posted without comment..

w00t!

I love all the words of the year that are published at this time of year. I hadn't heard of that one. I like the whimsy of the letters and numbers.

Languagehat uses the word yawpish. What does that mean?

yawpish.. noisy, clamorous?

the Brits will probly have a better gloss.

There's a verb to yawp which has been nominalized. It's a variant of to yelp and means 'to bark, cry'. As with tsuwm's above, it seems to fit the context.

Some say that "w00t" is an acronym of "we own the other team." I'm not sure of that, it seems like just an expression of excitement to me.

"we own the other team."

Oughtn't it to be wp0t, then?

[Addendum: Grant Barrett, a lexicographer and real aficionado of language, weighs in on w00t.]

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K I love it too

Is there a word for words with letters and numbers, like w00t?

Is there a word for words with letters and numbers

It's a standard feature of l33t.

I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode where Marge tries to join a fancy Country Club, and when driving through an upscale neighborhood, she sees on the house numbers written like "four hundred eighteen" in script. She says, "It's so fancy here, they spell out the numbers using letters". Homer responds, "Get used to it. From now on, we'll be spelling everything with letters".

I feel very strongly that this was an awful choice for word of the year. When I first heard this, I thought it was a news story from years ago. The word, in my circles, has been going down in popularity for some years now, to the point where we only use it to describe the website, http://www.woot.com . Perhaps as this word moved into the popular lexicon it fell out of use as internet slang with those who'd used it for a long time. A lot of jargon used to distinguish membership in a specialized field will drop out of usage within that group as it becomes used by the n00bs.

I am repeatedly telling my colleagues (and I know I've said it on this forum as well) that if there is a word that we hear and think "oh, the kids are all saying this now", the very fact that we (library staff) know the word means that it's been around a while and is probably going out of style.

Is M-W just trying to sound cool?

That said (and questioned), I do like the word. It's cute, quirky and whimsical.

quote:

A lot of jargon used to distinguish membership in a specialized field will drop out of usage within that group as it becomes used by the n00bs.

Even worse than being n00bspeak, it's 0ldsterpeak. Sigh.

It's worth pointing about that this word was voted word of the year by MW website visitors, not by MW staff.

The OUP staff apparently decides their own word of the year, which is locavore

Ah, yes. We had talked about that word here. That seems more like a real word. I find w00t more like textspeak.

TVR, in retribution it seems, has instituted its own poll regarding w00t, to wit:

W00t should be included in the next, the twelfth, edition of Merriam-Webster's.

0 If it is, I'll burn my copy.
0 Good Lord, I hope not.
0 Sure, why not?
0 W00t, w00t!

here's a hotlink should you actually care to vote.

p.s. - the results seem to give a good indication of TVR's.. <ahem> slant.

quote:

the very fact that we (library staff) know the word means that it's been around a while and is probably going out of style.

That's the same with parents trying to sound 'cool' and failing. If a word starts being used by parents the kids will immediately move on to another word.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:I find w00t more like textspeak.

That's funny, because it arose before text messages. I'm not sure how common the use of zeroes for O's in text messages is, so I can't judge to that, but both of them arose from the same group of speakers, teenagers trying to sound cool. Again, 1337 sp34k (leet speak) arose from a different group of teenagers, at least a decade apart, so I'm not sure if there was borrowing, or if the form was separately invented. It doesn't take a genius to figure out shortened representations of English orthography.

quote:

It doesn't take a genius to figure out shortened representations of English orthography

Here's a data point: my friend Andrew was signing his emails &rew in 1986.

the use of zeroes for O's in text messages

It used to be quite common to see zeros with slashes so as not to confuse them with the letter o, but back in the old days, it was the os that were slashed and the zeros unslashed. Same reason, different frequency of usage. Many typewriters lacked a digit 1 key and typists used the letter l instead, that wouldn't fly, but for years you could tell when somebody was a pre-PC typist rather than a keyboardist by how they wrote years (back before the year before the turn of the century, anyway). Folks have been using digits for syllables in rebuses since the 19th century at the least.

[Addendum and corrections.]

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