Thursday, December 20, 2007

More on w00t...

Today's Guardian features a beginner's guide to what they term "Geekspeak", or what others term "Leetspeak". The Merriam Webster US Dictionary has chosen w00t as its word of the year, but as this article points out, w00t has been around for a long time in gaming and hacker circles.

Some of the other terms covered are LOLcats, teh and LQTM, all of which are interesting examples of language change processes in action (acronyms and compounds in the case of LOLcats, random fluctuation for teh and initialism for LQTM).

Useful for:
ENA5 - Contemporary Language Change
ENGA3 (new spec) - Language Explorations

Black British English vs MLE

The latest episode of Lexis is out and it features an interview with Ife Thompson about lots of issues connected to Black British English, i...