‘What do they mean by the millionth word?’ asked my husband as he turned away from Jeremy Paxman’s houndlike physiognomy and towards his whisky glass.
‘What do they mean by the millionth word?’ asked my husband as he turned away from Jeremy Paxman’s houndlike physiognomy and towards his whisky glass. What indeed?
It seems that an American company had got up a PR stunt that caught the imagination of the press. As that reliable old linguistician, Professor David Crystal remarked, ‘It is total nonsense. English reached a million words years ago.’ All the more disappointingly, the word chosen by the American publicity people was Web 2.0. This is a vague term for a new generation of phenomena on the World Wide Web. It is not a very new word, having been coined, it is generally acknowledged, in 2004 by Tim O’Reilly, a grand computer-book publisher.
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