Technology changes culture and culture is reflected in language,” says Mile Elgan who writes about tech culture. As technology develops, the need for creating new words arises. According to the Global Language Monitor (GLM), which tracks media sources throughout the world, the number of words in the English language, as on January 1, 2016, is 1,035,877. The English language passed the Million Word threshold on June 10, 2009 and Web 2.0 was declared the millionth word. Readers may recall my column in Edex on how the millionth word and a few other words, including the Indian term ‘Jai Ho’, that were in the race to be declared the millionth word.
GLM states that currently a new word is created every 98 minutes or 14.7 words per day. Let us look at some trending terms such as phablet, phubbing, farecasting, and troll. Many new coinages are portmanteau in nature. A portmanteau word is a word blending the sounds and combining the meanings of two words. Examples are: brunch (breakfast+lunch) and infotainment (information+entertainment).
A phablet is a smartphone having a screen which is intermediate in size between that of a typical smartphone and a tablet computer. The screen size of a phablet is between five and seven inches.
Phablet is a portmanteau of phone and tablet.
I bought a phablet as it has all the features of a smartphone and a tablet.
Phubbing describes the habit of snubbing someone by paying attention to a phone during a face-to-face conversation. It is a portmanteau of phone and snubbing. This rude practice of continuing a conversation without maintaining proper eye contact with the person in the conversation and looking at the phone or chatting with a person on the phone is becoming very common these days. Those who have the habit of phubbing are called phubbers.
At every restaurant we can see cases of phubbing these days.
What does farecast mean? Isn’t it easy to guess the origin of the term? It is a portmanteau of (air)fare and forecast. Farecast was a startup acquired by Microsoft in 2008 and later was terminated. Farecast is a term used to describe the act of predicting the best time to buy airtickets. Fares change over time and airlines optimize their revenue through dynamic pricing. There are many websites that offer the service of finding the best deals.
Farecast used to offer a unique service by providing its users with intelligent airfare predictions.
Troll can be used as a verb and a noun. The word trolling is used to describe a method of fishing. When used as a verb, troll means to post a deliberately offensive or provocative comment on a social networking site such as Facebook and Twitter with the aim of eliciting an angry response from the users. As a noun, it refers to a person who enjoys posting inflammatory comments on the Internet with the intention of provoking others.
Any fool knew that arguing with a troll was pointless. – April Adams