Twenty years ago this week the British inventor Tim Berners-Lee created the world's first webpage. It is worth pausing to consider the extraordinaryimpact that his invention has had on the English language.

Everyday words like google, unfriend and app simply didn't exist in 1990.

Even more words have had unexpected shifts in meaning in those two decades. If you had mentioned tweeting to an English-speaker a few years ago, he would have assumed you were talking about bird noises, not the use of the microblogging site Twitter.

Long ago, if someone lived online, it didn't mean they spent every waking minute on the internet, but that they travelled around with the rail network.

And wireless still means, to anyone of a certain age, a radio - not the system for retrieving internet pages without wires.

"The internet is an amazingmedium for languages," said David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor. "Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."

English is a remarkablyinclusive language, and if words continue to be used for at least five years they generally end up in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But less accepted are the peculiardialects that have sprung upamongst some users. For example, 'LOLcat' is a phonetic, grammatically-incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, like "I'm in ur bed zleeping".

In an article called "Cats Can Has Grammar" the blogger Anil Dash referred to LOLcat as "kittypidgin". But does something like LOLcat have the staying power to become an accepted form of English?

Not according to Professor Crystal. "They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. Will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."

• extraordinary [ik´strɔ:dinəri]   a.非常的；额外的   (初中英语单词)
• invention [in´venʃən]   n.创造；发明；虚构   (初中英语单词)
• system [´sistəm]   n.系统，体系，制度   (初中英语单词)
• amazing [ə´meiziŋ]   a.惊人的；惊奇的   (初中英语单词)
• medium [´mi:diəm]   n.中间；平均 a.中等的   (初中英语单词)
• crystal [´kristəl]   n.水晶 a.水晶的   (初中英语单词)
• peculiar [pi´kju:liə]   a.特有的；奇异的   (初中英语单词)
• inventor [in´ventə]   n.发明者   (高中英语单词)
• unexpected [ʌniks´pektid]   a.突然的；意外的   (高中英语单词)
• linguistics [liŋ´gwistiks]   n.语言学   (高中英语单词)
• oxford [´ɔksfəd]   n.牛津   (高中英语单词)
• sprung [sprʌŋ]   spring的过去分词   (高中英语单词)
• amongst [ə´mʌŋst]   prep.其中之一 =among   (高中英语单词)
• remarkably [ri´mɑ:kəbli]   ad.非凡地；显著地   (英语四级单词)
• impact [´impækt]   n.影响，作用；冲击   (英语六级单词)