"Nanobot" has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. You can find it here under out-of-sequence new entries, lodged between nadger and off book.
I heard the news via Minnesota Public Radio. If you have a RealMedia player, you can listen here, although the reporter sadly skips over the nanobot entry. But she does comment: "The words we use tell us a lot about what's going on in our society. They're like a reflection of our culture at that point in time."
And that is the truth, especially when it comes to "nanobot" -- that vague, almost anthropomorphic, incarnation of our greatest hopes for modern technology ... and our most ghastly nightmares.
Backgrounder
NanoBot's discard pile
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