Студентка 1 курса
Санкт-Петербургского гуманитарного университета профсоюзов, г. Алматы
Паршукова
Наталья Владимировна
старший
преподаватель Санкт-Петербургского гуманитарного университета профсоюзов, г.
Алматы
ENGLISH INTERNET SLANG
Every year, hundreds of new words and phrases that
come from internet slang are added to the dictionary. Some of them are
abbreviations, like FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and YOLO (You Only Live Once).
Others are words that have been stretched into more parts of speech than
originally intended - like when "trend" became a verb
("It's trending worldwide"). Others still have emerged as we adapt
our language to new technologies; think "crowdfunding,"
"selfie," "cyberbullying."
You might notice how many of these "new"
words are actually just appropriated, meaning they are pre-existing words that
are combined or given entirely new meanings. For example, "social
network" became a word in the Oxford English Dictionary back in 1973, referring to the
physical activity of networking in a social atmosphere. In the 1990s, people
began using the term to refer to virtual engagement, and that became an
official definition in 1998.
Why are so many new words and phrases emerging the
internet, and so quickly? How does slang spread between cities and countries?
Finally, what does it take for a slang word to become a word in the dictionary?
Let's explore some of the answers to these questions.
The internet isn't the only technological phenomenon
that's changed the way we talk. Radio, television, and telephones have
introduced their fair share of new words and phrases into our lexicon over the
last century.
For example, the phrase TTFN (Ta Ta For Now) comes from the "It's That Man Again" radio series in the 1940s.
Similarly, the word "doh" that was made famous by Homer Simpson
on The Simpsons became an
official word in the Oxford English Dictionary, "used
to comment on a foolish or stupid action, especially one's own." And
don't forget "Give me the 4-1-1," the slang phrase for requesting
information that refers the number for local directory assistance.
The question of
how slang spreads has occupied linguists and anthropologists for
decades. When it comes to the mechanics of new word distribution, it's
been tough to measure with any precision -- that is, until the advent of public
social media networks.
Social media networks like Twitter allow linguists a
more accurate and easily searchable record of our exchanges. Jacob
Eisenstein and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta conducted a study examining 30 million tweets sent from different locations in the
U.S. from December 2009 to May 2011. The purpose of the study was to pinpoint
the origin of popular slang words and track how they spread across the country.
The resulting map shows how these slang terms migrated
across the country, as well as the direction of that influence:
Because of social media, words are moving around the
world within weeks and months, whereas before, it could take a few years, says Julie
Coleman, author of The Life of Slang. "It's not necessarily
that language is changing more quickly, but technologies have developed and
they allow the transmission of slang terms to pass from one group to another
much more quickly."
So, how do new words, like the acronym
"LOL," make it all the way to the dictionary?
The secret of a new word's success is its longevity.
To make it into the dictionary, the general population must use it and keep
using it. A word must be in use for at least five years to be considered. So,
love it or hate it, when words like "LOL" become common, widespread,
well understood, and stick around for more than five years, they're eligible
for a spot in the big book.
There are plenty of internet slang words that don't make
it in, like "wurfing" (the act of surfing the internet while at
work). But to say that word was rejected would be wrong - that word, among many
others, will be revisited if its usage grows. The dictionary is a living,
breathing document, and there's always a chance a previously down voted word
will make it into the mainstream vocabulary in the future.
Sources:
1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_slang
2.
Baron, N.S. (2003). Language of the Internet. In A.
Farghali (Ed.), The Stanford handbook for language engineers (pp. 59—127).
Stanford, California: CSLI