At work I stumbled upon an interesting book on lexicography that will be coming out later this year by David Crysal called Words, Words, Words. I found this interesting blurb in the sample pages about the 404 Error message:Everyone logged on to the Internet will have encountered this message sooner or later. A ‘four-oh-four’ error. It tells you that your browser has made a faulty request to a server, typically because a page or site no longer exists. But why 404? The expression derives from the ‘file not found’ message sent out as a response to a faultyenquiry by staff at CERN, in Switzerland—the place where theWorld Wide Web was devised. The members of staff worked out of room 404.
Extended uses of the word soon followed, especially in the spoken language of the computer fraternity. As an adjective, applied to humans, it came to mean ‘confused, blank, uncertain’:
You’ve got a 404 look on your face
(or ‘stupid, uninformed, clueless’).
You’ll never get an answer from that 404 headcase
(or ‘unavailable, not around’).
Jane’s 404 (i.e. not at her desk).
And as a verb, it began to mean ‘make no progress’:
I’m 404-ing on that new code.
The error message continues to appear on our screens, so we cannot ignore it. We can therefore expect more uses to emerge, as time goes by. And to see it in dictionaries. (It has already been logged for inclusion by the Oxford English Dictionary.)
