Week 4: Inventing a New Word

Welcome to our blog! We are the Brave of Seven, a group of students on a course called Communicating in the Digital World, at the University of Vaasa.

Why did we chose this name for our group? Well, obviously there is seven of us. At the first lecture of the course we were taught to step out of our comfort zone. We decided to be brave and defeat this course. That’s why we are called the Brave of Seven.

We also had to choose a theme to our blog. We had little difficulties to come up with a theme that is interesting to all of us. Anyway, the theme is now is tv-series and movies. It means that our blog posts are always somehow related to this theme.

After coming up with the name, theme and creating a blog we started working on our first assignment. What we had to do, was to decide an interesting phenomenon of digital communication which does not yet have a name and give a name for it and write the name and description in Urban Dictionary.

At first it seemed difficult to imagine a phenomenon that doesn’t have a name yet. Quite soon one of us came up with an idea: to define the phenomenon of using memes as the main way of communicating in the social media. The rest of us thought the idea was very good, we didn’t have to argue about it. We don’t have a word for that kind of communication even though it is very common. It was also quite easy to create a word for the phenomenon. There was already an existing word meme so what we had to do was to adapt the word to our needs. To create a verb out of it. We decided to combine the words meme and communicate.

Writing the official definition wasn't as easy as we thought: we had to post and edit the definiton three times before our new word was accepted to be part of the vocabulary of Urban Dictionary. It is actually very difficult to define a new word so that everyone can understand it. 

So, nowadays we have a word for this phenomenon. The phenomenon can be called to memecate. The official definition is to use memes as the way of communication in the social media, to describe and comment events and facts on social media by using memes, usually in a humorous way. Usually used by heavy Internet users (Geeks). There is a pre-knowledge of memecating or memes needed, to use memes in the right context.

You can find the definition also on the Urban Dictionary when you click here.

The first assignment was very interesting. Time will show if our new word will actually be used in general. Anyway, it was interesting to notice that this is how the process actually works: someone is in a need of a word for an unnamed phenomenon and comes up with an idea. He/she starts to use the word and if other people find it good enough, it becomes part of people’s daily vocabulary.

In conclusion, let me memecate a little by using the favorite memes of our group!

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQglTs5mCLvdrV2i5wWD3WdnNbTwh4HMpKkh6xrjyVLy-YFRwZrOw

http://www.digitallydanielle.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Blog-meme-2.0.png

http://cdn.crushable.com/files/2012/04/Offensive-Forrest-Gump-1.jpg

https://scontent-b-ams.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10522094_10203620098772785_7755325129432332811_n.jpg?oh=1efee317d1e30205ed1af51ca43cc8d1&oe=556918E2

http://www.quickmeme.com/img/a9/a99abdac727ddfc3646fe9b55d8b0f10c943f8e813bd1d84b9102d0c48c09519.jpg

Stay tuned! :)

H-L S.