Mary Sullivan of Way to Grow emailed to tell me about the latest buzzword in media: WiwWiwWiw. It stands for "What I Want, When I Want, Where I Want," and it's pronounced "wee wee wee" (in French: "oui oui oui")--as Susan Willet Bird tells it, just like the punchline in "This Little Piggy Went to Market." Shelly Palmer, who blogs about "media 3.0," used the term to explain the pressures that led to the Today Show's decision to add a fourth hour of programming.
WiwWiwWiw is by no means to be confused with Nintendo's Wii.
This reminds me of a phenomenon I think needs a name. I have seen in more than one e-mail or briefing the use of "Wallah", a Hindu/Sanskrit term referring to a successful person in a given business (as in, "Placek's a naming and branding wallah"), in a context where it made no sense.
Then I tried it phonetically, and realized it was people meaning to use the French voila, meaning "there it is". I don't use Microsoft products, but I would suspect that this is due to a suggestion made by some MS spell-checker when someone has typed "walla" or a variation thereof, trying to demonstrate a certain je ne se quoi when revealing some amazing branding idea.
Is there a word yet for an automated spelling correction suggestion that becomes a new spelling?
Posted by: Mark Gunnion | September 27, 2007 at 10:48 AM
Mark, it's not quite the same thing, but at Language Log they've mentioned the "Cupertino effect" a few times—it's named after a spell-checker's unfortunate fix for some misspellings of "cooperation."
Posted by: Jeff | October 02, 2007 at 01:12 PM