Skip to main content

Social Media: New Words Spread or Fail

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A STORY about STOREY

Here is another case where two words differ in American/British meaning based on an extra E: STORY and STOREY. You can tell a STORY, it's a piece of narration or fiction, or a news story.  I don't normally think of it as a verb, but it can be.  I would normally say I was telling a STORY, but I could be STORYING.  Having finished the STORY, I suppose I am all STORIED out.  But, STORIED fits as an adjective too: if many stories have been told about you, you have lived a STORIED life. STOREY is a floor in a house, and to make matters a little more complex, in the British Isles, what we call the first floor (Am) is the ground floor and our second floor is their first storey (floor).  A taller building could have multiple STOREYS.  Merriam-Webster says that this STOREY is just a less common version of STORY, but it always felt to me like a specifically British version.  Cambridge has STOREYED, which would be used as an adjective, as in "a three-storeyed ho...
Post a Comment
Read more

Poor Frankenstein

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?
2 comments
Read more

Similar but Not: Byre/Bier

Sometimes when rushing through a puzzle app, swiping words so quickly, the actual words can become a blur.  I am used to telling Anne about alternate American/English versions of words, like COLOR (Am) vs COLOUR (Eng) and NITER (Am) vs NITRE (Eng).  So I got into a blur where I ended up thinking BYRE and BIER were the same word, just different dialect spellings. But no, a BYRE is a shed for a cow, and a BIER is a typically wooden platform for carrying the dead.  So, if you have cattle, you can get them into the BYRE, but if you have a corpse or coffin to carry to a gravesite, a BIER would be the thing. In German, BIER is just BEER. And while swiping those letters, I misspelled BIER as BRIE, which is a soft spreadable cheese, like cream cheese.  I can't remember the last time I actually had some, but I seem to recall it looked like cream cheese but tasted skunky and awful.
Post a Comment
Read more