THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH (Part 9)

Here's a new chapter of the series The History of English in 10 minutes. The topic today is Internet English and in it you can learn how many new words have been invented since the Internet was first used. As always, watch the video, listen to it attentively and try to understand it. In case you need it, the transcript is below.

The History of English in Ten Minutes

Internet English

In 1972 the first email was sent. Soon the Internet arrived – a free global space to share information, ideas and amusing pictures of cats.

Before then English changed through people speaking it – but the net brought typing back into fashion and hundreds of cases of repetitive strain syndrome.

Nobody had ever had to ‘download’ anything before, let alone use a ‘toolbar’ - And the only time someone set up a ‘firewall’, it ended with a massive insurance claim and a huge pile of charred wallpaper.

Conversations were getting shorter than the average attention span – why bother writing a sentence when an abbreviation would do and leave you more time to ‘blog’, ‘poke’ and ‘reboot’ when your ‘hard drive’ crashed?

‘In my humble opinion’ became ‘IMHO, ‘by the way’ became ‘BTW and ‘if we’re honest that life-threatening accident was pretty hilarious!’ simply became ‘fail’.

Some changes even passed into spoken English. For your information people frequently asked questions like “how can ‘LOL’ mean ‘laugh out loud’ and ‘lots of love’? But if you’re going to complain about that then UG2BK.