w00t! Honored as word of year
I can hear ancient grammarians choking on their participles now. Let’s roll out the red carpet for w00t, Merriam-Webster’s Word of the year for 2007 as voted on by the crowd. It’s a nice slang word with an impressive parallel construction of 2 letters and 2 numbers - sometimes written with an exclamation point, as in w00t!.
Nate Anderson on the ars technica blog describes w00t as:
an expression so likely to die off in the near future that I can just about see its pallbearers lining up down the hall. Merriam-Webster offers this definition for those not quite l33t enough to spend their lives in online chatrooms: “expressing joy; similar in use to the word yay.”
Perhaps w00t’s honor reflects a deeper silliness at having a word of the year, so the crowd shunned wisdom and decided to interject some humor into our otherwise grammatical lives.