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

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?

why not SQUUUSH?

There is a strange and cartoony clump of words centered around SQUISH, or the idea or sound of squishing things. This includes SQUUSH, SQUSH, and SQUOOSH, and an Ngram view of these shows all kinds of ups and downs in the noise of word history ... The first of these to appear was SQUSH, around 1830, and it was used in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter 29. SQUUSH came about in 1850, peaked well below the others in 1970 and is headed down to obscurity these days, while SQUOOSH first gets a blip around 1880 and had a big upturn from 1950 to 2010, but it now sinking as, much to my surprise, SQUSH is taking off. Since these are all verbs, they have the full range of strange-looking endings which would be fun for a Scrabble night: SQUUSHED, SQUUSHES, SQUUSHING, SQUSHED, SQUSHES, SQUSHING, SQUOOSHED, SQUOOSHES, SQUOOSHING and can be turned into adjectives as SQUSHY, SQUUSHY and SQUOOSHY. OMG, it's never ending, there are comparative versions SQUSHIER, SQUUSHIER, SQUOOSHIER an

RULY, RECK, and RobWords

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 enjoying h

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