Here's my shot at fame in a grammar rodeo

My word! English may gain millionth entry soon
By ALLAN TURNER/HOUSTON CHRONICLE

You may not find the words defollow, noob and defriend in the dictionary. But they and others like them — springing from far-flung corners of the English-speaking world — will push the mother tongue over the 1 million-word threshold in just a few weeks, Texas word-watcher Paul Payack says.

Payack, chief of the Internet’s Global Language Monitor and author of A Million Words and Counting, thinks the millionth word will join the language at 10:22 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Wednesday, June 10. Payack’s Web site features a clock ticking off the seconds.

A new English word is created every 98 minutes, he contends, hedging his bet by adding that his June 10 date is just an estimate.

A marketer of online research services, Payack says new words are fed to his Austin headquarters from around the globe — one-fourth of the world’s population speaks at least some English — then checked for acceptance. When a word is published at least 25,000 times, it becomes a candidate for the Payack’s new-word list.

Not a linguist
Payack, 59, holds a comparative literature degree from Harvard’s extension school and has no formal training in linguistics or lexicography. Still, he likes to think of himself as a latter-day Noah Webster or Samuel Johnson — master dictionary makers who had little formal training.

“We’re approaching this as poets,” Payack says, “not linguists.”

But harsh words are what linguists and modern-day dictionary makers have for Payack and his million-word threshold.

“He made it all up in his head,” says Robert Beard, a University of Michigan-trained linguist who collaborated with Payack on an Internet dictionary. “He’s a great marketer, but he’s a classics major. He knows nothing about linguistics.”

So if a Texan got to decide there will be 1 million words than I think a Texan should create that word, that Texan being me. I went through a lot of choices but ultimately I landed on muench because of its versitility. It can be a noun, a verb, an adjective and other grammar things I never really learned. For example, I muenched it or dude don't pull a muench. I'm not sure if I can pick it though because I think it means something in yiddish. Probably the same thing. Love ya, Muench!