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?
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!
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.
Too late. Woot sold out to Amazon.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
"Where will I be able to buy an HP TouchPad?" Word of the day for three hundred, Alex.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What about Samuel Boswell?
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
looks you could use a whole fucking lot of new fuckin' words your-fuckin'-self: maybe you should take fuckin' advantage of this fucking release.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
...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!
I'm just waiting for Grammar Nazi to hit the OED. The lulz of it would be plentiful.
I've never seen anyone use newb for newbie. But I've seen noob or n00b all the time. In fact if you do a google search for both newb and noob, it only returns a section of images for noob, therefore noob is more common and accepted.
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.
"N00b" is a misspelling of "newb", that is in its turn an abbreviation of "newbie". "Noob", on the other hand, is a misspelling of "n00b" that no one ever used before those self-proclaimed lords and masters of English language.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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?
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.
It's standard usage in Dungeons and Dragons Online. A newb is a new player, he is fresh and has to learn. A noob is someone with a certain state of mind, an unwillingness to learn coupled with self-professed mastery. A newb asks if he should wield a greataxe as a monk, a noob does it and proclaims it to be uber.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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
Is there some way to enable details for Oxford Dictionaries online to show date a word was added.
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.
http://www.lyricstime.com/95-south-whoot-there-it-is-lyrics.html
Ask Me About... The 80's!
I'm going to assume that the OED isn't going to lose any of your business, because you're not in the market for one.
For all of that, I'm a descriptivist, and don't consider "fucking" to be improper grammar or any of that stuffy prescritivist nonsense, but you don't strike me as someone who sees the value in having an exhaustive historical research tool such as the OED handy.
I do, but I can't afford it. So in the end, we're more equal than I'd like.