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Scouring the Web to Make New Words ‘Lookupable’
- mojoe 11y agoI really like this concept -- there have been many studies on how language shapes thinking (for example, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010028501907480 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010028501..., http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v304/n2/full/scientificamerican0211-62.html http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v304/n2/ful..., http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.short http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.short). I would be willing to bet that having a greater number of descriptive English words will be beneficial in the long run.
- afarrell 11y agoI feel like this article commits a serious oversight by failing to reference http://www.urbandictionary.com/ http://www.urbandictionary.com/ and the problem it raises for this enterprise: How does one determine if a word is actually used in communication or if it's existence is is merely a result of trolling. To take one example, I seriously doubt that the entry "wolfbagging" refers to a genuine sexual activity that people engage in, but that does not mean it is not used in some metaphorical or referential sense. After all, "rainbow parties" were never a phenomenon in the 90s outside the minds of the media and jumpy parents, but that is probably a phrase that has entered common knowledge in the U.S. One cannot use ridiculousness or physical possibility as a test. One has to look at a sufficiently a massive corpus of text to observe the word being used in the wild. The reddit corpus might be sufficient, but even then, that will only let you decide that the word exists with a certain subculture.
- wingerlang 11y agoThis is my only issue with urban dictionary, it feels like a lot of it is just random words that people shoehorn sexual activities into.
- _0ffh 11y agoWell, I think it's a good thing, so long as these new words are cromulent.