A sad day for the English language

I saw the headlines a couple of days ago: "Web 2.0 is the One Millionth Word in English". This is sad on many levels. First of all, "Web 2.0" isn't a word; it is a phrase. The phrase was first coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci in an article titled, "Fragmented Future." It's one of those things that makes a fine catch phrase for an article but it is misleading. It's not like the World Wide Web has really been changed. What has changed is the way it is used. It is more interactive now but it didn't happen all of a sudden. As programmers started to learn to use Ajax and make Web applications more like desktop applications, using the Web became easier and faster. "Web 2.0" is a description of that change in usage. See this Wikipedia article for more information about the phrase.

One of the better articles I read on this comes from the Guardian website. They point out that this cannot be anything but an estimate and that many other real words could be considered before "Web 2.0". The people who made this ridiculous claim, The Global Language Monitor, say that the "word" (my quotes) crossed from technical jargon into widespread usage over the last six months. Ridiculous. If these guys are such word experts, I would hope they would be trying to build up our language instead of trivializing it.