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As the new year begins, weâre reeling from an overload of retrospective lists: top news stories; persons of the year; scandals of the year (and their subsets: financial scandals of the year, celebrity scandals of the year, etc.); viral videos of the year, ad nauseam. (Yes, thatâs how itâs spelled, no matter how many times youâve seen it as âad nauseum.â)
One list that has surged in recent years is âwords of the year.â (âSurgeâ was a finalist for the American Dialect Societyâs 2006 âword of the year.â) Of course, thereâs not just one list. Every dictionary, linguist, or word society seems to have its ownâat least each one attached to a public relations agency or Twitter account.
This year, for example, The New Oxford American Dictionary, which looks at words in use, chose âunfriendâ as its âword of the year.â Among its runners-up were âhashtagâ (the symbol # used to âtagâ a subject or continuing conversation on Twitter), âdeath panel,â and âsexting,â sending suggestive texts or pictures via cellphone. Merriam-Webster, which rates words by how much they were looked up in its online dictionaries, lists âadmonishâ as its âword of the year,â followed by âemaciated,â âempathy,â and âfurlough.âWebsterâs New World, which also picks based on usage, chose âdistracted driving.â Among the runners-up were âcloud computing,â ânetbook,â and âwrap rage,â anger at being unable to open a plastic or cardboard package.
The lists can be faddish. Remember âovershareâ? Didnât think so. That was WNWâs 2008 word of the year, and it means âsharing too much informationâ (also known as âTMIâ). Its finalists were âleisure sickness,â âcyberchondriac,â âselective ignorance,â and âyouthanasia.â Go ahead. Use them in a sentence.
But then thereâs âlocavore.â That was NOADâs word of 2008, and itâs now in many dictionaries. And âblog,â which the ADS named as the 2002 word âmost likely to succeed.â It certainly did. Other ADS âword of the yearâ candidates for 2002 included âAmber alert,â âregime change,â âgoogleâ as a verb, and the winner, âweapons of mass destruction,â all of which are now widely used and (mostly) accepted. (The selection of the 2009 ADS âwords of the yearâ is Jan. 8.)
Many of these words are manufactured, in the sense that someone, somewhere, just came up with somethingâwhat, for example, prompted the invention of a âyouthanasia,â a word to describe having way too many cosmetic alterations? Others are ârepurposedâ words, the way the trademark noun âGoogleâ became a verb. (Though Google officially bans using its trademark as a verb, its lawyers are less quick to admonish than those of, say, Xerox.) Others are conflations, words created by mushing other words together and sometimes abbreviating them, as in âblogâ (short for âWeb log.â). Still others are alternate spellings of existing words, as in âphishing,â voted by the ADS as 2004âs word âmost likely to succeed.â
The point is not to praise or condemn, but to help illuminate how fickle language is. The problem, of course, is knowing when a word or phrase has caught on enough for use in general-interest publications. Thatâs a much trickier proposition than merely listing what others have determined to be âwords of the year.â If you know who is in your audience, youâll know what words they use regularly or understand, and which ones have been âplutoed.â*
*âPlutoedâ was the ADS âword of the yearâ for 2006, and means âdemoted or devalued,â the way Pluto was when it lost its planetary status. Yeah, that one caught on.
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