[lg policy] When news breaks, someone looks it up

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

When news breaks, someone looks it up

The internet may be the new newspaper, but it's also become the new dictionary, and the two are inextricably linked: when news breaks, people rush online to find out what it means, and whether it's a noun or a verb.
In its “trend watch” link, dictionary-maker merriam-webster.com reports on this almost-Pavlovian response to look up words in the news, which runs the gamut from the vocabulary of hot political stories to news about more routine events. For example, when former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez called John Stewart a bigot and suggested that “everybody who runs CNN” is Jewish, people looked up bigot, though probably not because they thought John Stewart was a bigot. And when austerity began to appear with some regularity in stories about the economy, people looked it up as well, if they could afford to. . . .

to find out more about spiking dictionary look-ups, read the rest of this post on the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/hWI6NR


____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English                    
University of Illinois 
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801                                               

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage








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