Thursday, January 10, 2008

Never Break a New Year's Resolution

It's simple. Don't make any. A quick and easy way to reduce stress.

What I learned at the Reference Desk yesterday:

w00t - Webster's 2007 word of the year, an expression of joy and triumph. W00t supposedly evolved from "Whoomp, there it is" by 95 South, but I have my doubts... Woot, though not w00t, appears in Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale. For wel I woot they patience is gon. And any married man will agree.

Backronym - A phrase constructed after the fact from a pre-existing word (such as Why Order Rich Desserts?)

Neologism - what w00t and backronym are, newly constructed words. The number of neologisms is growing exponentially. My favorite of late is Huckabounce. When I typed Huckabounce into Google it asked me if I didn't mean Huckabone, the 83572nd most popular surname in the United States. Many more neologisms appear instantly at Urban Dictionary.

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DailyLit - read books in installments by e-mail or RSS feed. Over 400 public domain titles free, and many more for a cost. (via my main man miguel, frenzied scavenger of the web) (what eats Bob?)

1 comment:

Miguel said...

Ohhh, I'm going to make that into a t-shirt! "frenzied scavenger of the web" - ver-nice!