{"id":593,"date":"2006-01-23T11:59:55","date_gmt":"2006-01-23T16:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2006\/01\/23\/word-crisis\/"},"modified":"2006-01-23T11:59:55","modified_gmt":"2006-01-23T16:59:55","slug":"word-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/23\/word-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Word crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forget about Peak Oil<\/a>, here’s the real looming crisis: we’re running out of new words. Do you realize how hard it is, in our hyperactive age, to come up with a word that hasn’t already been invented for some purpose or another? Surely we’ve all had the experience of mistyping a word into Google and nevertheless hitting a handful of results. So as a little experiment, I made up some strings of letters that sounded like they could be words, checked in the dictionary<\/a> that none of them actually exists as a conventional English word, and asked Google to go look for them. Here’s how many hits I got.<\/p>\n