L'Academie Gawker
Via Poynter, we learn [link to http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/246113/gawker-bans-internet-slang/ no longer works] that the word “massive” has been banned on Gawker.
We want to sound like regular adult human beings, not Buzzfeed writers or Reddit commenters,” new Gawker Editor Max Read says in a memo to the publication’s writers. Words like “epic,” “pwn” and “derp” are no longer welcome on the site. Read also says the word “massive” is “never to appear on the website Gawker dot com.”
The desire to sound like regular human beings is admirable, and Mr. Read is correct when he says that jokes made using strikethrough are generally not worth saving.
However, he seems to fall into a trap of believing that there is an hierarchy of language goodness which is removed from our social hierarchies. We’re not the French, with L’Acadamie française to define correct language, and to be ignored by Le Frenchmen dans on le weekends.
The observable reality is that language evolves as a result of a variety of pressures or opportunities. That is, language is emergent, not decreed. There is no authority who gets to declare what words a community uses (outside of NewSpeak, and even in Orwell’s world, normal people don’t use NewSpeak daily, because the words decreed by Big Brother didn’t serve their needs. Real language is inevitably chaotic and messy.
This is a massive pile of derp, and an epic mistake on Gawker’s part.
[Updated to add a strikethrough joke.]
Indeed, I recently enjoyed this article on how certain words were formed: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/11/pronunciation-errors-english-language. I supposed pwn’d is the opposite of f epenthesis?