How the Internet Is Changing Language

Ant writes "BBC News reports on how the internet is changing language. What was once understandable only to the tech savvy has become common. From the article: 'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own Internet slang. But is the Web changing language and is everyone up to speed?'"

Comments

Not so much the internet as games

[MichaelSmith]

My eight year old son plays the usual games in the playground but I noticed that it is now possible to pause them. The way it works in you are running around playing Tag or something and somebody says Pause and everything stops. Its a bit like time out in basketball, but for me it is directly derived from the electronic games they play which generally have a Pause function.

Re:Can anyone be really up to date?

[rolfwind]

Just read the Lolcat Bible:
http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

You'll turn the tables and be confusing the kids in no time.

Re:To google..

[kumanopuusan]

In Japanese, verbs often end in ru. guguru (one transliteration of Google) ends in ru and it's used as a verb. With only a handful of exceptions, all Japanese verbs are regular, so once a new verb is coined all of its many forms are used more or less naturally.

From the verb stem (gugur-) one can derive all the other forms of the verb, including gugureba (if [one] googles), gugutta (googled), gugurimasu (google [polite]) and even gugurikata (googling technique), gugutteirassyaru (to google [exalted]), gugutteitadakereba (if [I] humbly receive the addressee's act of googling), guguritai ([I] want to google) and gugure (google [impolite imperative, similar to "Google it, motherfucker!"]).

Try the real one

[Moraelin]

Just read the real bible and you'll be confusing fundies left and right.

And you can go for even nastier than confusing if you want. For example, find someone who's a fan of that Ezekiel 4:9 bread, and tell them that the whole recipe given by God there continues all the way to Ezekiel 4:13: "and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man". Yep, God's recipe there actually calls for human shit as an ingredient for that bread. (Though Ezekiel himself, for being so faithful and kosher all his life, gets Gods dispensation in 4:15 to eat his with cow shit instead.)

Especially if you spring that on them after they ate some, honestly, no amount of lolcat bible can even start to compare :p

Re:What about television?

[pushing-robot]

Go back 50 years, and you will probably find the same commentary about television. How it was spreading new terms and speech patterns and what not.

Funny you mention that, since I just ran across this:

http://sundaymagazine.org/2010/08/from-1890-the-first-text-messages/