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Merriam-Webster got the attention of wordsmiths, librarians, comedians, and gamers this week when it officially named the alphanumeric interjection "w00t" the word of the year. Those are two zeros you see in the word. It's the first alphanumeric word in the dictionary.
At LAist, where I found this great tee shirt image with its celebratory w00t!, blogger Callie Miller commented on her mixed reactions to the news:
So Merriam-Webster's word of the year is w00t. Sort of uninspiring, right? As in, aren't there thousands of other words that communicate so much more, mean so much more than the gamer battle-cry for "yes! i just killed your guy and i still have seven lives left!"?!?!?
Surely there are more important things that happened in the word world than this, we kept thinking. Surely there were actual words that should have won. "Facebook" was the runner-up at Webster's, while another study tracking this year's word usage pointed to "surge" (as in troop-surge), "hybrid", "climate change" and "Bluetooth" as top contenders.
This whole w00t thing seemed silly to us. But then we remembered the comments here on LAist, where w00t appears almost daily. And the many LAist emails and IM's in which it appears frequently. It takes many forms - from the standard w00t to "wooty woot!" We've even seen "w to the 00t." Really. Our favorite usage of it is verbal, and nearly always ironic.
What does all of this usage and partial usage and ironic usage of w00t mean? That we will one day communicate in binary code?
The word became popular among gamers, who often speak in the esoteric geek speak known as Leet. Or should I say 133t? Or 1337? With leet speak, numbers are substituted for letters. It's quite possible that when gamers heard that w00t was in the running for word of the year, they began flooding in the votes.
Christina Crouch, commenting on the word at SlashGear, used the persona of a library to express her opinion.
I’m very familiar and friendly with words. I’ve been a library for 8 years and I’ve seen how we abuse the language. It’s a shame to think that 50-60 years ago people had a vocabulary of a much higher quality than us but so is the times. As a bonus for us, we have more words than they could have ever dreamed about, words like: Shizzle, Truthiness, and w00t.
Christine Bordon at The Daily Clog thinks Merriam-Webster is sadly behind the times.
Besides, wasn’t “w00t” so high school? You’d think that being bloggers we’d be up on the nexus of technology and language … but we think we’ve gone beyond the phase of 1337 speak.
Merriam Webster’s president, John Morse explains the trend behind the word of ’07:
"It’s a term that’s arrived only because we’re now communicating electronically with each other."
Yes, that makes sense. Pagers, cell phones, computers, text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail and blogs didn’t really peak until 2007. Man, to think that only a year ago we were still using carrier pigeons. What a n00b. Or is it “nub” now?
Yvonne Russell at Grow Your Writing Business was more interested in some of the other contenders.
Check out the 2007 Top 10 Words Shortlist. Where was I when “Pecksniffian” or “sardoodledom” were invented? Scrabble players must love these lists. Have you coined a word yourself?
The 2006 word of the year was truthiness. Truthiness? Well, that’s one I missed and I call myself a word collector.
Kathy Schenck at JS Online gave us even more info about this year's words.
For technophobes, the word also is familiar from the 1990 movie "Pretty Woman," in which Julia Roberts startles her date's upper-crust friends with a hearty "Woot, woot, woot!" at a polo match.
The 2006 pick, truthiness, also has its roots in pop culture. It was popularized by Comedy Central satirical political commentator Stephen Colbert.
Some also-rans in the 2007 list: the use of facebook as a verb to signify using the Web site by that name; nuanced terms such as quixotic and hypocrite; and blamestorm, a meeting in which mistakes are aired, fingers are pointed and much discomfort is had by all.
At Librarian in Black, Sarah went way back in time to the word of the year for 2004.
Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word of the Year is w00t! No, seriously. It is w00t. I mean it. And as I had a w00t temporary tattoo during Internet Librarian, I feel hip now. Well, sort
