So I was listening to this past Wednesday's Buzz Out Loud podcast, and they were talking about supposed new slang. One of them sounded plausible: due to "predictive typing" software built into phones that support sending text messages, apparently, trying to type cool often produces book. (B and C being on the same key, ditto K and L.)
I like that on so many levels.
But here's what's really book. I wanted to see if this entry was in the Urban Dictionary, since I was agreeing with the Buzz crew that a lot of these terms in the article they were discussing sounded contrived. (I guarantee you that anyone who tries to use 404 to mean anything but HTTP code for page not found will immediately suffer death by wedgie -- the tech press has been trying to suggest this is cool-kid slang since pets.com was a going concern, but I ain't buyin'.) Unable to remember whether it's urban-dictionary or urbandictionary, and whether it's dot com or dot net, I just Googled urbandictionary. Look what came back (click to enlarge):
Recently, I was griping to somebody about big newspaper sites being so paranoid about losing visitors that they still do a terrible job adding internal links in their articles. This may have boosted to my moment of pleasure at seeing the above. Say what you will about Google, I have to admire them for allowing the interface to someone else's search engine to appear on their own search results page. I don't know whether it's a spirit of webbiness and openness, or an expression of self-confidence, but it sure does appeal.
[Afterthought] Pardon my fanboyism. This is not an interface to Urban Dictionary's search engine, but just a shortcut/GUI interface to do a Google site: search of Urban Dictionary. It's still slick, though, and I'm sure people who care about branding will get where I'm coming from.
Try it live.
Oh, and yeah. It's urbandictionary (no hyphen) dot com, and yes, book as a synonym for cool indeed appears.
Oh, and the "come to jesus" business in the image is just evidently the "word of the day" at this moment.
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