It’s funny, but I’ve been noticing a phenomenon in pitches/decks of interesting companies I’ve been seeing recently and I’m calling it Underlined Word Syndrome.
The idea is simple: good technology startups will naturally use words at the core of their model that get underlined in Word (or other editors) for being misspelled.
Let me make a very clear distinction. These companies are not the new rush of startups jumping on the bandwagon of attempting to create their own, company-specific lexicon. <Rant> I’ve been seeing more and more seemingly endless variations of new hybrid words that are being morphed out of old ones. One example I’ve recently encountered are variations of the word “entrepreneur.” I’ve seen mompreneur, studenpreneur, boompreneur, etc. To me, those are not examples of innovation. Perhaps the underlying business models or concepts of the business are innovative, but the act of creating a new hybrid word is simply a twist of an old word, and as a corollary to businesses – those rarely become the Next Big Thing. I’m sure someone can easily offer Twitter as the pinnacle counter-argument, and I’d have to agree. I’m just saying, it’s not my cup of tea.<End Rant>
No, I’m speaking of words that have become part of the collective, day-to-day diction of millions of people, but words that have not been included in common dictionary filters yet.
Without getting into a long linguistics discussion on the origin of words and the constant evolution of language, I do want to take a moment to say that I’m fascinated by this phenomenon. The propagation of new words has always occurred, and is usually spurred by advancements in technology. Obviously the words “television” and “automobile” were created at the time of invention, in the same way that “e-mail” ( shortened from “electronic mail”) and “internet” were just a few years ago.
However it is interesting to note that it seems the pace at which new words are being introduced into our language and culture is accelerating – which strongly correlates to the pace at which technology and innovation is increasing. At Dace, one of our core investment philosophies, and one of the ways we look at the world – is the belief that subsequent “waves” of innovation are not just increasing in size and scope (~20M AOL subscribers in 1999 vs. ~400M users on Facebook currently), but are also accelerating (it took Netscape 5 years from 1994 – 1999 to get to ~50M users, versus Apple reached 86M iPhone/iTouch users in 11 quarters – roughly half that time – ten years later).
So what’s my point? Why am I mentioning linguistics and technological innovation?
Because they are inexorably linked. In a rough/tangential manner, you can look at the number of words that are underlined if you copy/pasted a recent tech article into a Word document as an approximate barometer of the pace of technological innovation.
For example, the following words are all underlined in red right now:
Netbooks, wifi, realtime, weblinks, googled, touchscreen, widgetize, refollow, seo, checkin, texters, etail, etailer, autocompletion, spidered, geoaware, geolocation, friending, commenters.
Those are all words I just saw underlined by copying/pasting articles from TechCrunch and Mashable in the last 120 seconds. They are also all words that most people in the tech field wouldn’t blink an eye at. Hell, most 10 year-olds know what a netbook is.
And it pains me that there is a glaring red underline staring at me from under “netbooks” in my last sentence.
The observation becomes even more apparent if you take a moment to think about all the words that are not picked up by the filter…words that have taken on drastically different connotations which we as a culture not only understand, but identify and associate primarily with the new meaning. In effect, that creates a new word from an old one. The most obvious example? “Tweet.”
Clearly this phenomenon is not a science. There will never be an O’Shaughnessy’s Underlined Word Theorem. Yet the point remains: next time you are reading or writing a startup pitch deck… if you see a lot of red, you just might be in good shape.
