This might be a stretch, perhaps a bit meta, but Merriam-Webster has announced the winner of its 2007 Word of the Year contest. (Last year’s winner was “truthiness.”) My favorite Google News search term, “hypocrite,” made this year’s finalists, but it lost out to…
Are you sitting down?
The winner is: “w00t”! That’s right, the Word of the Year has numbers in it. Congratulations to all you l33t gamers out there, because your victorious exclamation of choice is now an actual word. Go celebrate by killing some orcs or dragons or whatever. (Tip: I’ve found that a folded-up Hefty bag tucked into the collar of my shirt makes the Doritos crumbs slide right off. HTH!)
Better luck next year, “hypocrite.” We’ll do our part to keep you on people’s minds.
c_c
I’ve been using ‘w00t’ a lot longer then I’ve been playing MMOs.. . the ‘we owned the other team’ thing was.. well, *I* have never heard of it
I wonder what ‘whoo-hoo’ and ‘yay’ are acronyms for?
I understand the blog is satire, but.. I admit to being slightly offended by your apparently idea of what a ‘w00t’ user looks and acts like. Gamers come in all shapes, sizes, and sexes, and from all walks in life. World of warcraft makes this even more true, and expanded the MMO market dramatically. People who normally wouldn’t play games, much less the previously-exclusive MMORPG market, suddenly started playing WoW. And I promise they didn’t change into dorito consuming slugs.
In fact, I can think of several of my RL friends who are gamers–mmos and otherwise… one of them did spent a lot of time playing EQ several years ago, but he’s never weighted more than 140 lbs and he’s nearly 6 foot tall. and he’s the ‘worst’ of all my MMO playing friends. (outside the one who’s living on government money due to extreme social phobias… but his problems go a lot deeper then a computer game. He also weights next-to-nothing.)
Just sometihng to think about