#1144 Weird Web Words

The advent of the World Wide Web has brought about a situation where we have been forced to invent a whole new vocabulary. Some of the web words we’ve come up with are quite functional. Some are a little weird. The Weird Wide Webwords.
Those words that just added an “e” to the main words seem to work okay. You have “email” of course, no longer hyphenated and well into the mainstream of the American lexicon. Then you have e-commerce and e-correspondence and such like. Again perfectly serviceable, as they take the main word we all know and love and add an “e” to indicate it’s on the web.
The use of the word “net” as a prefix or suffix also suffices to indicate web affiliation. Internet, of course, intra-net, net-working.
Then there are the outlier word issues. Like people on Facebook voting whether the term unfriend or defriend is more popular as a substitution for the older term “ostracize.”
Ostracize always sounded to me like you were the size of an ostrich. Or possibly banned from polite company because the sound of your voice grated like a food processor. Ostracizer, Osterizer, it’s easy to be confused.
But the worst word I’ve heard in a while has got to be “webinar.” It refers to people taking classes on the web—apparently some bastardization of the words web and seminar.
But unlike email, which leaves the main word intact and understandable, webinar strips out the meaningful syllable, “sem” of “semin,” as in seminary and dissemination, and replaces it with web, only adding on the meaningless suffix “inar.”
You could as easily say I’m having a desk-i-nar or a house-i-nar.
Webinar is a weird word and I’m not sure I’m going to accept it. But I may as well give up and play along, my high-falutin word opinions have never mattered to the masses in the past.
So when one wants to make money from webinars, will that be called web-i-nue? Will educators suddenly see the light and have a web-a-lation?
“Eureka,” they’ll say, “untapped educational web-i-nue!” Webinars are a web-o-lution in learning!”
America, ya gotta love it.