"grease" out, "w00t" is the word! (plus vote for me & a word to expat bloggers in italy)

24 CommentsFriday • December 14, 2007 • by michelle

Various announcements this Friday, so let’s get to it:

W00t!

Merriam-Webster has recently named its Word of the Year. It’s “w00t” and yes, those are zeros in the middle of it. Yes Virginia, this is a word that’s not even made up of letters.

W00t is defined as “expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word ‘yay.’”

Hey, who knew that “yay” was a word?

Anyway, you can read more about “w00t” and its origins here. As much as I love an evolving language, are we getting a bit too lax on the criteria when words are made of numbers?

I’m kidding (mostly) but what I’m really wondering is how long it is before I hear Italian children shouting this in the piazza:

“Ci vediamo dopo…w00t!”

Eh. I guess it’s still better than all the English-turned-Italian technological terms that have become part of the lingo around here like clickare, downloadare . . . bloggare. Don’t get me started.

Vote!

As you may know, I recently entered this photo in Write From Karen’s Photo Contest 5: Holiday Cheer:

Doesn’t Pap Pap just *scream* Holiday Cheer?!

You can read more about the background of this photo here in my official entry to the contest, but let me just say that for the record, Pap, who has since passed away, put these bows on himself of his own volition. And it was so very out of character that the hilarity was monumentally increased.

You still have time to enter your own photo (until 4 pm Central today) but then just an hour later at 5 pm Central today, I invite you to vote for my photo in the contest–voting lasts through the weekend until 8 pm Central on Monday, December 17, so you have a few days to get to it.

There will be a voting poll here when the precincts open.

Make your voice heard!

Grazie mille in advance!

Enter/Email!

This is a note to my fellow expat bloggers in Italy. If you haven’t already, head over to Valerie’s 2 Baci in a Pinon Tree to see about a contest she’s running just for us.And to those who aren’t expat bloggers in Italy, head on over to Valerie’s anyway for some great reading on her and her husband Bryan‘s move to Ascoli Piceno in Le Marche from New Mexico.

Valerie is trying to compile a blogroll of all of us expats who blog from Italy–a very worthy pursuit–and so she’s asking us to send her an email at:

italybloggersAThotmailDOTcom

with the following info:

Your Name (as well as your blog moniker if you use one)

Your Blog’s Name and URL address

A one-line description of your blog’s focus

Your Location (city and region)

Send the email by December 30 and you can win “[a] brand-spanking new English translation of the quintessential Italian cookbook, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well by Pellegrino Artusi.”

Sounds great to me!

And that’s all for today kids. Busy weekend ahead for many of us, I’m sure, so…

Buon weekend!

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[tags]woot[/tags]