ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, August 15, 1996 TAG: 9608150084
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
Quick, convenient e-mail is the medium of choice when 11-year-old Valerie Lampert of Randolph, Mass., wants to communicate with her grandfather in New York.
``Why don't you E that to me?'' she tells him. Grandpa appreciates the saying. ``E that,'' Richard Weiner marvels. ``I love it.''
It's more than familial pride. Weiner has just completed the significantly updated second edition of Webster's New World Dictionary of Media and Communications, and new ways of using the English language are his biz (``business,'' as in ``show biz'').
More than any other dictionary, perhaps, his is a telling bellwether of how fast American English is changing as humanity wades deeper into the Information Age. It may simply be a 678-page list of words, but it tells the story of the 20th century - and the 21st.
The underlying principle: Mass media is both the carrier and the source of new terms.
``We live in a media culture. You cannot look at the television and not be aware of what's behind the scenes in media,'' says Weiner, 69, a longtime public relations man who began his lexicographer's labor by collecting media terms on paper scraps.
``So,'' he says, ``the specialized language of newspaper reporters and others in the communications industry is becoming the language of the general public.''
Consider that, disregarding ``E'' entirely (one wonders, though, how the present participle would be expressed - ``Eing?''), electronic mail just became ``e-mail'' within the past 10 years or so. And where a ``blurb'' began as a short lump of text, today authors and actors ``get blurbed.''
Many everyday words - born of the media, advertising and entertainment industries - are still barely toddlers.
There's ``fax,'' which survived a happily brief and clunky incarnation as ``telefacsimile.'' And ``FedEx,'' now occasionally a verb, which has become so well known that Federal Express has painted the shorter form on many of its trucks. And ``newsmagazine,'' ``tabloid TV'' and ``cyberspace,'' all less than 15 years old.
``Our language is expanding as well as changing, and I think that's terrific,'' Weiner says. ``Now, not just people in the communications industry but everyone of all ages, starting with children, now use terms like `fast forward' and `zap' - things that started as specialized terms.''
This isn't shocking, considering how the walls between media and culture are falling. The Internet allows anyone with a $9.95 monthly account to carry a message to the world via the World Wide Web. The appetite for all news, all the time has become voracious enough to give birth to MSNBC last month, and Fox will soon follow suit. And fictional accounts of journalism - ``Mary Tyler Moore,'' ``Murphy Brown,'' ``Broadcast News'' and ``The Paper'' - continue to glamorize the profession for the public.
Politicians, journalists and actors trade places daily, blurring the line between media and celebrity. Consider Pat Buchanan's decision to leave CNN's ``Crossfire'' for the campaign trail. Look who replaced him: Former White House Chief of Staff John Sununu.
So if life imitates art imitates life, language naturally comes along for the ride. And more quickly: Weiner added or updated more than 3,000 entries since the first edition in 1990.
``Today, if somebody comes up with a new phrase or word, it is spread instantly,'' says Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society. ``Instead of weeks and months, now it takes milliseconds. It doesn't mean these terms will last forever, just that they're suddenly here.''
Allene Grognet, vice president of the Center for Applied Linguistics, sees television and the computer as the two major reasons that language has changed faster in the past 30 years. The computer, she says, affects it in two ways - by being a widely used machine and by connecting people via modems and the Net.
``It is obvious that the mass media has affected English a great deal over the last 30 years,'' Grognet says. ``And it will continue and grow very fast as computers and the Internet grow very fast. They are the new generation of affecting the English language.''
As for Weiner, whose granddaughter knows how to work the VCR better than he does, his dictionary is an attempt to keep up with the vocabulary of an increasingly complex world - from ``adult contemporary'' (a format of radio stations that emphasizes current popular music but not hard rock) to ``zine'' (a special-interest publication, generally produced by amateurs).
``We still live in an age in which people have a high respect for media, or if not that, at least a focus on it,'' Weiner says. ``And I think that it can be a good thing. I think that as a result of our global media society, people are more knowledgeable about more different fields than ever before.''
Webster's New World Dictionary of Media and Communications. MacMillan. $27.95.
A sampler of modern language
Tidbits from Webster's New World Dictionary of Media and Communications, second edition, by Richard Weiner:
La-La land, slang for Hollywood, is derived from ``LA'' - the initials for Los Angeles.
People are picking up the language of television meteorologists and applying it in everyday life. ``Cold front,'' for example, is used now to refer to spousal arguments, i.e. ``There's a cold front coming in.''
Actual cablegrams are rarely used in the age of high-speed data transmission, but many people still use vestiges of ``cablese.'' For example: ``-30-'' is still used as a signoff to mark the end of a newspaper story or transmission. It may, Weiner says, have originated as the Roman numerals ``XXX,'' used by telegraphers as a signoff.
The term ``exploitation film,'' which refers to a movie made for profit with little regard for quality, gave birth to the term ``blaxploitation,'' for films such as ``Blacula'' and ``Shaft,'' popular in the '70s, which pandered to black audiences.
Though Chyron is a company that manufactures television graphics systems, the word has become genericized to mean text superimposed upon the television screen over an image, as in ``George Allen, Governor, Virginia.''
The term ``pennysaver,'' for a free, throwaway (now usually mailed) newspaper, originated in the era when daily newspapers were a penny and a free paper saved the recipient one cent.
And one from the past: ``Operator 25 Service'' was a Western Union system that allowed consumers to call a local number and receive - from Operator 25 - the names of local dealers or information from national advertisers. The service was discontinued when 800 numbers became popular.
LENGTH: Long : 129 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Richard Weiner has just completed the significantlyby CNBupdated second edition of Webster's New World Dictionary of Media
and Communications.|