This year’s choice for the word of 2007 by dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster may cause many to say “what”? Or in this case, w00t?
The word, w00t, a mashup of letters and numbers used by gamers to express triumph, emerged victorious in the online poll for the word that best sums up the year.
According to Merriam-Webster’s president, John Morse:
It shows a really interesting thing that’s going on in language. It’s a term that’s arrived only because we’re now communicating electronically with each other
This l33t speak has been around since the early 1980s with hackers mixing using numbers to replace letters. But it only entered more common usage with the rise of online gaming, with veteran gamers deriding newcomers as n00bs and saying they pwned them.
I suspect all of this makes little sense to anyone who doesn’t play games. The reaction from “authoritah“, namely Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, was hardly surprising:
It’s amusing, but it’s limited to a small community and unlikely to spread and unlikely to last
This illustrates one of the challenges facing the media. On one side, you have a generation who have grown up with computers, the Internet, video games. On the other, an older generation who grow up in an analogue world. Deriding the language of digital natives is pointless.
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