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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."
The KJV is in Early Modern English, not Old English. Old English is incomprehensible to modern speakers. u scealt witan over æm e u segest ær u spricst.
We have now created symbols that can represent simple meanings cross-culturally and cross-linguistically
We had these thousands of years ago, on the walls of caves.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
It's not that they don't recognize that it has meaning or that it's a word: Far from it. (By including it on the list they are explicitly acknowledging that it is a word, in fact.)
They are saying that it, like the rest of the words on this list, has been over-used and misused to the point of uselessness, where any meaning it once had is now worthless.
It's not that they disagree that it is a word. It is that they think it had a meaning and lost it, because people use it to mean anything they want.
Yea, what's with that? I remember /. used to be a site for techies, by techies--which means it actually used to work. Now I preview a comment and half the time I don't have the time to finish the edit-post cycle to get it posted.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Interesting - that appears to be closer to modern German (my native language) than modern English.
It's cause we stole it from you long ago. Most of English's "base" is German derived. It's just we're also very loose about adding words stolen from other languages. Making a faux pas at a rodeo is strictly verboten - you say this to an English speaker, and most of us will know what you're talking about, even though "faux pas", "rodeo", and "verboten" have all entered the English lexicon in the past 150 years or less. German, plus this stuff, plus 1300 years, equals modern English.
This is, consequently, why I think English has ended up being a global language - because it's so absurdly flexible. When's the last time French decided it was ok to add a word? I hear all the time about cultural purists in France being against adding simple words that the rest of us have been using for years, just because "that's English, so we don't want it" or whatever.
~X
sig?
Yeah, and how long until...
8===D
Gets the boot?