An interesting article came up today on phys.org about how new words reach the mainstream (or fail to do so) from social media.
The basic premise: "Language evolves within a social context and variations in a language are always in competition with each other. In everyday language, words are constantly being created, but not all these words persist."
The examples are French words, but the data should apply to any language. A well-placed creator at the center of a large network is more likely to get a new word across the finish line to acceptability, compared to people on the fringes using it. No surprise here, but it was interesting to see the charts and how they broke down the analysis. They saw three windows of 6 to 18 months each, where the word is trending, then peaking, and after that it either stays at the peak or falls back into obscurity.
This wasn't based on just asking a few people. The team analyzed "650 million tweets written in French between 2012 and 2014" and tracked 400 words up and over the curve for four to five years.
The words that stuck around appeared to have about a year and a half of usage by major central figures in the network before peaking and staying in the public eye, where the ones that failed (the "buzzes") only had six months among users with weaker connections before peaking and falling.
Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster." Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?
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