Anti-Twitter fans will surely hate this news. This report is not about the most annoying word of all, but quite the contrary the most popular word, so gobble it up and heed the news, for this one is official.
Global Language Monitor has just announced Twitter as the Most Popular English Word of 2009. Followed by Obama, H1N1, Stimulus, and Vampire. The near-ubiquitous suffix, 2.0, was No. 6, with Deficit, Hadron the object of study of CERN’s new atom smasher, Healthcare, and Transparency rounded out the Top 10.
According to GLM:
“In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the after effects of a financial tsunami and the death of a revered pop icon, the word Twitter stands above all the other words. Twitter represents a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters,” said Paul JJ Payack, President of The Global Language Monitor. “Being limited to strict formats did wonders for the sonnet and haiku. One wonders where this highly impractical word-limit will lead as the future unfolds.”
Now we don’t know how this committee do the calculation to adjudicate these trending words, but one thing is for sure. Their reckoning is all-based on web-searches and not in our existent world.
Let’s face it, Twitter is a very popular language trend in the cyberworld, particularly now that it’s being spammed by millions of botters – It’s not unusual for it not to be picked as the most popular word. But, hey! If you’ll try to look at the words it surpassed like “Obama, H1N1. Vampire”. These words are more commonly you hear in real-life, right?
Have you ever heard of a group of people talking more about, “Follow me on Twitter”, than “I love Vampire?” or “Check my Twitter” than “Obama” ? I guess you’ll always go for the latter indeed.
GLM said, Twitter stands “above all” the other words such as news about the death of MJ, Pandemic Flu, Horrible Climatic Change and so on. But if you’ll take a deeper look on the picture, you see the only reason why Twitter has been the omnipotent word is because it was built to cater these trends via its 140 character feature. Netizens check Twitter for the latest buzz, and by that doing so, the word “Twitter” has been repeated millions of times though the thought of it being the “Most Popular Word” will be defeated because its just associated with a more popular trend at that moment.
Still a non-believer? Again, try to ask people in your community if they know Twitter or if they do speak Twitter as much as they speak things like “H1N1″ or “Obama”, chances are they will scratch their head and retort with an expression, “Twitter what?”
Maybe we are not correct with this analysis, but hey – Twitter won’t even be existing if not for the popular trends surrounding it. And the word “twitter” won’t be recurring millions of times in the web if not for the botters and spammers redundantly spamming this word like there’s no tomorrow.
In the end you will be asking yourself, “Is Twitter Really a Popular Trending Word”, or “It only became popular because it’s connected with another popular trend?”. Furthermore, would it be better if Twitter was hailed exactly as the “Most Used Word For Internet”, rather than the title of the most popular word – Which begs the question, popular word in what ground? Internet or Reality?
Your call…
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