Posted 11/16/09 at 04:53:11 PM by Bart Salisbury

The modification of the English language, due to advances in technology, continues apace. The latest addition to the language, and “word of the year” in fact, is “unfriend.”

Unfriend, a verb that means “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook” is the New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year for 2009. A simple example of usage, according to the Dictionary: “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

Christine Lindberg, a Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s U.S. dictionary program says the word “has both currency and potential longevity. Lindberg notes “most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!).” Unable to resist the pun, Lindberg adds: “Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

Other new technology-generated words in competition for the award were “hashtag,” “intexticated,” “netbook,” “paywall,” and “sexting.”

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Posted 11/11/09 at 12:45:08 PM by Paul Lilly

As it turns out, Google's been busy developing its own programming language called "Go," and on Tuesday, the search giant released what they've managed to build so far. As an open source project, the rest may be up to you.

To describe the programming language, Google reached into its bag of adjectives and came up with simple, fast, safe, concurrent, and fun. Typical builds take a fraction of a second but run nearly as quickly as comparable C or C++ code, Google clams. Go is also touted as being memory safe.

So what's it for? One of the things Go was designed to do is take advantage of multicore processors that can perform multiple tasks in parallel, as well as give programmers the ability to quickly write code.

"It seems it's getting much harder to build software than it used to be," said Rob Pike, a principal software engineer working on Go. "The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago. We deliberately tried to make a language that focused in part on rapid development, that compiles really efficiently, and that expresses dependencies efficiently and precisely so the compilation process can be controlled well. I find it much more productive to work in."

Intrigued? Get started with Go right here.

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Posted 06/11/09 at 03:10:04 PM by Paul Lilly

It's official - the Global Language Monitor, which analyzes and tracks trends in language, has dubbed "Web 2.0" as the one millionth word. To qualify, potential words must appear 25,000 times in searches and be widely accepted. Web 2.0 fit that criteria, beating out Jai Ho, Noob, Slumdog, and Cloud Computing (among others) as the millionth English word or phrase.

The list has some linguists up in arms, who dismissed the whole thing as nothing more than a publicity stunt.

"I think it's pure fraud. I'ts not bad science. It's nonsense," Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters.

His and other similar opinions didn't seem to phase Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, who insisted that his method has merit.

"If you want to count the stars in the sky, you have to define what a star is first and then count," Payack said. "Our criteria is quite plain and if you follow those criteria you can count words. Most academics say what we are doing is very valuable."

Word up.

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