An Illiterate Language Monitor
'The Texas-based Global Language Monitor (GLM)' is a hilariously illiterate organisation. They call "web two point zero" a word when it is actually 4 words.
They claim that ''Web 2.0' is the one millionth English word'. Looking through their list of so-called 'words' I found they had artificially brought the number up to a million by classifying many many phrases as words.
I realise I'm a pedant but, honestly, a 'Global Language Monitor' ought to be able to tell the difference between a word and a phrase. I mean, the distinction isn't peculiar to English. All modern languages draw a clear distinction between words and phrases.
I wonder how many actual words there are in English these days. There couldn't be an exact answer, of course, because there are always words which are in the process of becoming acceptable to some people but not to others.
'Blog' - now that actually is a newish word.
References: http://www.languagemonitor.com/
http://news.uk.msn.com/features/article.aspx?cp-documentid=147866718
They claim that ''Web 2.0' is the one millionth English word'. Looking through their list of so-called 'words' I found they had artificially brought the number up to a million by classifying many many phrases as words.
I realise I'm a pedant but, honestly, a 'Global Language Monitor' ought to be able to tell the difference between a word and a phrase. I mean, the distinction isn't peculiar to English. All modern languages draw a clear distinction between words and phrases.
I wonder how many actual words there are in English these days. There couldn't be an exact answer, of course, because there are always words which are in the process of becoming acceptable to some people but not to others.
'Blog' - now that actually is a newish word.
References: http://www.languagemonitor.com/
http://news.uk.msn.com/features/article.aspx?cp-documentid=147866718
posted by Speculativism at June 11, 2009
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