Alas, poor English; I knew it well

It's been a week of awful, disheartening and un-Christmas-like news. Someone in Brazil tried to kill Santa Claus, an old man was murdered while delivering Christmas cards and, proving that cultural hypersensitivity is gradually making us all into morons, an Ottawa school has edited a classic Christmas carol, removing the word Christmas from it. Brilliant.

But there's worse news. It's the worst news story of the year, and probably the worst thing in media and culture since TIME magazine's sausage-spined decision to make YOU the 2006 Person of the Year. That is that me and approximately 300 million other people like me have just become essentially irrelevant.

Why? We speak English.

For those of you remaining blissfully unaware, The English language was essentially declared moot on December 12, 2007 when the charlatans at Merriam-Webster - a dictionary publisher, mind you - declared "w00t" the 2007 word of the year.

It's actually hard to diagnose what's wrong with that BECAUSE IT'S SO OVERWHELMINGLY WRONG that I scarcely know where to start.

I guess I should start with the broadest strokes, that being that it's not even a fucking word. It's an expression of exultation, an acronym used by online gamers that means "we owned the other team." It's part of the "l33t" (another non-word, a bastardized form of "elite") lexicon, an online game language.

It's spelled with two zeros instead of the letter o, which instantly disqualifies it as a word. Words are spelled with letters. The zeroes are used for no logical reason, it's just to look cool and computery.

Furthermore, the word was concocted by hackers and gamers, the same subhuman mouth-breathers who concocted pwned, absolutely and irrefutably the stupidest pseudo-word of all time.

Not surprisingly, the word of the year was decided by an online poll, so slug-like computer nerds can stay congealed at home and make their mark on the world without venturing too far from the World of Warcraft tournaments. That doesn't let Merriam-Webster off the hook by any means, though. It accepted nominations for the word of the year, and it probably could have exercised the barest amount of editorial discretion and disallowed words that, you know, AREN'T WORDS.

For your edification, here's the list of word of the year finalists:

· facebook - as a verb, a vile usage. "Did you Facebook today?"
· conundrum
· quixotic - you're not hallucinating; that's two real words! In a row!
· blamestorm - fuck off. A stupid neologism; more on these shortly
· sardoodledom - a real word, as unlikely as it sounds
· apathetic
· Pecksniffian - a great Dickensian word. I'm gonna start using this.
· hypocrite
· charlatan - noun: fraud, fake, Merriam-Webster editor


Look at that, English users. A list of the top ten words of the year, and only seventy percent of them are real words. Facebook works as a noun, but using it as a verb should qualify you for summary execution. It's only slightly more inexcusable than "texted."

As for "blamestorm," it's a product of another great scourge of then English language: neologisms, or wannabe-clever "words" concocted by idiots. Examples include:

• awkword, noun - a word that's difficult to pronounce
• lexpionage, adj - Lexical espionage; the sleuthing of new words and phrases
• multidude, noun - The collective noun for a group of surfers

Terms like those are worthless on so many levels. Remember the Rob Schneider character on Saturday Night Live who made wordplay with peoples' names? That's exactly the kind of retard who thinks up things like "lexpionage." They're designed for maxiumum cleverness, but who the hell is ever going to use a word like "multidude"? If you liked any of the examples above, please please stop reading this and go to hell.

Of course, languages must change and evolve. English is a constantly growing and changing thing, and it has changed for the better in the past. I'm a fan of non-idiotic new words and co-opting foreign-language terms like schadenfreude or carte blanche. English rules can also be unnecessarily anal. I don't yearn for us all to simply speak Shakespearean English. I don't care that you didn't spot the split infinitive in the last sentence. But we have to have limits.

And w00t definitely fucking crosses them.