From internee to internist

Nothing ages you like receiving an email and realising that there was a time, well into your adult life, when half the words in it would have made no sense whatsoever. I recently received an email about iPad apps and usability (old word but new, specialised, meaning) that mentioned such things as 'swipe ambiguity' and 'navigation overload'.

This golden age of communications technology has spawned a plethora of new words and phrases – some, such as 'app' are relatively new, even to the technologically savvy, even if 'application' has been around for years. Others are better established – just out of curiosity, I checked my old and trusted, but now woefully out of date, Concise Oxford Dictionary to see what was there and what was missing. Interestingly, 'virus', in the computing sense, was there, as was 'email'. But 'internet'? No sign – straight from 'internee' to 'internist'.

Of course, language, especially the English language, is constantly growing and adapting. But I think there's something more at work than the gradual shifts to which we've become accustomed.

Because the very communications revolution that's led to all these new words and phrases means that those words can become embedded in our everyday lives with incredible speed. And developments that might once have taken years need now take only months.