Booming or busting, dot-commers have made their mark on the language. And now, as Casey Stengel (by way of James Thurber) said, you can look it up: the new edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary includes "dot-commer" among 10,000 new words and over 100,000 new meanings.
As a matter of fact, said Merriam-Webster president and publisher John Morse to the Associated Press, it's the Internet which has had the biggest influence on our language in the past decade, not just with the words themselves but the speed they make the dictionary: it took "dot-commer" only five years to get listed.
"Typically, it takes 10 to 20 years before a word moves out of usage by small groups into the larger populace," Morse told the AP. And next in influence are the baby-boom generation, who have lately sent such terms as "comb-over" (covering your bald spot), "macular degeneration" (eye problem common mostly to the elderly), "heart-healthy" (three guesses) into the 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.
Alas, the lexicon isn't the only change dot-commers have wreaked upon the tome: not only does the 11th edition come with a CD-ROM and a year's subscription to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Website at $29.95, but there is also an online version of the 11th edition that is only available to subscribers of dictionary site for $14.95 annually. As an incentive, subscribers to the site gain access to the Collegiate Thesaurus, the Collegiate Encyclopedia, and the Spanish-English Dictionary as well.
Not that it'll ever take away the hardbound book, Morse said. "We live in a hybrid world and people were telling us they didn't want the dictionary in just one form," he told the AP. "(But) people love the serendipity of what is put in front of them when they page through the book in search of a word," Morse said.
