Half way through the BBC NEWS AT 6 O'CLOCK this evening, the news reader said, I quote, "It's now about exactly quarter past six... ish." At least he had the good grace to look a bit sheepish about it, but I'm not sure its any excuse!
And this just a month just after it was reported....
It could have been "coddies", "chengguan", "slumdog" or even "fundoo". "Jai Ho!" would have been fun. Even "noob" wouldn't have been that bad. But when a group of US wordsmiths in Texas claimed today that the millionth word in the English language was "Web 2.0", there must have been collective sigh of disappointment among those lexicographers who hadn't already declared the idea preposterous.
The Global Language Monitor (GLM), based in Austin, calculated that a neologism is created on average every 98 minutes and that "Web 2.0", a term for the next generation of internet applications, should be formally crowned the millionth word.
I can only assume that American English is much more varied and "fruity" than Standard English as the Oxford English Dictionary still lists less than 700,000 words.
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