NEOLOGISMS

I really interest with this unique article, so I want to share it here :

the title is :

Why do tech neologisms make people angry?

The bewildering stream of new words to describe technology and its uses makes many people angry, but there's much to celebrate.

In the 16th Century, neologisms "smelling too much of the Latin" - as the poet Richard Willes put it - were frowned upon by many.

Willes's objects of contempt included portentous, antiques, despicable, obsequious, homicide, destructive and prodigious, all of which he labelled "ink-horn terms" - a word itself now vanished from common usage, meaning an inkwell made out of horn.

Come the 19th Century, the English poet William Barnes was still fighting the "ink-horn" battle against such foreign barbarities as preface and photograph which, he suggested should be rechristened "foreword" and "sun print" in order to achieve proper Englishness.

Forewords caught on, but sun prints didn't, instead joining the growing ranks of outmoded terms for innovations - a scrapheap that by the end of the century ranged from temporarily mainstream names like velocipede (meaning "swift foot" and used to describe early bicycles and tricycles) to near-unpronounceable curiosities like phenakistoscope (an early device for animation, meaning "to deceive vision").

today, the debate around what constitutes "proper" speech and writing is livelier than ever, courtesy of a transition every bit as significant (at least so far as language is concerned) as the Industrial Revolution.

From text messages and email to chat rooms and video games, technology has over the past few decades brought an extraordinary new arena of verbal exchange into being - and one whose controversies relate not so much to foreign infiltrations as to informality, abbreviation and self-indulgence. Hence the swelling legions of acronyms, grunts of internet-inspired indifference and social-media-inspired techniques for dramatising the business of typing.

In each case, the dividing line is largely generational - with a dash of snobbery and aesthetic appeal thrown in. Yet even the most seemingly obvious divisions between old and new can break down under closer examination.

the Oxford English Dictionary took the leap and added some "notable initialisms" to its vocabulary in March 2011 - including "oh my God" (OMG), "laughs out loud" (LOL) and "for your information" (FYI) - it noted that OMG had first seen the light of day in a 1917 letter from a British admiral to none other than Winston Churchill.

Even that most iconic embodiment of online messaging, the emoticon - a happy or a sad face drawn in punctuation marks - was pre-empted by a satirical 19th Century magazine called Puck under the heading "typographical art". more info about neologisms article go to

 BBC News