What would Funk and Wagnall say?
Heard on local radio talk show yesterday morning and confirmed via the AP and the Albuquerque Tribune, the Word of the Year for 2007 is:
w00t!
Yup.
Now, who am I to complain? I’m a big fan of the word. It peppers my personal emails, has made an appearance in this very blog (and here and here and….uh a few more times too….). But I’m not sure the word is Miriam-Webster worthy.
How do I feel about this? I sort of don’t like it when a slang word is legitimized. I mean…doesn’t that take some of the fun away? I love words, I really do, I’m a certified linguaphile (*wink*) but I also really love made up words. My best friend and I have a vocabulary all our own. It’s fun to bastardize words. And w00t is fun because the letters and numbers make it a word that’s not quite a word, but heck, even if you’ve never seen the word, you can get the joyous meaning when you see: w00t!!
It’s word that means what it sounds like.
If I recall my English teacher’s hardworking edumacation, that would be an onomatopoeia.
There’s my nickel word for the week. (NMSU grad in the hizz house, w00t!)
Today, it’s w00t, tomorrow it’s teh…before you know it STFU will be a part of the formal lexicon. I want to know when w00t shows up on a kid’s spelling test….
Anyhow, best to just end this post with a w00t! for the selection of w00t! as the word of the year.
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One Comment
Patrick Strei
Can you sepell “onomatopoeia” without looking it up?(well, who does that anymore? I mean without a spell check)
Bonus point: is it singular or plural( in the original Greek)?