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| Keeping up with words is now a full time job and fodder for new "text" books |
TEXTICON—The
lexicon of texting. Nothing is changing the landscape of the mother tongue
faster than texting abbreviations.
Remember the pre-text era’s FYI?
Well, FYI is too snobby. “For
your information” in American texticon (lexicon and texting combined) comes off
as too un-PC. Replacing FYI is ICYMI,
which is simply a more politically correct: “*In case you missed it.” ICYMI is seeing big time usage this past year
when sharing stuff you’ve seen on the ‘net.
CLOUD—Talk about making
something so simple as a cloud in the sky into something hugely complicated That’s what happened when computer techies got
a hold of a metaphor. Cloud is a modern
term spawned in the Internet era to mean: a next stage in the Internet’s
evolution, providing the means through which everything—from computer power to
computing infrastructure, applications, business processes to personal
collaboration—can be delivered to you as a service wherever and whenever you
need it. The latter definition is from
“Cloud Computing for Dummies.” The
Dummies authors go on to define the “cloud” in cloud computing as the set of
hardware, networks, storage, services, and interfaces that combine to deliver
aspects of computing as a service.
Google and Google Docs are examples of popular clouds in modern
computer era usage.
Cloud and its subcloud evolution has become so essential and
yet hard to define that the “For Dummies” folks have published “Hybrid Cloud
for Dummies,” by Judith Hurwitz, Marcia Kaufman, Fern Halper and Dan Kirsch. http://www.dummies.com/store/product/Hybrid-Cloud-For-Dummies.productCd-1118127196.html
NEW CONCIERGE—It
was once a hotel term for the person behind a lobby desk tasked with helping
guests “find or solve things.” In our
Internet driven texticon it means simple a person or a company taking “personal
assistant” to the business level. In the
hospital/medical insurance industry a concierge service is someone or some firm
in business to guide the consumer (customer) through the maze of technical
terms. Who has time to wade through tech
stuff. Hire a concierge firm or person
to do it for you. http://www.triangleconcierge.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-a-concierge-depends-who-you-ask/
EMOTICONS—Whoa,
emoticons are smiley face terminology gone bonkers. Emoticons are old school in
many ways as they are the first victim of widespread texting usage. Wikipedia is all over this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons
MOST ANNOYING WORDS
FOR 2013—Selfie and Twerking, according to popular media, including the New York Daily News: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/selfie-twerking-top-2013-annoying-word-list-article-1.1562207
JUST BECAUSE—Here’s
the Word of the Year from the American Dialect Society in a post via the
Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2014/0109/Because-is-2013-word-of-the-year
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