Word of the Day: Segway
I would suppose that most people know that a Segway is a battery-powered, personal vehicle. However, have you ever heard the word used with a different meaning?
Unofficially, the word Segway can be used when someone wants to change the direction of a conversation.
Quite often, during a conversation, a person will go off on a tangent. Sometimes it just seems to happen naturally, and no one knows when the conversation topic changed.
At other times a person can signal that they are going to change the topic by saying, “Let’s segway into this topic now.”
This type of usage is, of course, informal.
One formal way to change the topic of a conversation or discussion is to use the word segue.
Segue means to transition smoothly from one piece of music or topic to another.
The English language is in constant flux. People are always adopting new words and changing the meanings of old ones. As new words enter, the language older ones are abandoned.
As an English language learner, you should always try to keep this in mind. The language you learned twenty years ago is not the same as the language you hear today.
So that was a little bit of urban slang for you today. Take care and keep your stick on the ice.