Bill's Musings

A while back, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary added 400 new words to their version of the dictionary. Words like ‘re-tweeting’, ‘cyberbullying’, ‘sexting’, and one of my personal favorites, ‘woot’, as in ‘Woot-woot, I just lost 5 pounds’,  or maybe, ‘Woot-woot, I just got caught sexting while I was retweeting someone that ended up cyberbullying me!’

Glancing quickly through the 400 or so words they added, one of the common denominators that  I noticed is that a large portion of these words owe their existence to today’s newer technologies. Twenty years ago, there was no such thing as sexting, let alone texting. Cyberbullying wasn’t even thought of, unless by some geeks dreaming about creating robots to bully their own tormentors back, and if you re-tweeted, it merely meant you were answering your pet Budgie ‘Tyrone’ back.

This all struck me as funny, in an odd sort of way. I was…