Bullycide

I want my blog to be filled with happy and positive neologisms but today I'll write about the term bullycide. The purpose is not only linguistical but also to try to raise awareness among people.

Bullycide is a compound of words bullying and suicide. I'm sure there are other explanations about what bullycide is as well, but the way I see it, bullycide is when a person commits suicide because he or she is being bullied. This is happenning a lot nowadays. But maybe we know about it because we receive so much more information from the media now in the digital age.

Bullycide happens mostly among teenagers, either because they are bullied in school or on social networks, like Facebook and Ask.fm. I'm sure that the most known bullycide is the death of Amanda Todd. She was being bullied on Facebook by some stranger, who was never found. She lost her friends in school, she had to move several times in order to escape from her torturer, but nothing helped. He/she always found her, she couldn't hide anywhere. Because of that she couldn't find any new friends. She was alone. Depression kicked in. She attempted to commit suicide several times before. On 16th October 2012, she was found dead.

There are a lot of victims of bullying, maybe even among your friends. 

If you know a victim of bullying, please don't look away. Try to help her/him yourself or get some help. You may not know it now, but you can save a life. 

Source: http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/141/1/3/bullycide_victims_wallpaper_by_midnightwolf18-d3gwcks.jpg

Flop-flip

I came across a great article on Daily Edge, describing eleven newly-invented words which are appropriate to use in everyday situations. I will write about the one I relate to the most.

Flop-flip. It should be 'flip-flop' but that's the point. Flop-flip 'happens' when you confuse some stuff. For example, when you eat bread and cheese and you put the cheese on a cupboard and bread in the fridge. I have to say this happens to me a lot, usually when my mind is somewhere else or when I'm deep in thoughts.

Or sometimes I need a spoon to eat yogurt but instead I take a glass. I think this is also included in the category of flop-flips. :)

Captcha

Today I'm going to write about the acronym captcha. Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Touring test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It sounds so familiar but you don't remember what captcha is? Well, this will certainly freshen up your memory.

Everytime you want to register on a forum or some other website they want you to rewrite certain letters or numbers that appear in a small box. This is called captcha. It's a test that checks if you're a human or a computer. Sometimes captcha is so unreadable that I, for example have to rewrite it up to five times in order to successfully register on a forum. This is because computer programs have advanced so much that they can easily read captcha.

So the purpose of captcha is anti-spam but it also affects us users because the symbols are getting more and more unreadable.

Source: http://andrej.mernik.eu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/captcha_primer.jpg

Neknominate

Neknominate is a drinking game that is very popular these days here in Slovenia. It goes like this; the participant of the game has to film himself drinking the entire glass of beer in one gulp. He then nominates three other people to do the same in 24 hours. If they don't do it, they owe him a crate of beer.

Videos are uploaded to Facebook, so your news feed is probably full of that stuff right now. I know mine is. :( I read somewhere that the game originates from Australia (surprisingly not from America) and that a few people actually died because of it.

I personally don't like this game because it has no sense to me. I don't see any purpose in it and there's not a single positive outcome from it.

You would think that only teenagers participate in this game but that's simply not the case here. Supposedly intelligent human beings in their mid-twenties and thirties also participate in Neknominations.

Source: http://ruralleaderonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/neknominate-2.jpg

Geobragging

I seriously do not know a single person who doesn't post about their whereabouts every now and then via Foursquare and shares it on other social networks, like Facebook. Hey, we all do it! ;)
I deliberately mentioned Foursquare because it all started with this popular app but is now also widely spread on Facebook, Instagram and other social network apps. Basically in every app you can post a status update with your location.

So, let's say you're at this fancy place and want to show off by letting everyone know your location and how cool you are by just being there. And if you're eating a delicious looking chocolate cake on top of all that, why not post a picture with your location as well? But that's already another neologism, called 'food porn'. I'll write about it in one of my future posts. :)

If we stick with Foursquare, as said before you can post your location with a picture. We call that check-in. The more posts you have of the same location, higher are your ranks and you can become mayor of that place.

People who do that all the time are usually called geobraggers. But as mentioned before we all do it, some more, some less frequently. You know you do, so just admit it. :)      

Geobraggers of the world, unite! :)

Source: http://genevieveyates.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/007.jpg

Felfie

If we stick to the ending -fie, there is also another version of the word selfie with a slightly different meaning that goes with a different photo. A felfie is a farm selfie, a picture usually taken by farmers when they snap a photo of themselves with a certain farm animal or with agricultural machinery. These photos are also uploaded on social media networks and reposted by "felfie fans".

Again, all this is connected with hashtag (#), meaning that a person can add a hashtag #felfie when posting the photo to social networks.

Below you can see an example photo of a felfie, so you have an idea how does one look like.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/201401/r1225068_16093820.jpg

Selfie

A selfie is very popular nowadays, mostly by teenagers. It's a picture that one takes of himself with a phone. You can easily see that it is a selfie because usually a person's arm is also seen in the photo.
Selfies are uploaded on social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

The word selfie is also included in the online version of Oxford English Dictionary and was the word of the year in 2013.

Source: http://blog.laptopmag.com/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Selfie1.jpg