These are a few of my favorite expressions.
July 15th, 2009 (Culture)
New words are created every day in the English language. If you think about it, there are endless combinations of words that can be made out of the 26 letters in the alphabet because there is no restriction on the number of letters that can be in a word and the letters can be repeated. Hence, the number of permutations of letters in our alphabet is 26!/(26-infinity)! = ?? (OK, basically it equals an infinite number of words). Now, my math teacher would have berated me for not using “grows large without bounds” instead of “infinity” – fortunately, this not math class. Many of these words and phrases (or new uses for words) are born in online communities. Here are a few of my favorite exclamations that people have come up with:
- Huzzah! – Another word for hooray! I’ve commonly heard it from DigitalKitty (Colleen Kelly of TWiT).
- Woot! – Yes, Woot! is a website that sells one item a day at a blowout price. It’s also short for “Wow, loot!” from old RPGs (table-top), but gets used today as a general term of excitement.
- Screw You! – One of my favorites. This was exclaimed by Leo Laporte (aimed at Mike Arrington of Techcrunch) on 6/6/2009 during a recording of the Gillmor Gang.
- OMG!!! PONIES!!! – April 1st, 2006, Slashdot went way above and beyond their classic April Fools pranks of fake news stories and turned the whole site pink. Hence, OMG!!! PONIES!!! was born.
- Why I oughta! – I’m not sure exactly when this phrase came into popularity, but it was often used by the Three Stooges as a curmudgeony expression. It’s part of the whole old man culture…you know..like “get offa my lawn!”. It has been heard online from the likes of Veronica Belmont and I Can Has Cheezburger?.
- Fail! – There is a whole blog dedicated to failures that are often funny. I first heard the derivation of this phrase, “failure”, from Mark H. Back in the Explorer Micro days. It’s used very widely now with one of the most prevalent references being the Twitter Fail Whale.
- Oh hai! – Another Lolcats phrase made famous. This word has become almost as ubiquitous as “indeed” in my everyday language. According to the Urban Dictionary: “Or ‘Oh Hi’ Derived from the epic pictures of lolcats. Used when something the cat, dog, aardvark, long cat, etc. sees something surprising or interesting yet is not limited to.”
So, there you have it. A few of my favorite exclamations. What are yours? Do you know if any other languages (like German) have similar funny little expressions?
Fun post! (yes, I’m home now/Fri 3pm)—-Huzzah is actually a resurrection from the era of your grandparents, and meant the same thing then as it does now—unusual, I think. Words tend to change meaning with new generation usage–this one survived the time warp.
Oh hai! Love this—I get all warm and fuzzy inside when I see it in print. Iwould add to your the urban dictionary use: used when the cat, etc, is CAUGHT doing something it knows it shouldn’t…..
Thanks for the entertainment…