The web accelerates things.
It took days to get a message across the country when horses carried the mail, but email is near instantaneous. It took days to send product information out to potential customers, but the web provides it in miliseconds, and any time of the day. It took new books and new magazines to spread new words around the world, but now email, instant messaging, chat rooms, and other collaborative online tools make language evolve and spread far faster than it has.
At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Tim O’Reilly gave a keynote about several new innovations on his radar. One of them is The Word Spy. The Word Spy catalogs new words that have emerged in the world’s English, and in its words, performs lexpionage – the sleuthing of new words and phrases. Wardrobe malfunction? It’s there. Jump the shark? Yep. Check it out.