Slashdot Mirror
"Woot" Becomes an Official Word
tekgoblin writes with a quick bit about new words in the COED. From the article: "Concise Oxford English Dictionary is the smaller but most widely recognized derivative of the official Oxford English Dictionary, which is celebrating this August its 100th anniversary. To celebrate, the lexicon published its 12th edition today that adds more than 400 new entries – many of which reflect the technological vocabulary found in today's society, like 'woot,' 'mankini,' and 'jeggings.'"
Is it w00t or woot?
"Woot".
I'm in the market for a good dictionary, but I think I'm going to wait until the 5th edition American Heritage comes out in November. That dictionary is pretty much the standard for most professional writers and editors in the U.S. I've also heard that the New Oxford American is a good dictionary -- some say better -- but I'm leaning toward the traditional.
Breakfast served all day!
"Noob" is now also an official word in the dictionary. I suppose that means I have to actually add it to my browser's dictionary so it'll stop telling me it's not a real word. Take that, spellchecker!
Will we still get 5.00 shipping????
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Woot o.O ? Woot is and official word now! That pwns!
This totally deserves a Woot Off.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Any schmuck can publish a dictionary, and there is no central authority that decides what is or isn't a word. If "woot" is appearing in dictionaries then that's all well and good as a sign that it's becoming more recognized by our culture, but that doesn't make it any more "official" of a word than it was last year.
Now that COED have given it's approval, hopefully the Queen will have the good taste to call out the noobishness displayed by the looters and offer them a royal teabagging.
Woot; is the Baba Wawa superuser!
Are the others soon to follow?
"Woot!" It's sort of a decade too late, but I do still get some use out of the word.
I also love how some people consider if may have been created due to the words wow and loot. Given that WoW was barely in development when I first noticed the word while playing quake. 0.o
but now I no longer have any respect for the OED
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
Slashdot, verb: to send a much higher amount of internet traffic to a website due to a link to it being included in a post on Slashdot, sometimes resulting in said site becoming inaccessible due to the increased load.
also slashdotted
Hey, how's it going?
This makes me very happy.
I'm really a low 5-digit Slashdotter, but this ID is where I am now.
Fucking dictionary companies just need to sell more fucking dictionaries, why else do you think they need to make a new fucking edition every fucking year?
woots!
I feel I am the one that restarted this up! Some friends and I started it during MegaTF Quake matches. Then that died. Now after playing battlefieldBC2 matches, everyone started copying me and it took off again to this point. Fing hilarious!
Too late. Woot sold out to Amazon.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
What about Samuel Boswell?
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
...when mankini was added? I never believed language-rape was possible, until now.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
'Newb' would actually be the correct word. Short for 'Newbie' from the root 'New'.
'Noob' is either a misspelling or just a rude word for 'Newb'.
darb, spifflicated, and giggle water.
I know it's supposed to be referencing the Tag Team song Whoomp! There It Is, but I can't be the only one who read it as "thereitis", as if it's there just because it's there.
Thereitis for Oxford English 2017.
It was at Oxford that some of the Monty Python troop began to display their talents for both erudition and silliness.
Why can't the OED display both, as well?
I look to see if the dictionary has cuss words. If it doesn't have any, it's probably not good.
I figure if they are too reserved to list cuss words, they probably also censor or 'politically correct' definitions of other words they might deem objectionable.
I always thought "Woot" stood for "We Owned the Other Team" ........ The "offical" meaning is "used to express elation, enthusiasm, or triumph (especially in electronic communication)" .... which is true... but not by acronym definition
d00d, at least spell it correctly, it's, "w00t". oh=zero. I'd also like to add they we shouldn't fight this decision. Imagine what would happend if the work F#@k was never conceived?
woot! + grats! = woots!
...
Woot.com is one of the sponsors of a conference I attend. A couple years back they began giving each attendee a box of random swag - with the company logo: WOOT! on the box.
When I brought it home after the conference and my wife saw it she couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.
She's one of the several hundred remaining speakers of Chinook Jargon - a west-coast American Indian trade language that has become an L1 on at least one multi-tribe reservation. It seems that WOOT-l'et (my phonetic approximation, not one of the canonical spellings) is a word in that language for penis.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Speak for your own country. In Finland, at least, we have Research Institute for the Languages of Finland.
The Research Institute for the Languages of Finland is a governmental linguistic research institute of Finland geared at studies of Finnish, Swedish (Cf. Finland Swedish), the Sami languages, Romani language, and the Finnish Sign Language. The institute is charged with the standardization of languages used in Finland.
Emphasis mine. In Swedish, there is a very similar body of Swedish Language Council.
The Swedish Language Council (Swedish: Språkrådet) is the primary regulatory body for the advancement and cultivation of the Swedish language. The council is partially funded by the Swedish government and has semi-official status. The council asserts control over the language through the publication of various books with recommendations in spelling and grammar as well as books on linguistics intended for a general audience, the sales of which are used to fund its operation.
You might also be interested in this rather long list of language regulators from other countries. So there are indeed words and ways to spell them which are considered official.
The problem with the Oxford English Dictionary is that it has become the "Guinness World Records" of dictionaries - adding all sorts of dumb-assed "words" for no other reason than to make the headlines and be "hip", with one single goal - get press to sell whatever it is they sell.
I'm guessing that they have some "on-line" product, as not too many people are buying huge multi-volume book series these days.
But rest assured, adding all this trendy "1337" crap and other new words that the young folks are spewing (get the fuck off my lawn) is being done *not* because these words have passed the test of time and are now semi-permanent in our lingual consciousness, but rather a desperate attempt of these "dictionaries" to stay relevant and thus stay profitable.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary was today renamed to "T3h ub3r5h0r+ gr@mm4r h4ck3r5 ch34+ 5h34+". Co-author of the dictionary, Edmund Weiner (alias "w3iner69"), said the move was made "for teh lulz" and that "411 ur wrdz r b3lng 2 us". Leaked copies of the latest edition are in fact ROT13d, and editors appear to have adopted Unicode in order to create crude textual illustrations.
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
From the article:
Since publishing its first edition back in 1911, the COED shows how the effects of social media and instant-access technology on language has created a variety of new words while modifying existing definitions such as “follower”.
Wow, I didn't know that there already were social media and instant-access technology in 1911.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So do words have to get approval from dictionaries now to become a word? I'm pretty sure words like 'jeggings' and 'mankini' have been commonly known colloquialisms for a while now. '"Woot" becomes a word' is not a very accurate title.
Since the OED lexicographers are over an office divider from where I am sitting I guess I'm in a good position to answer this.
The most important point to make about modern dictionaries is that they are descriptive not prescriptive. That is to say that they describe the language as it evolves rather than tell you how you should use it. Lexicographers are like scientists though they do not generally consider themselves as such, everything they include in their dictionaries has made it there through painstaking linguistic research.
Please believe me when I tell you that my lexicographer colleagues have no interest in being 'hip'. Trust me on this one, I see them walk past my desk every day. Instead they are passionately interested in language and when a word has amassed enough evidence of usage in modern English they include it in their modern English dictionaries. Evidence of sufficiently common usage to be considered to have entered the language is their only value judgement.
It is also worth spelling out the differences between the different Oxford dictionaries. The OED is a massive multi-volume historical dictionary based on human research. You would use it to find the etymologies of words over a milennium. The Oxford Dictionary of English and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary however are corpus based dictionaries, they are derived from computational analysis of a billion-plus word corpus of contemporary English. That kind of stuff should be right up the average Slashdotter's street. Thus words like 'woot' and 'leet' (The lexicographers are funny about numbers in words, don't blame me) will not have been selected for trendiness but because the corpus analysis tells us people are using them.
The multi-volume book sells rather well as it happens. Not to many individuals but there are a lot of schools, universities and libraries in the world. And yes, we do have two dictionary websites. But as to a desperate attempt to stay profitable, the OED itself is not likely ever to do that. It took decades to produce its first edition, decades more for the second. We are a publishing company that is also a not-for-profit department of a major university so the OED is a project created for its academic value rather than its monetary return.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
The OED is a descriptivist dictionary, as opposed to a prescriptivist dictionary. That means that the OED includes words that are actually being used, rather than prescribing which words should and should not be used. This means including words that many people object to, but too bad, there are a large number of people who use the word regardless of any official position about the word.
If you want to speak a language which has a prescriptivist authority, then I recommend French or Spanish, they have institutes that declare what is and is not proper language, and if you disagree, then you're wrong. If you want a language that is generally descriptivist, then stick with the Germanic languages, where we recognize that the authority on language is a native speaker, and not some people locked up in a room declaring that "ain't isn't a word" even though 70% of the population uses it on a regular basis.
If I had mod points I'd give 'em to your post. Sitting next door to the OED lexicographers I couldn't have put it better myself.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Huzzah!
I'm just excited because I finally won a boc from woot.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
This is the first time in my life I ever see those "words".
Please define.
Is there some way to enable details for Oxford Dictionaries online to show date a word was added.
There is no such thing as an "official" word. If a native speaker of a language uses anything as a word, it is a word. You get to coin new words on the spot.
Yet the word "Funner" is still not in there and probably more widely used.... our dictionaries are messed with all sorts of ridiculous words.
Shakespeare used it, albeit with an apostrophe...
'Swounds, show me what thou'lt do:
Woo't weep? woo't fight? woo't fast? woo't tear thyself?
Woo't drink up eisel? eat a crocodile?
I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I:
And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou'lt mouth,
I'll rant as well as thou.
Woot (not w00t) is the god and original ancestor of the Kuba people of Zaire. He mated with his sister (if memory serves) Ngaady a Mwaash in a sort of Adam and Eve way for the Kuba people. Woot is most commonly depicted in some pretty badass masks. Well worth checking out.
is the smaller but most widely recognized derivative
I try not to be a grammar Nazi but their talking about dictionaries...
Yep it's Friday.
http://www.lyricstime.com/95-south-whoot-there-it-is-lyrics.html
Ask Me About... The 80's!