The word of the year, 2007 ed.

Merriam Webster announced the word of the year today, and we’re sure it’ll thrill the online community. As the press release describes,

“This year’s winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t (“leet,” or “elite”) speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters.”

It would seem that ‘w00t’ is the 2007 word of the year.

The AP article on the choice is a bit more interesting. The president of Merriam Webster, John Morse, makes a fabulous comment about why it makes sense that w00t would be the word of the year: “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.” True that, John. That’s one of the things that we hope to examine in the image macro (i.e. the Lol-whatever) panel: how the internet has changed communication and language. Here’s a question, though — w00t has been in the popular lexicon for a few years now, why now?

Also of note to techies: ‘facebook’ was #2. Not the website or the noun, like the verb: “I facebooked her, and she deleted her relationship status last night! What could it mean?!” Or, “I facebooked my professor and he has no friends :’(.” Or, the ever popular “I facebooked your mom last night.” This is not to be confused with “[de/un]friend,” “[un]tag,” “poke,” or “drunk post.” I think “facebooking” in this sense is more akin to facebook stalking, also an amorphous idea (my conception is that it involves looking at the profiles of people you don’t know so well to acquire information that you would not otherwise get). So say most of the entries on the Open Dictionary, anyway; I tend to agree.