On June 11^th 2009, the word czars announced that Web 2.0 was the 1,000,000^th word in the English language. I didn’t know we were still counting/gived a damn. This announcement triggered a poll in the local Globe and Mail web-chronicle. It asked readers to vote for what word they would like to retire as the most over-used word. Let’s throw the list on the board:

bling bling
like, you know
organic
Web 2.0
rightsizing
whatever
economic stimulus
awesome
state-of-the-art
leverage

Now, most of those words may be annoying, however only three are worth noting. The first is “bling bling”. As any three year old can notice, this is actually a) two words, b) the same word twice. How can this legally be a word? Someone should investigate the people who are just throwing around accusations that combinations of words are full words. I’ll even let “economic stimulus” pass because there is no need to nit-pick. But Web 2.0! No, that’s not a word. Web is a word, 2 is a number. Again, we need a three year old to fact check the English language. Are they really in that dire of straits to get publicity for literacy that they just throw up expressions for people to discuss in order to drum up support?

This brings me to the most egregious error on the part of English: “like, you know” is not a word. It’s just not. I don’t care how literate you are and how much you can argue that Web 2.0 is a proper noun and bling bling is slang, “like, you know” is a phrase or a saying. Simple. It’s a combination of three words. All of them are great words, don’t get me wrong, but they are three words nonetheless. Why would anyone think this is one word? It’s not! IT EVEN INCLUDES A COMMA!! No word should have a comma since it is “a mark of punctuation used for indicating a division in a sentence”, not division of a word. Jackasses.

It’s just not a word. Stop it. But let’s play illiterate devil’s advocate: So what if we bend the rules for a combination of words if we say it in our every day conversations? It’s part of our updated, hip cool English language so let’s allow it. My answer to that is why dumb down our language? Shouldn’t we try and uphold the standards of an already failing industry of spelling errors and abbreviations? We’re losing our English language to texting and emoticons and T9 cell phones. Everything is an abbreviation because people are too busy to spell properly. (Oh and you’re not that busy. People can wait for your urgent response to last night’s mistake/hook-up you knew exactly what you were doing). And I’ll admit, I can’t spell at all. Without spell-check I would be useless and this would be completely unreadable. I’m not saying that’s right, all I’m saying is that like, you know, it’s not a word.

Still not convinced and think I’m being too picky? Aright, try this one: Snot-rocket. That’s right. Think that should be a word in the English language? Something that is used in our everyday vernacular, is hip and cool with the kids. “Hey, did you see that guy blow a snot-rocket when we ran out of Kleenex? Narly dude!” Only one small problem: this isn’t an official word. English doesn’t recognize this word’s existence.

Here’s hoping that 2010 brings in the year of the snot-rocket and our 1,000,001^st word.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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