot into "Idle".
Well it looks like shit and feels broken. Can we PLEASE have the old /. back?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
ummm, lets see.
0000
0001
0010
0011
0100
0101
0110
0111
1000
1001
1010
1011
1100
1101
1110
1111
then keep on continuing from 15, all the way up to infinite
I am not stubborn. I am right!