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.
There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not. A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it. I tried explaining it to Anne. It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds." It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here . "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled. It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong. Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview. I have been enjoy...
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