Originally invented by people who either didn't know there was a verb 'to converse' or found it too formal, conversate became part of US hip-hop slang in the 1990s. Now a favourite of the neo-hipster generation, it sometimes simply means to talk, but with overtones of bonding and sharing. It often specifically refers to interacting with Internet-based conversational media.
These are social networking and open-source websites such as Twitter, Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary, and less well-known many-to-many consumer-creator sites such as FMyLife and Pop Hangover, where so-called indie-lectuals (trend-aware individuals) and online posses (microniche activists or interest groups sharing the same causes or tastes) congregate and — this is the business imperative — can be targeted by marketing specialists such as Conversated.com. Purists, of course, will damn this novelty as another grammatical mangling, along with its contemporaries, Australian verb to auspice, meaning to host and/or fund, and see as a noun, as in the boss's catchphrase, "Your see isn't my see".
Send your buzzwords, jargon and new and exotic usages to tony.thorne@kcl.ac.uk
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