Odd News

Humanity is obsessed with words and why wouldn't it be? After all, we communicate through words, not only expressing opinions, but also revealing ourselves. Therefore there should be a contest that awards the favorite word of people. Well, now it is. The Macquarie dictionary, Australia's top dictionary, started a poll for readers to vote for their favourite new word in the latest annually updated online volume, offering a total of 85 words or phrases in 17 categories which are not specifically Australian, but reflect global trends in fields such as technology, health and the social scene. Some of the new words created as a result of expansion, intercommunication and worldwide technology development, are cyberathlete (a professional player of computer games), digital native (a person who grows up using digital media and communications systems, and thus has complete familiarity with them), globesity (the frightening phenomenon of fatness spread all over the world), which generated the words slummy mummy (mothers of young children who have abandoned all care for their personal appearance) or yummy mummy, tanorexia (an obsessive desire to have tanned skin, placing the sufferer at risk of skin cancer), manscaping (a grooming procedure in which hair is shaved or trimmed from a man's body, as from the back, legs, chest), etc. The fast pace of technology generated words like password fatigue that means a level of frustration reached by having too many different passwords to remember exposing the computer slave to data smog (electronic information as by emails, internet searches, etc., which, by its volume, impairs performance and increases stress). The voting takes place in the last weeks of January and at the beginning of February, the winner will be announced. Don't waste any more time, your word might be the lucky one. In any case you'll have a blast just reading the terms and their definitions. Recommended to those suffering of password fatigue as a way of relaxation. Enjoy!

related story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080110/tod-australia-language-internet-offbeat-37b0eca_1.html

Edited by: Katarina Zerzanova