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Rating: Summary: Modern Times: McJobs, dot-bombs and cell yell Review: After nine years of hosting one of the most popular websites on neologisms - words which have entered our vocabularies, but not yet our dictionaries -- Paul McFedries has written a tourist's guide to modern society using new words as signposts. What better indication is there of what is important to us than the new words we create? We live in a world that is more stressed ("road rage", "postal"), older ("boomeritis", "silver ceiling"), and self-consciously materialistic ("metrosexual", "McMansion"). We are also a generation which has incorporated such words of war and destruction as "weapons-grade" into our everyday vocabulary. No wonder some of us are "downsizing", moving "off-the-grid" and reading "comfort books". Paul McFedries is a self-proclaimed "neologophiliac". What he really loves, like H L Mencken, is: "the biology of language, as opposed to its paleantology". Best of all, he is able to express that "irrational exhuberance" in language that is funny and light. There are regular additions to McFedries' collection of new words on http://www.wordspy.com/ .
Rating: Summary: Modern Times: McJobs, dot-bombs and cell yell Review: After nine years of hosting one of the most popular websites on neologisms - words which have entered our vocabularies, but not yet our dictionaries -- Paul McFedries has written a tourist's guide to modern society using new words as signposts. What better indication is there of what is important to us than the new words we create? We live in a world that is more stressed ("road rage", "postal"), older ("boomeritis", "silver ceiling"), and self-consciously materialistic ("metrosexual", "McMansion"). We are also a generation which has incorporated such words of war and destruction as "weapons-grade" into our everyday vocabulary. No wonder some of us are "downsizing", moving "off-the-grid" and reading "comfort books". Paul McFedries is a self-proclaimed "neologophiliac". What he really loves, like H L Mencken, is: "the biology of language, as opposed to its paleantology". Best of all, he is able to express that "irrational exhuberance" in language that is funny and light. There are regular additions to McFedries' collection of new words on http://www.wordspy.com/ .
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