September 8, 2009 by Matt Thomas
Today the influence of Twitter seems to have reached an exciting/depressing (delete as appropriate) new frontier, actual manipulation of the English language. Not content with simply dominating the celebrity pages, the social network is being credited with inspiring a huge percentage of the new words inducted into the new edition of the Collins English Dictionary this year.
The new words are made up not only of tech-speech like ‘woot’, ‘OMG’ and ‘noob’, but also of existing words or noises within language that have not needed to be written down until people started tweeting. We’re talking about words like ‘hmm’, ‘mwah’ and ‘meh’ that have been written down a lot as part of tweets thanks to a highly informal writing style of twitter that encourages people to write as they speak.
The publishers, Collins, claim that this year’s crop of new words shows ‘a preoccupation with digital culture music and climate change.’
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