For the last year or so, teenagers and hipsters across the United States started calling cool things "book." Some picked it up from their friends, while others coined it themselves.

The chance of this all happening spontaneously is insane. Instead, the uptake of this new term was driven by cell phones, just as other terms were introduced through forms of technology.

Coining new meanings of words isn't easy and historically, few have been successful. Shakespeare introduced dozens upon dozens of popular phrases in his plays, while Lewis Carroll is known for his words.

Take, for example, the word "chortle." Coined by Carroll in "Through the Looking Glass," it mixes a chuckle and a snort to fill a gap in the English language.

Once instant messaging came along, abbreviations like "lol" and "brb" followed, signifying "laugh out loud" and "be right back," respectively. For a medium where speed is essential, using the fewest letters possible became a significant advantage.

Then came cell phones, which usually have nine keys. One solution for text messages was to have someone repeatedly push a number to choose later letters on that key.

For example, "C" is the third letter on the "2" key, so we'd have to type the "2" button three times to get "C" to show up. In practice, this makes text messaging painful.

So, as a solution, a company called Tegic Communications introduced what's known as "T9" technology. Using this method, you just type each letter key once, and the cell phone consults a dictionary to find out the possible words that you could have meant, choosing the most common one to display on the screen.

For example, "cool" would be entered as 2-6-6-5. However, on most phones, "cool" isn't what comes up first on the screen. Instead, the phone suggests "book," a more common word using the same number entry.

This easily is corrected by pushing the down arrow to select a different possible word for that number entry, but in the heat of texting, such mistakes can be missed. So, a few errant text messages later, "book" started to be associated with "cool."

This example is innocent, but choosing words can have dramatic consequences. Politics, because of its legalistic roots, often spins around the use or misuse of a specific word.

Everyone loves citing the case of Bill Clinton arguing over the definition of "is," but liberals and conservatives alike have used language to their advantage. Conservative commentators make "liberal" a dirty term, so the Democratic party emphasizes their "progressive" nature. Likewise, "compassionate conservatism" flourished in 2000 due to the vilification of plain-old conservatism.

On a larger scale, "genocide" is a loaded term the government rarely uses. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, fully adopted by the United States in 1988, commits us to preventing and punishing all acts of genocide, whether in war or peacetime.

Some organizations (the United Nations among them) hesitate to call the situation in Darfur a genocide, using instead terms like "civil war" and "regional killings." Those aren't fightin' words.

The language you use can change the world, just as the world changes the language you use. It may be silly in some instances, but others can affect whether millions live or die. Be sure to celebrate the silly instances and keep on being book.

Greg Brown is a junior in philosophy. Please send your comments to opinion@spub.ksu.edu