Would you please stop tweeping me!

“Hey you tweep you’d better unfriend me or I’ll catfish you! “ Before our dear readers go bananas we would like to suggest that they check out the latest version of the Merrian-Webster dictionary, whose 2014 edition includes 150 new words. What about steampunk, autotune, hashtag, hot spot, selfie, unfriend, fangirl. If you are over 30 you’d better look them up at http://www.geeksugar.com/New-Webster-Dictionary-Words-2014-34815401.

Just in case you are in a hurry or not used to webbing, a tweep is a Twitter user, a selfie is a photo that you take of yourself, a dubstep is a genre of electronic dance music, catfish is to deceive someone with a false social networking site, unfriend is to remove a contact from a social networking site and hashtag is a clarifying or categorizing workd or phrase preceding the symbol #.

Surprising enough this is not a record year for new English terms. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the 150 new entries compares poorly with 1880-1889, in full industrial revolution, when 9,882 words were added. But like it or not, new technology brings new terminology. What some observers might be a potentially dangerous process is the distance that appears to be growing in the terminology used by the youngest generation and those over 50 years of age.