Neology | Marketing Communications

It seems that the world is going 2-dot-0. Marketing 2.0. Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0. Business 2.0. So where’s the Dictionary 2.0?

The world is changing, and our language is striving to keep pace. The advent of new technology and evolving culture is taking us into places for which we have no descriptive vernacular. To wit, words like “google”, “blogosphere”, “tweet”, “phishing”, “crowdsourcing”, “vaporware”, and “skype” didn’t exist 10 years ago. Now it’s hard to get a sentence out without using one of these neologisms.

Our language has never been very good at precision. I mean, where is the word describing the orange dust left on your fingers after eating Doritos? Or the word that explains the insatiable need to constantly check your phone for calls, text messages and emails? Shouldn’t we be devising these and recording them in some recognized Wordipedia?

It’s time to loosen our grip on what the English language should be and accept newer words for what they are: useable, descriptive content that fits comfortably beside any Dictionary 1.0 word. After all, those senescent words were once neologisms too.