Merriam-Webster, the venerable reference dictionary conglomerate, has announced its choice for 2007’s word of the year. The winner: "w00t."
If you are familiar with the term, then you must be one of the many devotees of online gaming whose form of communication is labeled "l33t speak" – that is, "leet," as in "elite speak" – which itself stems from hacker lingo. In this realm of butchering the English language, numbers and symbols are strung together in order to look like letters, thereby forming words that resemble remarks already in use.
The word "w00t" is atrocious in its written form because the double O’s in the word are replaced with two zeroes. This expression is said aloud as "whoot," though one wonders why such an exclamation is not used in place of the word of the year. Perhaps it is because "w00t" doubles as an acronym for "we owned the other team," another expression given to the communicative consciousness from the gaming world.
Twenty words were considered for Webster’s distinction. Among them: "Facebook," the popular online networking site; "charlatan," a fraud; "quixotic," unrealistic; and "conundrum," a puzzle or challenge. Any one of these words is superior and far more representative of this year than "w00t."
"Facebook" is versatile, since it can be used as a noun: the online Web site Facebook, or as a verb: "Did you facebook today?" "Charlatan" best describes the number of professional athletes this year -Marion Jones, Barry Bonds and so forth – linked to performance enhancing drugs; these people are charlatans in the sense that they have fraudulently represented themselves as hard-working individuals. "Quixotic" could be used in reference to President George W. Bush’s steadfast belief that the war in Iraq is winnable against often-unseen opponents. "Conundrum" could best describe the situation American voters are in at this stage of the 2008 Presidential Election; with so many candidates making so many promises, it can be hard to know who to support and who to cast aside as non-contenders come next November.
These four words are better choices than some butchered acronym that doubles as an exclamation. The fact that so many other words and phrases from the online world – blog, instant messaging and spam, to name a few – have crept into the face-to-face world of communication shows that the Internet is more a component of our daily lives than a tool that helps us keep in touch with distant relatives, send completed files to one’s branch office across the globe or even order hard-to-find products from an online store.
Though the Internet has made life seemingly less hectic, its lexicon of slang and acronyms for faster chatting online are best left to the online world. Put simply, such terms have no place in the real world.
While this language may hint at a changing world – we no longer speak of "going forth" and "coming hither" as was the phrasing in Shakespeare’s day – it places one in a certain category of thinking and puts one at a loss for conversing in person without a reliance on keyboard shortcuts.
Though users of Merriam-Webster’s Web site voted "w00t" the word of 2007, this in itself hints at a bias. Would non-Internet users choose a word birthed in online gaming forums as the defining word of this year? Probably not. For these "disconnected" (or even "not connected") users, any of the aforementioned words would have been the better choice.
Merriam-Webster may be trying to bend to the whims of the younger generation, as last year’s winner was "truthiness," which was developed by comedic political pundit Stephen Colbert. Colbert’s show on Comedy Central, The Colbert Report, along with its lead-in program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart have been found to be more popular for getting one’s news information than any one of the major networks’ nightly news programs.
Words come and go, but those with real staying power are the ones that have a broader appeal beyond some trend that may or may not be popular five or 10 years from now. Such appeasement does nothing to spur the growth of the English language. It merely dates words and shows those who employ such terms in daily conversations "in real time" to be incapable of expressing themselves as verbosely as their counterparts who do not turn to some made-up idiom.
Alas, as an English major, I am appalled that online methods of shortening conversations – and thought processes – are creeping into the way the world communicates. Words may be primitive tools meant to express one’s self but when the best words are plucked from one’s vocabulary and strung together to convey one’s message, they can change the world. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is less than 300 words long; nary an acronym or word of jargon is found within its text. Yet his speech is one of the most honored in history. Online lingo could be a sign of man adapting to the medium, but it seems more like a step back than propulsion into the future. History remembers great words; it forgets the ones that have little or no meaning. In 50 years, every word in Lincoln’s speech will be remembered and "w00t" will most likely find itself relegated to vocabulary’s trash bin.
