Netymology: From Apps to Zombies – A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World by Tom Chatfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
For those of us who love languages almost as much as we love the internet, this is a lovely stroll through the lingo of the internet and the origins of the words we invented or re-appropriated to describe new phenomenon, culture and behaviours in the digital world. And for meatspace, the non-digital world where the sneakernet is sometimes faster than teh interwebs. If you ever wondered where those words came from, what makes someone hikikomori or who the patron saint of the internet is, wait no longer, the answers are in this book!
I’ll end this, before it gets TL;DR – but let me just disclose that someone finally invented a word for the lazy journalism half truths that gets repeated over and over, it’s Snowclones (in honour of those 100 words for snow, the Inuit allegedly have).
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