Word To Use Today: children's word of the year.

Children's word of the year?

What's that all about, then?

Well, according to the Oxford University Press's analysis of the 500 Words Short Story Competition, the children's word of the year is hashtag (that's the # sign. It's used to group Tweets). 

Lots of the children writing short stories for the competition used the hashtag sign as an ironic comment on the action.

This is the example that's been published to illustrate its use:

the cave exploded and she didn't look back at it exploding, she just kept on walking forward#super cool.

Commentators have remarked on how inventive and creative children are, and it's true: children are both inventive and creative - though probably not in this case. This use of the hashtag symbol has been around for ages #solastyear, and has been used by all sorts of attention-seeking idiots #justsohip.

Does the hashtag sign have a place in serious literature? I expect so, briefly, though I should imagine it'll have been abandoned by...ooh, at a guess, 2017.

So perhaps we should seize our chance use it while you can.

Word To Use Today: hashtag. The # sign was called a pound sign in the USA, but in Britain, which already had a computer key with a pound sign on it (£) it became known as a hash. When it began to be used to tag Internet Relay Chat channels it became a hashtag. Chris Messina suggested its use for Twitter in 2007.