Trending

Trending is the new way to determine if you are popular, so I understand.  The other night there was an episode of CSI which featured something like Twitter.  In the show, a fraternity at The University of Las Vegas had a party at which everyone tweeted things like “insane party”, “having a wonderful time”, and then of course since it was CSI, a murder.  One of the actors who played the son of the head of the CSI team was shown explaining trending to his Dad.  Incidentally, I looked online and actually found a site called WhatTheTrend.com which shows what is currently trending on Twitter. 

As with many words, trending is not an actual word but has evolved to be used to describe an online activity or event.  It is so well used that spell checker in Word does not display it as incorrect.  I looked it up in my American Heritage Dictionary from 1981 and the word does not exist.  But that’s how things are today.  Words are being created every day.  There are several sites online which describe and define new words in the English language and it is interesting because many of them I have never heard before.  Trending however, was not on several of the sites I looked at.  If you Google “trending” (Google being another made up word) there is a Wikipedia entry for Twitter in which the word appears.  According to that, the word appeared on Twitter in 2009 when Twitter created a column to show what topics were most popular.

I love learning the origin of words and in these days when words are being made up all the time it is a constant source of amazement when I see a new one.  The question is that as more words become part of our language, are the old words going to go away?  Interesting concept.