I stumbled across a wonderful article by Judith Belkin in the April 23rd issue of the New York Times, entitled “Coming to Terms With a Wired Age, Part 2.” Ms. Belkin has collected, with help from a number of clever, witty readers, a list of new buzzwords and acronyms to describe the quirky behavior we’re beginning to see more and more often in today’s wired (and wireless) world — the collection of which is called “blang,” for “web language.”

I’m tempted to list all of the buzzwords here, but I’ll control myself and give you just one: “Schoogle — A popular pastime, consisting of Googling the names of old classmates.”

Oh, heck, why not one more? “Stripped — The opposite of wired, when your computer tells you that there are wireless networks all around, but not one is accessible without a password, or when your computer tells you it has a signal, but won’t connect for reasons it refuses to share.”

But that’s it. You’ll have to surf over to her article on the New York Times web site for the rest of them. While you’re at it, take a look at the first part of her commentary on blang: it’s entitled “Overly Wired? There’s a Word for It,” published in the April 9th issue of the paper.

By the way, you should also be aware that “blang” is the name of a British record label, as well as a slang term meaning such things as: cheap bling; one’s bling that has been pawned and resold; cheap, tacky, ersatz or plastic immitation bling; especially referring to wannabe trendies; or, as a verb, to make a telephone call (”hold on a second, I’m getting blanged”). And if that’s not enough to satisfy you, then know this: the Blang are, according to Wikipedia’s pronouncement right here, one of 56 ethnic groups in the People’s Republic of China. Don’t you feel so much better knowing all these details?

Here’s another random, possibly unrelated thought: I’ve always been intrigued by the statement (the source for which, sadly, I can’t remember) that 10% of the words in Shakespeare’s plays were words that he invented — i.e., words that were not part of the English language at the time he wrote them. (Perhaps this random thought came back to me after reading an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, entitled “The Modern Elizabethan,” in which Lorrie Moore reminded me that Shakespeare was born 442 years ago, today).

Not being a particularly apt student of history, I don’t know whether the world was a sufficiently chaotic place in Shakespeare’s time that so many new words would naturally pop up, to help describe phenomena that had not previously existed — but that does seem to be what’s going on today. Even a few years ago, we didn’t have people sitting in Central Park, trying to figure out how to piggyback onto someone else’s Wi-Fi network with their laptop computer. We didn’t have people behaving in quite such bizarre ways with their Blackberry (or “crackberry,” depending on your frame of mind) devices. We didn’t have … well, you get the idea. But now, we do have all these things, and we need new words to help us express them.

Hence the justification for blang.