Sunday 5 July 2009

useless but interesting vocabulary

Been listening to Stephen Fry's podgram. Specifically, the episode where he talked about language.

He talked about a few words that I found interesting.

Note: These are words that you can find in the dictionary. Google it!

Aitch
noun: the name of the letter H

Meld
verb: blend; combine
noun: formed by merging or blending

Fry also talked about a graffiti he saw on a wall in London, which read: One Nation Under CCTV.

Now, Fry was thinking - CCTV. That's not a very nice acronym. It's clumsy, it's not very 'memorable'. But why not call it something else? Like SS - Surveillance System. The UK's been taken over by the SS, anyone?

I was also thinking, when he talked about that, why has the name "CCTV" caught on? How did people learn to know what a CCTV is? 

I guess it's just like the tech lingo that we use so casually, isn't it? Like how 'LOL' or 'Epic Fail' caught on amongst the technologically elite, and eventually spread around the echo chamber and in the series of tubes. The same way we know "Apple Store" no longer means a fruit shop that specialises in selling apples and other apple products (pies, jams, tarts, etc), but the technology company which sells cellphones, mp3 players and computers.

I know I'm going off a tangent here, but why do we call a CCTV a CCTV and not something else? not a security camera, or an SS, or a mini spycam? I mean, maybe we use the first one occasionally, but the second sounds shorter, yet nobody uses it. This is against the 'trend', isn't it? After all, our culture is one that seems to embrace the shortening and simplification of communication. Look at Chinese, look at the spelling of "programme" in US English. Look at LOL and ROFLMAO.

Well, what do you think?

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