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Totally Jazz, Man
By Corvus | January 25, 2007
As a follow up to This Post is Totally Book (link), a post about linguistic shenanigans inspired by T9 Word technology, comes this word replacement tale from Freakonomics (link).
I asked my younger sister if she’d heard of this predictive-text slang phenomenon and she immediately supplied her own example. Among her hipper-than-thou (hipper-than-me) art-school crowd in San Francisco, “jazz” is apparently the new “lame,” for a few reasons: The first is that some predictive-text programs guess “jazz” when you try to type in “lame” (they’re both spelled starting 5-2). Secondly, it’s a classic evolution in the hipsters’ flip-the-script lexicon: using a word to connote its exact opposite. Granted, that last point is debatable — depending on your opinion of jazz.
It’s only a matter of time before ‘jazz’ and ‘book’ become passe when the T9Word replacements will start offering up suggestions such as ‘conk’ and ‘kane’.
Tagged:evolution-of-language, sms, t9-word, Tech. | No Comments »
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