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Colloquialismism

By Ophelia Chong
July 28, 2010
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Word of the Day: Colloquialismism. The double use of words because of the internet. i.e. Tweet is not just a bird sound, but now an action online.

Every generation has its touchstones, its own "words", and this one has appropriated words to create new meanings. This generation has spawned a shorthand that has now been merged into everyday language - LOL, an abbreviation for laughing out loud, that we now use to describe everything from cats to comments on Facebook.

Twitter has taken the action of Tweet away from birds, we now tweet our thoughts out loud to the world in 140 characters or less.

To search, we now google. Instead of diary entries we now blog. Even sex has come down to sexting on our smartphones, we spend more time texting about it than doing it (and get into trouble later when others see what was meant for another).

Our conversations are spiked with new words that didnt' exist a decade ago, we are adding more to describe the new, the unthinkable of a past generation. We perk up our ears when we hear a new word that brings us closer to what we "meant" when we tried to describe what we were doing. Conversation has become a shorthand of acronyms and re-working of verbs.

Will the future just be you and I facing each other and not speaking more than ten words, yet we will get exactly what the other is saying? I believe so, we will no longer need extraneous words to fill the space, all we will need is just common ground to communicate.

Image: ophelia chong / XO-As Close As She Comes

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