Countdown to the 1,000,000th word

AUSTIN (KXAN) - According to self-styled "word watcher" Paul Payack, while most of Central Texas sleeps, in the middle of the night of June 10, something historic is going to take place.

At 4:22 a.m., give or take a minute or an hour or a day or so, English will become the world's first global language. By that, Payack means, it will gain its 1,000,000th word.

Payack is a consultant who monitors the language through sources and contacts all over the planet for clients who need to know how their marketing campaigns are taking hold. He started monitoring the growth of English several years ago and using mathematical algorithms, he determined a new English word is added to the lexicon every 98 minutes.

Take "Jacuzzi," for example.

"Jacuzzi is an Italian family up in the North Bay in San Francisco that used to make pumps," said Payack. "They were plumbers and somehow they made pumps that went into the bathtub and it made a success and now all of a sudden, it's a name that symbolizes luxury. 'I have a Jacuzzi.'"

Thus another English word was born.

Such births do not come easily, however. Payack said there are rules to the game. Multiple forms of a word, such as run, ran, running, do not count. Neither do most of the gazillion, bazillion names for insects in the world. "Cockroach" does count and so does "bee." That's because they pass the "breadth and depth" test.

Payack does not count a word unless it’ ha been published or cited at least 25,000 times around the world. He's not talking about street slang either. Scholarly works meet the bar as do mentions in network news broadcasts, for example.

"Depth is the quality of citations and breadth has to be that people understand it in China," he said.

Speaking of China, Payack points to "word" he received from his colleagues in the People's Republic about a new term circulating widely there. It's "brokeback" which means "gay" after the film "Brokeback Mountain."

There are other examples: "Obamamania" is as familiar to Germans as it is to Americans. Even Michelle Obama gets a word. Commentators observing the clothes she wears are taking to the word, "Mobama," as in, "That gown is quite Mobamaish."

You might think "Twitter" and "Tweet," would qualify. After all, we never heard of the social-networking site until what, just yesterday or so. But those words were already part of the language, albeit with different meanings.

Plenty of critics dismiss Payack as dreamer, at best, almost a quack, at worst, who is just trying to attract attention to himself and his new book, "A Million Words and Counting." He responds with a heartfelt term, loosely translated as, "baloney!"

"It's amazing how many people care and the reason why they care, and the whole reason that we started the million-word count is really to celebrate the robustness of English as the first global language," he said.

Unlike French, a language that actually has "referees" who ordain what can be considered a French word; English is a "bottom-up" language. The people decide what is and what is not a word, he argues.

Payack insists this is not chauvinism or cultural elitism on the part of the English speaking world. He notes there is no overt campaign to make other citizens of the planet adopt the language. Driven by it's usefulness in business and commerce, "The people of the world are choosing to speak English," he said.

A half century ago, Americans were being encouraged to learn other languages like Chinese, German, even Portuguese, the language of the emerging South American powerhouse country, Brazil.

"Something interesting happened on the way to the funeral of the English language; it just exploded," he said.

That does not mean English speakers no longer shoulder any responsibility for reaching out to the rest of the world. We must respect and nurture other languages, he argues. And in the end, he is certain English will eventually follow in the footsteps of ancient Greek and Latin. It will grow and spread until it fragments and dies.

Meanwhile, however, there is a clock on his Global Language Monitor Web site, counting down to one magic moment, give or take a minute or an hour or a day or so.