At the end of each year, a lot of word-nerdy organizations make a set of announcements that most people don’t even notice: They look back at the year’s writings, uterrances and online dictionary hits, and they choose the annual Words of the Year.
One such word-voting organization is the American Dialect Society, which selects winning terms and phrases in a number of categories – including most useful, most creative and most likely to succeed.
For 2010, the ADS chose “app” as its overall winner – that cute, short form of “application,” as in, “No, I’m not addicted to my iPhone; I’m just downloading another app.” ADS’s chair of its New Words Committee explained in a press release that, while “app” has been around for ages, the phrase “There’s an app for that!” made the word “newly prominent” in 2010.
As it turns out, it took a run-off vote at the ADS session to determine that “app” should beat out “nom.” That term, as you may know, can be an eating-related verb, as in “I’m hungry, let’s go nom,” or a deliciousness-related interjection, such as “That looks scrumptious! Nom!”
Little “nom” still took home a tasty award, though: It was voted most useful overall.
Other ADS winners included “gate rape” as the most outrageous – that’s a randy description of the latest TSA enhanced-pat-down techniques – and “refudiate” as the most unnecessary – that’s a mix of “refute” and “repudiate” that Twitter typist Sarah Palin let slip.
The new Palin coinage made an even bigger splash with the folks at The New Oxford American Dictionary, who picked “refudiate” as their solitary Word of the Year. It beat competitors such as “vuvuzela” (that not-to-be-forgotten, non-musical instrument from World-Cup-in-South-Africa fame), “gleek” (a fan of the TV show “Glee,” who’s likely to be a geek) and “retweet” (the echoing of a tweet on Twitter, which is how Palin’s “refudiate” was made famous in the first place).
The folks at Merriam-Webster get in on the notable-annual-words act, too – but they take a group-behavior, rather than expert-voter, approach: Since 2003 the company has publicized its Web site visitors’ top 10 look-ups and called them the Words of the Year. For 2010, “austerity” took the top spot with more than 250,000 hits. Others included "pragmatic," "moratorium," "doppelganger" and "ebullient."
The Merriam-Webster winners are interesting not only because they show current usage in the popular press; they also prove that, for all the advisories to dumb down one’s writing and all the complaints that looking up terms is an onerous task, there are still writers who aren’t afraid of the occasionally big word, and readers who aren’t afraid to check it out.
Altogether, Word of the Year announcements tend to be more amusing than deeply informative: What do we do with the knowledge, for example, that top linguists consider “spillionaire” (a person made rich through oil cleanup funds) and “prehab” (preemptive rehab enrollment to stave off a relapse) to be highly creative; or that “skyaking” (jumping out of a plane in a kayak) is unlikely to succeed?
We laugh – and we remind ourselves that English is a living, changing thing.
And if any crusty old language-biddies attempt to claim otherwise, we note that they’re simply refudiating the truth.
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