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A new word to describe Internet smut: 'webcest.'

Date published: 9/1/2005

About a month ago, the fundamentals of the English language were forcibly shaken by the introduction of a brand-new word.

The word is "webcest"; its definition: "anything kind of deviant and/or disgusting that people do because of the Internet."

That's a pretty clear-cut definition for the word; however, many more questions lie beneath the surface, and for answers, I went right to the source: Jeffrey Rowland.

Now-three-time Headroom interviewee Rowland is the creator/author/artist of the popular Web comics Wigu and Overcompensating, and it was in the Aug. 2 Overcompensating comic strip in which Rowland unleashed "webcest" upon an unsuspecting Internet.

We can be sure that Rowland created this word because before putting it into the comic, he searched Google for it and found nothing.

If something doesn't come up on Google, than you can be sure it does not exist. Now a search for "webcest" yields some 400-plus results.

In an online interview, Rowland described webcest in further detail.

"Webcest is, but is not limited to, unusual sexual behavior facilitated by the Internet, via instant messaging, forums, newsgroups, chatrooms--any place where otherwise ordinary people can let their freak flags fly as high as they wanna. And they do. And it gets messy sometimes."

While webcest would seem inherently bad, Rowland describes it this way: "I never said webcest was bad, but it is something that possibly hurts people in the long run. It kind of desensitized people. There used to be a time when you could say 'Well, now I've seen everything,' and it actually meant you had literally seen everything.

"Nowadays, the Internet will hear you say that, and in a voice that sounds like James Earl Jones using a vocoder will say, 'No. No you haven't. In fact, you haven't seen anything.'"

When looking at the Internet in this sense, it would seem that webcest is a term that we as a society are in dire need of, though there are those out there who would rather see how far webcest goes before making it official.

So far the most defiant protestor against the widespread use and relevance of webcest is the world-renowned online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

For a short while, webcest was an entry on Wiki, but it was quickly taken down by the higher-ups, who claimed that webcest was not yet relevant enough in our culture to warrant its own entry.

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Date published: 9/1/2005