Wednesday, January 02, 2013

This is Language Evolution?

Our language gets added to all the time.  It isn't just the aristocracy in the world of words that brings new vocabulary into being. In fact, it's most often the common man's creation.  Regardless of where it starts or ends, it's language evolution in all its splendor and I embrace it.  Usually.

I take issue with a word I heard for the first time today, although maybe I wasn't paying attention previously.  The word was 'facebooked'.  Those fluent in social media will understand this term immediately in all its potential meanings.  Even I understood its use and I consider myself maybe a hairsbreadth above novice in understanding all there is to understand about social media.  My problem with it is purely technical.

Facebook is a noun, yet is being used as a verb.  As a proper name, it gets capitalized.  Verbs are not capitalized unless they start a sentence.  Still, I want to capitalize it even though it's incorrect because it looks wrong without the capital F.  I practically need a referee to deal with my inner struggle.  Twitter is fortunate that their creators chose a word that was in existence and already both noun and verb.  It's much easier to deal with this verbal issue, even though one does not twitter on Twitter, one tweets.

I suppose it's my love of pure and pretty language that makes me have such a hard time with this new word.  It's slang bordering on jargon and it's not even pleasant to the ear.  However, one of the main purposes of language is clarity of communication. It should be perfectly clear to those who use electronic social media and even to those who don't but who maintain an awareness of what's happening on the internet what the word 'facebooked' likely means.  But for the majority of the planet which, by the way, isn't connected to internet and doesn't know what a computer is, this little bit of word creation means nothing.

I don't actually know what it means myself, I just figured it out from context.

No comments: