In last Sunday’s New York Times Acrostic Puzzle (spoiler alert!), the featured quote was, “Are ‘toujours vu,’ ‘newbiquitous,’ and ‘coincidensity’...words? No, not quite. They are the verbal equivalents of...Tinker Bell whose little light will be extinguished if we don’t believe in her. They are words only if we use them.” This, from Barbara Wallraff’s Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words. English purists note with dismay the growing prevalence of “neologisms,” or the appearance of new words—think of “tebowism,” “tweet,” or even “blog.” There is the use of “text” as a verb that I still have difficulty with. And then there is all the Internet and texting (see?) shorthand that is spreading into the actual world (fwiw, lol, lmao). And yet, we may bemoan this, but one of the features (not bugs) of the English language is that it can easily adapt to reflect changes in society, culture, or in technology. Sure, would anyone prior to 2005, say, know what “smartphone” means? But then would anyone before, say, 1930 know what “television” meant? And will anyone 20 years hence know what “Walkman” means? It’s not just inventions, of course, but conventions, as well. This seems like an odd conversation to be having here, but I confess to a strong interest in both the history of our language and in science—so when I see a study that combines the two, I sit up and take notice—and inflict it upon the Going Greenosphere. Over at Discover, researchers have availed themselves of Google Books to write the first “culturnomics”* (there’s another one!) paper, published in the January 2011 issue of Science magazine—with graphs! Essentially, they tracked the birth and death of words in three languages—English, Spanish, and Hebrew—and tracked how language evolves over time. Some of the findings include the impact of war and other major historical events on the frequency of word generation/destruction, the sorting out of synonyms or the number of words that refer to the same thing, and the general span of time required for words to either succeed or fail in the common parlance. Lest we think rapid word creation is something new, let us take note of the fact that, as per the Oxford English Dictionary, William Shakespeare alone invented more than 2,000 words.   *I think we need a moratorium on words ending in “-nomics.” I have seen books titled Socialnomics, Wikinomics, and, of course, Freakonomics. I am waiting for a book dedicated to the economics of lunch called Nomnomnomnomics.