language fun and search engines
one thing i love about google and the internetz, but it's not talked about much: the ease with which you can see if others are making up the same words.in the typewriter/letter days, you pulled a dictionary off the shelf to check a word you figured probably didn't exist, and maybe if marginal would hesitate to assume someone else would roll with it. now with search engines, when i make up words with implied meaning it only takes a trip to google to find others (usually anywhere from 5 to thousands) who found a use for it and fired. encouraging on the margin.
i don't advocate cutesy expansion of language into dictionaries. i just like seeing warps naturally invented independently. would like to see dictionaries circumvented eventually, possibly by bots roving wires. dictionaries, while helpful when used intelligently, are a disease for most people. most people don't know that dictionaries are born subservient to commoners, and remain so.
Labels: neato
posted by saltypig @ 22:31
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