Much to the chagrin of our entertainment and geek culture columnist, I am going to opine about a subject that involves both of our respective areas of expertise.
Merriam-Webster, those purveyors and recorders of our beloved English language, recently announced their "Word of the Year for 2007." And what might that word be?
w00t.
Yes, readers, you read that correctly (assuming that, by reading this, you can read). Our E & GC columnist is telling me that I should define this term for those of you not steeped in video game culture. "w00t" is an exclamation of joy, victory, delight, or success. Such is usually proclaimed after one team has thoroughly massacred another team with all manner of barbaric, destructive, and wildly fanciful weaponry. It is the gamer slang parallel of "yay."
The E & GC columnist also desires me to inform you that "w00t" is only properly spelled with double zeros, not the letter "o."
Now...I'm not sure who it is that gets to work for the Merriam-Webster Dictionary these days. I'm not sure where these people might come from, nor could I even hazard a guess as to their educational backgrounds. However, I do know how much pot one would have to smoke to choose "w00t" as the word of the year: A lot.
For such a person would have to be higher than a freshman on Spring Break to overlook the cornucopian wealth of real words in the English language to arrive at "w00t," or any other bit of gamer slang.
To be fair, this is not to malign the gaming community, nor its self-accepted modes of communication. It should also be noted that the contest was submission-driven; individuals were allowed to write in their choices for "Word of the Year," and the one with the most votes wins, just like a politician. Once again, democracy disappoints in its insipidity.
That "w00t" won by what was essentially a popular write-in vote is perhaps the saddest part of this debacle, and is indicative, in the estimation of this contributor, to be both an indictment of our educational system and telling evidence of the decline of Western culture. Not because it is slang. Not because it is pointless slang (as yay, is one letter shorter and quicker to type). No, the crux of the problem with choosing "w00t" as "Word of the Year" is this:
It has zeros in it. Two of them.
"w00t" is not a word. It's a mathematical expression. I never learned much from Algebra, because my teachers always wanted to tell me about at 8:00 in the morning, and there was no way I was going to learn anything that early, no matter how much coffee I'd had. But one thing I do remember is this: words are composed of letters, calculations are composed of numbers. And anything that combines the two needs to be solved for x, taking care to show one's work for full credit.
- Cheers,
Lockhart.
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2 comments:
The current-day use of the word w00t stems from hackers in the early to mid 80's. While communicating with each other groups of hackers would need lingo which nobody else would be able to understand to express milestones in their hacking. One such milestone was gaining root access, but the term rooted or "gained root access" was easily understood so the term was changed to w00t to help disguise. Because of the difficulty of "rooting" many times the term w00t would be much in a celebratory tone. It later evolved to simply be a celebratory remark rather than a hacking milestone.
Very interesting, anonymous. I, for one, was unaware that the history of the term went back that far.
Had my co-writer not lost the coin toss on this one, I'm sure he would have been a bit more thorough than I was in researching the term, but would invariably have gone off topic.
But kudos to you, sir/madam/otherwise. We thank you for the information!
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