twat.

i've resolved (this won't last long -- don't worry) to start using that as my default curse word. whenever something goes wrong, 'TWAT!'

bookworm doesn't recognize the word 'twat' in its dictionary.

bookworm's this game that i've playing on-line since i started doing these scans in the lab. it's essentially a grid of scrabble tiles, each with a letter and worth a certain number of points. you string adjacent letters together to spell words -- the longer the better, generally -- and you accumulate points and advance through the levels.

now, i understand how you wouldn't want a child's game to involve the word 'twat,' but that doesn't make it any less a word. what are the chances that a kid would spell out twat in the game without first knowing what it was, anyway?

'fart,' on the other hand, does seem to be a recognized word in bookworm.

i was a 'p' away from spelling 'juxtapose' on bookworm the other day -- no joke.

anyway, i just assumed that bookworm used the scrabble list of recognized words, but i looked up both 'fart' and 'twat' in the scrabble dictionary. scrabble, apparently, likes neither.

just a few weeks ago, the OED officially recognized "to google" as a bona fide verb. is that what makes a word? to have the OED finally take you into its fold?

i'd been fascinated for years with sociolinguistics and morphology, and how novel words get made and perpetuated. i really regret not taking linguistics as my major -- i'm a lot better at it than i am at physics, and just think: i'd have been able to study something i was genuinely interested in.

it seems human geography might offer some answers to language evolution as well. i don't ever recall human geography even being offered at my alma mater, but perhaps i just wasn't paying attention.

well, then, what makes a word a word? i used to be the ultimate of prescriptivists -- i had to adhere to a strick set of rules and be grammatically correct -- a relic from my grade 9 english teacher. my university linguistics courses changed all that. most of it, anyway. language is so dynamic, and even some of the guidelines we have now were considered wrong a few decades ago. how could we possibly not allow for flexibility, especially when it might even help get the point across?

i've since adopted a more liberal descriptivist view. a word is a word if it's used in a contextually and denotatively significant way that more than just one person can understand, right? in student journalism, we find ways to make up new words all the time -- or we use words in unconventional parts of speech. most of the time it's clear what we mean; for instance, when we verb common nouns.

...

i wish that on this issue i could avoid my own pervasive hypocrisy, but i can't: never ever will i recognize 'nuculer' as a proper pronunciation of the word 'nuclear.' 'supposably' isn't a real word and the use of the term 'to impact' as a substitution for the phrase 'to have an impact on' will never be right in my books. it drives me mad every time i hear it used that way, especially on the news.

then again, i am a stodgy old maid.

TWAT!