Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Language is a living thing, constantly evolving to reflect the world we live in. Today, the hyperfast pace of technological innovation is a major force driving linguistic change -- and not just acronymatic txtspk. Real words to capture the zeitgeist and express new concepts and constructs.

Many of these neologisms come from teens and the tech community. While these groups have always had their own slang, it's increasingly filtering up into common parlance, even (offline) dictionaries. Witness "unfriend", named 2009 Word for the Year by the linguistic gatekeepers at The New Oxford American Dictionary.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.

"It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. While sites like Urban Dictionary and Word Spy chronicle new words as they are coined, traditional dictionaries are understandably a bit more discriminating, so its interesting to see what makes their cut. This is certainly an indicator of the influence that young people and the web have on everyone's daily lives and our culture as a whole.

Here are some other youth and tech-inspired neologisms that Oxford was considering:

• hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

• intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

• netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

• paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

• sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

What else do you think they should have considered?