the velocity of slang
In a lecture the other day, I had a slide on “neologisms” to illustrate the concept of productivity. This was in Linguistics 101, a course populated by undergraduates from a wide variety of majors, and I thought I’d use “weblog” as an example of a neologism. So I pointed to “weblog” on the slide and asked what the word meant. Silence. This is a tough class to crack as it’s in the evening and they’re tuckered out and digesting, so I often have to resort to calling on individual students. No worry, I thought, as it’s an easy question for someone to answer, and it’s just their general disinclination to speak in class that’s causing the blank stares. I choose a name from the list. The student in question looks up at me with the same blank stare. “Umm, do you mean ‘blog’?” she asks, and then provides the definition.
It is actually the case that ‘weblog’ has ceased to function as a denoting term amongst this age group, having been supplanted by the catchier ‘blog’, thereby obscuring the etymology.
I felt just a tiny bit old after that class.