"What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

- "Luke" the inmate played by Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke

Web 2.0, as of course you know, refers to the second generation of web development centered on users communicating and sharing information through sites like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Flickr.

And of course you also know all about Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Flickr?

You don't? Neither do I. Yet Web 2.0, tightly intertwined with the universe of social networking, was named last week the millionth word or phrase in the English language by the Global Language Monitor, a U.S. Internet company that tracks how words are used, the media just reported.

If we're going to celebrate its arrival, we better know what it means.

But whatever happened to getting by on: Morning honey. I love you. See you tonight. Decaf, black. Tuna on rye. Thanks. The boss is a dope. Damn the traffic. Hi honey I'm home. Pass the macaroni. Do your homework. Letterman, not Leno. Good night.

Language is, at once, so diverse, so specialized, so personalized, so trendy, murky and quirky these days that we each are at risk of exclusion from what much of the rest of the human race is discussing at any given moment.

Web 2.0. Who knew?

How do we get through our days effectively, faced as we are with the vast variety of dialects, speech patterns, vocabularies, slang, regionalized terminologies and tech talk peppering the universe?

A sweet ice cream glop of a drink is a frappe in New England and a cabinet in Rhode Island, a milk shake elsewhere.

Idioms ("it's raining cats and dogs") are a mystery to the visiting Chinese lecturer, who ducks her head in horror and does not "grin ear to ear."

The eye doctor solemnly pronounces that our "visual acuity has been affected by myopia." We wonder: Is it fatal?

Semantics, jargon, vernacular, acronyms, tags, marketing, industry lingo. When and why ever did a small coffee become a tall coffee? "Too posh to push" Urban Dictionary says, refers to celebs who opt for Caesarean over vaginal birth. "Flee-Mail" is e-mail justifying a work absence ("gotta go to the dentist."). A "DLS" is a dirty little secret.

Grandma loved Cole Porter's Gay Paree about the naughty heterosexual city of the 1890s in Can-Can. Today, Paris parlays the term to attract gay and lesbian tourists.

Definitions change, co-opted by who knows who, and we're left wondering if anything is sacrosanct, if we'll ever keep up with all the changes.

Everyone's heard of NASDAQ and mega pixels but not a soul knows what they are.

You've got garage junk, but the gal with "junk in her trunk" has a big butt.

You glaze windows, but when a worker glazes, he's "sleeping at the desk."

Your SOS is a soap pad; your teen means, uh-oh "Sibling Over Shoulder."

Your family tiff is a fight. Digital buffs mean Tagged Image File Format.

It's enough to make some of us feel - just when we should be out partying at the arrival of Web 2.0 as the one-millionth phrase in the language - oh so "yesterday."

BETSY SHEA-TAYLOR, a former editor and writer for The Sun Chronicle, is a freelance writer. She can be reached at prosewing@aol.com.