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The legendary George Carlin made a career out of calling tending to the dispute between how words & idioms are perceived as opposed to what they are ‘actually’ telling …

He would call for wonderfully rhetorical questions, my favourite of which was this:

- Would you really get on a non-stop flight?

And yet, that expression is not only used on a daytime by daytime basis, but with a straight face each time. How does this happen, wherever nonsense in reality becomes an lucid phrase?

There are 2 schools of conveived when it comes to the use of the English language. The conservative view is that its integrity must be maintained, maybe grudgingly at times. The copious view is that, in order to be a lively, vibrant language, it wants to adapt to the times. Of course, there is as well my view, which is that the English language defies definition.

My subject might be began by citing the classical instance wherever it may be argued that ‘ghoti’ is a homonym of ‘fish’ by temper of the following logic:

- ‘gh’ sounds like ‘f’ in words like ‘enough’ & ‘cough;’

- ‘o’ sounds like ‘i’ in ‘women;’ and

- ‘ti’ sounds like ‘sh’ in words like ‘sanction’ & ‘action.’

This is a ridiculous extreme, of course. The evolution of letter combinations & the sounds they symbolize in English is a result of dialectical isolation over numerous decades. As universal as the language has become, this is a casual progression. It’s as well wherefore more geographically ‘compact’ languages such as Swedish rest ‘purer’ in the logic of their pronunciation rules.

Another ontogenesis of English is that, not only do sounds alter over time, so do definitions.

With that in mind, let’s take a ‘nice’ alter of direction. ‘Nice’ has its ancestry in the Latin word, ‘nescius,’ which means ‘ignorant.’ So, the phrasal idiom ‘nice man’ would have been referring to an idiot in the 1400s. However, by the 1600s, the word had turned. A ‘nice man’ then meant that he was ‘refined.’ After slightly more than a century, a ‘nice man’ had become ‘pleasant’ — & acknowledged in the Merriam-Webster lexicon as such — which stands to this day.

How ‘sick’ is that for a turn of events?

I’m not sure what ‘dudes’ did in the 1400s to do the exploit on ‘nice,’ but their modern-day progeny are alive & well today, turning the road meaning of ‘sick’ into a synonym for ‘cool,’ which was ‘morphed’ by before ‘cats’ from a temperature status to a state of zeitgeist. (That’s German for ‘trendy;’ conservatives find alien idioms satisfactory as ‘pop’ condescensions.) Every generation has its slang, of course. It’s rare that definitions of affected words in reality evolve into the settled vernacular, ie- lexicon recognition, which ironically supplies them the differentiation of being defended by conservatives as ‘proper’ English. Whether that occurs or not, folks of each time period still want to comprehend each other. This supplies rise to ‘alternative’ reference sources.

One of the more fascinating of these nowadays is the Urban Dictionary. It’s the brainchild of Aaron Peckham, a student at (where else?) Cal Poly. He watched a want to catalog, specify & post today’s jargon for the benefit of all. His site is non-profit & its popularity has skyrocketed. The key cause for this has got to be the exponential growth of cyberspace.

The Urban Dictionary has become so popular, it’s today useable in script form. It contains a modest 2000 jargon definitions. However, that is the same as the count of submissions the internet receives each daytime from contributors around the world. You will find over 250,000 submissions there, from emoticons to phrases.

If you have ‘gone 404′ — a reference for the on the web wrongdoing message displayed when a site is missing — you are truly talking geek. If you are ignoring someone by concentrating on your electronic device, such as a PDA, MP3 or laptop, you are ‘evoiding’ them. Have you ever so accidentally phoned someone since your mobile phone is fitting too tightly in your pocket? If so, you have just ‘butt dialed’ someone.

Peckham’s toil of cherish attracts millions of hits per year. He today utilizes the services of volunteer editors to keep his site up-to-date. It’s fair-minded to state that the Urban Dictionary has become a dependable reference for coping with the cyber-culture. Peckham states as practically in the book’s introduction, calling it “a resource for parents attempting to comprehend their kids, for language learners confused by real-world English but most of all for your entertainment.”

It is an fascinating surf. As he promises, it may even be rather useful. In fact, I’d even go so distant to state that he is done a really nice business with it. Very nice, indeed. In a ill sort of way, of course.