In theory, given enough time, a roomful of monkeys pounding randomly away at keyboards will eventually produce Hamlet. Of course it’s more likely that in significantly less time those same monkeys will discover Amazon, order William Shakespeare: The Complete Works and render the whole experiment pointless. Besides, from what I can tell, the monkeys have better work to do, namely coming up with for verbs to describe the process of social bookmarking.

Once upon a time, it was simple. You went to sites like Technorati, and del.icio.us and bookmarked – or maybe tagged – a site. Then someone realized that the average web surfer’s attention span was limited to one (maybe two) syllables and Digg was born. Pretty soon people were digging in the present and had dugg or digged in the past.

It really got interesting however when other sites such as StumbleUpon and Sphinn entered the fray. Soon we were stumbling and sphinning along with digging. But what really makes it exciting linguistically is when we do all three (and more) at once. This is where the typing monkeys come in.

Below are a few of the new terms for social bookmarking I’ve come across recently. I’m withholding the names of the monkeys to protect the innocent.

  • diggeddumblagged
  • diggity diggitied
  • dsphugnugn
  • dspugnmbled
  • duggedited
  • duggitted
  • duggumbled
  • dumbled
  • dunn
  • dunn sphunn
  • shuggumbled
  • sit and sphinned
  • Sphinnmblicious
  • sphinndled
  • sphoosted
  • sphugged
  • sphuggumbled
  • sphuked
  • sphumbled
  • sphunngg

There’s plenty more out there so feel free to contribute your favorites to the list (monkeys are standing by). In the mean time, I’ve got a call into the Oxford English Dictionary.

Oh, and if someone could sphagnumbelunx this post for me, I’d appreciate it.

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