Denounce Newswire: It's Official: Merriam-Webster Adds Two Words to Latest English Language Dictionary -- eBay and CNet

January 03, 2001

It's Official: Merriam-Webster Adds Two Words to Latest English Language Dictionary -- eBay and CNet

West Filabucket, NY /DenounceNewswire/ -- January 3, 2001 -- Merriam-Webster Company today announced it has added two technical terms to the English Language Dictionary: "ebay" and "cnet".

The first, "ebay", named after the famous online auction site, shall have the following official definition:

ebay
Pronunciation: E bA
Date 2000
Function: verb
1. To crash, fail, or otherwise malfunction.
2. To build a monolithic device knowing it will likely crash, fail, or otherwise malfunction
3..To lose $7 billion or more in market value in a single day
4..To develop your high-traffic web site using Microsoft products.

Example usage:
Did you hear about our competitor? They ebayed something fierce yesterday. Whew. That had to hurt.

Function: noun
1. The act of crashing, failing, or otherwise malfunctioning.
2. A system which is prone to failure
3. A massive loss of market capitalization, as in a publicly-traded company

Example usage:
You better have built a solid architecture, I don't want any ebays here!

"In the past year, 'to ebay' has become a commonplace term in the tech community for meaning a computer crash, especially for a commercial web site crash," said Indu Strypundit, an industry pundit. "Indeed, the motto at some dot-com engineering organizations these days goes something like this: "Otay ebay, ortay otnay otay ebay", which is Pig Latin for "built it right the first time or you deserve to lose your customers."

In related news, Merriam-Webster has chosen to add the word "cnet" (pronounced cee-net) to its latest dictionary.

cnet
Pronunciation: C 'n&t
Function: verb
Date 2000
1. To gloat.
2. To point out the weaknesses of a competitor.
3..To remind of past failures while gloating about the current failure

Example usage:
Okay so our competitors are idiots. Stop cnetting and get back to work.

Merriam-Webster noted that for each instance of an eBay website outage, the CNet news website was on top of it in a flash, reporting all of eBay's miserable details with glee, including a listing of all past outages. CNet is a competitor to eBay and runs its own CNet branded auction service.

Posted by denounce on January 3, 2001 05:53 PM

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