WordFixx

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in high school more than 40 years ago, and always admired the way D&D could pull in material from all know mythologies and tap into the history of high fantasy literature, from the Lord of the Rings to the old Conan novels. While I don't expect every phrase from this rich (but strange) heritage to show up in every dictionary, one huge pet peeve of mine is that the word GEAS is not in the Scrabble dictionary or any dictionary used by any online games I play.  Heck, you can always find ROCS and LICHES and ghosts and goblins in modern games.  But never GEAS. GEAS comes from the Irish, through Scottish to English.  A GEAS is an unwilling quest, which can also be conveyed as a taboo, or the curse that will be bestowed upon you for breaking a taboo.  If you take on a quest of your own free will, that's one thing.  But if a demigod gives you a GEAS to walk to the ends of the earth, you're in for a world of pain. Wikipedia has ...

On the radio on the way home a few nights ago, we had Mark Thompson filling in for Tim Conway Jr, and the show came back from a commercial break with an mellow old-school rap song intro, and he improvised his return with "Yo, yo, yo!" ... and then immediately got self-conscious about it. It turned into an actual linguistic discussion about where "Yo!" came from and where it's at today.  He felt it was an 80s or 90s thing.  It was never really a replacement for "Hello," but technically an interjection, and specifically used to get someone's attention. The other guys at the station felt it was outdated and confrontational.  Oddly, they might still use it to call attention to something, or to show surprise at something, but they would never use it in text messaging.  Or they would find it comically lame when older people used it in a text.  I thought it was interesting that usage can be so specific that a word leaves different impressions depending on...

New words are always appearing, but most of them disappear before ever making it into a proper dictionary.  Each individual has their own unique overall set of words and pronunciations, known as their "idiolect".  The next step above that is how small groups of people who get together regularly may share a few unique phrases within that group, but when they try to speak to people outside the group, those phrases will fall flat.  With our hyper-connected world, there are so many layers of language, it gets confusing. I'm regularly surprised that none of the word games we've tried will take NOOB or DERP.  I have been hearing people calling each other noobs for 5-10 years now, or saying "derp" as a sort of "oops", and calling things "derpy."  I suppose this is mostly in the realm of video gaming, but it spilled over into regular conversations a while ago. An interesting case that's currently developing is YEET.  I first heard it while pl...