Thanks to Chatroulette, the ridiculously popular website that pairs random strangers around the world for webcam conversations, we have a new verb in English: to next. Two language-related blogs explain what it means.
On his blog Wishydig, Michael Covarrubias examines the phenomenon of nexting:
From the Chatroulette anonymous video-chat craze are born all varieties of rules and strategies that soon become recognizable when wasting 15 minutes (or 2 hours) on the site.
And of course some new words. My favorite: next v.
What do you do when you see something or someone on your screen that you know you don't want to keep seeing? You next them. There's a handy little 'button' at the top of the screen that shuts them off and gives the chamber another spin. It's a lot of power.
I had been thinking that "to next" simply meant to hit that little button at any point in the conversation. According to this amusing and informative video, to next is more specific than that: it's clicking the button immediately on seeing the other person. He even provides his own little definition card for the word.
1. to be rejected, denied, cold dissed
2. when a random stranger clicks the next button immediately after seeing what you look like.
(Read the rest here.)
Meanwhile, on her Fritinancy blog, branding expert and Visual Thesaurus contributor Nancy Friedman provides further enlightenment:
Julia Ioffe profiles Chatroulette's founder, a Russian 18-year-old high-school dropout named Andrey Ternovsky, in a May 17, 2010, New Yorker article, "Roulette Russian." Here's how she explains Chatroulette and "to next":
The idea is simple. When you log on to Chatroulette.com, you see a sparse white window with two boxes. One box shows your own image, courtesy of your Webcam; the other is for the face of what the site calls, somewhat ambiguously, a "partner." When Partner appears, you can stay and talk using your voice or your keyboard, or you can click "Next," which whips you on to someone new. The point is to introduce you to people you'd never otherwise meet and will never see again—the dancing Korean girls, the leopard-printed Catman, the naked man in Gdansk.
More than a million people, most of them from the United States, clog Chatroulette's servers daily. To "next" someone has become a common transitive verb. Catman is an Internet celebrity, as is Merton the improvising pianist. Brooklyn bars throw Chatroulette parties, an indie band has used the site to début an album, and the Texas attorney general has warned parents to keep their children far, far away.
To next was not invented by Chatroulette users; its usage goes back at least to 2004, if Urban Dictionary's contributors are to be trusted. Here's a poignant January 25, 2004, definition for next.
(Read the rest here. And as a bonus, Nancy explains how Chatroulette got its name here.)
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Comments from our users:
I wonder how many such pop-influenced words and uses have the staying power to stretch through generations, like "man, cool, groove..." I suspect that, like most trends, such faddish words and phrases are ejected like candies from a Pez dispenser, and savored until they quickly disappear.
As I do this right now, I find many that have already been activated into verbs - to bowl, cup, tape, bottle, plate, picture, frame - but the fun starts when I hit upon words that are still trapped in nominal stasis, eg door and cupboard, and try to imagine what gap they could fill as verbs: to door someone or something? To cupboard an object or person?
What is amazing is that, given the need and the opportunity, we would recruit these nouns into the verbal ranks without hesitation. (I haven't checked, so 'door' and 'cupboard' may in fact already exist as verbs.)
I would love to know if this fluidity is peculiar to English or common in other languages.
(My apologies to President Obama admirers.)
1. to shun someone; to set something temporarily aside
2. to throw something, eg a newspaper, onto a porch
And I like your linking porching with dooring, Kris. So 'to door':
1. to permanently exclude someone; to discard something (especially a domestic item)
We say to 'floor' someone, but not to 'ceiling' them. But it would be a useful word, as in 'I'm handing in my notice, because my boss has definitely ceilinged me.' This would be easy to understand because of 'glass ceiling' which has probably been used as a verb by now.
I'd like to write an article about this for Literary Magic E-Magazine (I'm senior editor). Where can I read Clark & Clark's article, Ben?
Great idea! Great word!
Is that term only used in New York City?
I did door myself once. I had parked my car half on the pavement (sidewalk), so it was listing quite steeply. It was one of those boxy Volvo estate cars, and the door weighed a ton. When I returned to the car and opened the door, I didn't have a sufficiently tight grasp of the handle. The door swung at me and knocked me to the ground - I was well and truly doored.
I've never heard of "to porch" though.
One day Jeff woke up and felt totally porched by all his friends. They had been windowing him for weeks and he couldn't stop them. He knew that eventually the worst would happen...he would be doored by all for what they knew of him.
Is this game keeping you awake at night?!
By the way, we must be allowed to modify the noun, by adding a verbal suffix such as '-ize' (UK '-ise') or '-ate', as in to lionise or to decorate. So we could have coined eg 'to doorize' or 'to porchate' (probably stressing the 2nd syllable), though these lose some of their power to shock, compared with 'to door' and 'to porch'. But it's more subtle, maybe.
"next" button. Turned out McGee had fiddled with his computer, but not before Tony made a complete fool of himself.
I also "next" or mute a certain commercial in which he says how HUGE his car deals are.