Article & Journal Resources

Colin McEnroe

I do not w00t. I do not believe I ever will w00t. I don't even know anybody who (openly) w00ts.

W00t is the WOTY, which is to say it is the Merriam-Webster word of the year.

It seems to be an exclamation uttered by (video) gamers, when they are joyful and triumphant. As in: "w00t! I destroyed all of your Sand Moles, dude."

Alarmingly, ever since the word was announced by Merriam-Webster last week, there have been online debates about whether "w00t" really originates among gamers or whether it was adopted (by gamers) from hip hop, where it appeared as "Whoot! There it is." It has now been alleged that the rap group Tag Team shouted "Whoomp! There it is." And that another rap group, 95 South, altered it to become "Whoot! There it is." And that in each case "it" was the comely posterior of a lady. And that all of this was rapped and shouted in 1993, not at all recently enough to make it a Word of the Year.

In fact, as the debate wears on, we brace ourselves for the intelligence that it all dates back to Andrew Marvell, writing in the 17th century:

An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest;

Except thy booty, more mine than his,

Thus do I say "Whoot, there it is."

What I'm talking 'bout is: There's a pretty good chance that Merriam-Webster, keeper of words and word origins, does not have a handle on the origins on its own Word of the Year. They think it is a recent gamer word, but it may be a 14-year-old rap word that got played over and over at sports events until the one gamer who actually attends Chicago Bulls games noticed it and passed it along to his pasty LCD-lighted friends.

I can guess why this obscure and poorly understood word got picked. One of the important people at Merriam-Webster has a 12-year-old son, Ethan, who has been thumbing "ScanBot VII: Revenge of the Blood Regurgitating Moths" on PlayStation so steadily for the last seven months that he has been catheterized and would not recognize his own parents' faces.

The dictionary guy feels that, in canonizing a word like "w00t," he has taken a meaningful step toward getting his own son to stop drinking Ensure and avoiding sunlight.

Even as that happens, we can see the mother tongue skating up a frozen river of new speech, away, away from Merriam-Webster.

For example, has M-W even noted the transmogrification of "all" into a verb, mostly meaning "to say"?

As in: "She's all, 'I totally don't wear underwear anymore.'" (Actually, she would be all, "I totally go commando," which is something else M-W doesn't know about.)

Let me try again: "She's all, 'I'm not going to the Sassafras Cotillion this year.'"

In that usage, "all" introduces a direct quote.

But does Merriam-Webster acknowledge this? Even though "he's all" and "she's all" get said millions of times per day? Merriam-Webster does not. But they acknowledge "w00t." Nobody says "w00t."

All of the action is in verbs right now. For example, my son Mortimer and his friends use "about to" as a helping verb, but not the way you and I do. If you said, "I'm about to move to Canada," I would assume you had a job lined up and had probably started packing.

If Mortimer said it, it could mean, "I fully endorse the concept of moving to Canada" or "I could imagine future circumstances in which I might move to Canada" or perhaps some combination of those two ideas. It can be very confusing, as when a young person says: "I'm about to burst into flame."

I tried to ask Mortimer about his use of "I'm about to."

HE: I use it exactly the way people have used it since the beginning of time.

MYSELF: Not exactly. If your friend called you and asked what you were doing tonight and you answered "I'm about to jack an Escalade," you might mean, "I'm sitting here imagining how pleasant and life-enhancing it would be to jack an Escalade," as opposed to "I'm standing here next to an Escalade, holding a brick wrapped in a towel."

HE (grudgingly): Straight. (Meaning: "That's true.") (Note to Merriam-Webster: There are more people using "straight" in this manner than there are people yelling "w00t." Also, "jack" means "steal," as in "don't let no scrub [trifling person] jack yo' hoopty [automobile].")

I thought about this for longer than any sane adult should, and I eventually decided it's sort of the obverse of the much more long-standing "I'm not about to."

"I'm not about to buy a pig that doesn't have all its vaccinations."

"I'm not about to let Rush Limbaugh see me naked."

We know this means "Under no circumstances would I," as opposed to "It is not the case that I am moments away from."

The Word of the Year ought to be something the many or most of us are saying at the end of 2007 and that few, if any, of us had said at the beginning. I think "subprime," "waterboard" and "carbon footprint" all fit that bill. And "Don't taze me, bro," should be honored or noted in some way. I'm not so sure about "friend" and "poke," which — though less obscure than "w00t" — share some of its defects.

I wish Merriam-Webster had given this more thought. I wish Ethan would talk to his father. I know he's about to. I just don't know if that means he's about to. So I'm all, "W00t" (not!)."