Word Routes
Exploring the pathways of our lexicon
"Tweet" Named Word of the Year, "Google" Word of the Decade
After much good-natured debate at its annual meeting in Baltimore, the American Dialect Society has made its selections for Word of the Year and Word of the Decade. As proof that we're truly living in a digital age, the winner of Word of the Year for 2009 was tweet ("to post an update on Twitter") and the Word of the Decade for 2000-09 was google (the generic verb meaning "to use Google or another search engine").
On Thursday evening, ADS members gathered for a nominating session for the various subcategories of Word of the Year, as well as for the overall Word of the Year and Word of the Decade. After another day of fascinating paper presentations on American languages and dialects, we reconvened on Friday evening for the big WOTY-fest. As usual, it was a standing-room-only affair in the meeting room for the vote, with ADS members joined by attendees at the concurrent meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, as well as interested members of the public (including a friend of the Visual Thesaurus, longtime Baltimore Sun copy editing chief John E. McIntyre, who blogged about the experience here).
The first category voted on was Most Useful, and I'm happy to say that my nominee fail (used as a noun or interjection) emerged victorious, beating out the suffix -er (as in birther and deather), the prefix un- (as in unfollow or unfriend), and Sarah Palin's favorite word, rogue. (As the kids say, fail for the win!)
We then moved on to Most Creative, and the winner by a big margin was Dracula sneeze, defined as "covering one's mouth with the crook of one's elbow when sneezing, seen as similar to popular portrayals of the vampire Dracula, in which he hides the lower half of his face with a cape." Other nominees like botax (the proposed tax on cosmetic surgery) and bragabond (a person who travels a lot and brags about it a lot) didn't stand a chance.
As predicted in this space, hiking the Appalachian trail (Gov. Sanford's notorious alibi) was the runaway winner in the Most Euphemistic category. That was a nominee championed by our own Evasive Maneuvers columnist Mark Peters, who also nominated last year's winner in the category (scooping technician). Even though he wasn't able to attend and had me submit nominations on his behalf, Mark scored an impressive twofer. Another of his nominees for Most Euphemistic got moved over to the Most Unnecessary category and finished on top: sea kittens, the new name for fish dreamed up by PETA.
In the Most Outrageous category, Sarah Palin's memorable turn of phrase death panel won the day. And for Most Likely to Succeed, the winner was twenty-ten as a pronunciation of the year 2010, as opposed to saying two thousand (and) ten. It was suggested that this was really a vote for twenty- as a prefix for the names of years all the way until 2099. In the category of Least Likely to Succeed, the winning selection was also of the calendrical variety: Naughties, Aughties, and all the other failed names for the decade that just finished.
Finally it was time for the main events. First up, Word of the Year. A nomination came from the floor for tweet, the verb of the Twitterati. Soon there was a groundswell of support for the word, and it ended up triumphing over the previously nominated words, including fail (sniff), H1N1, public option, and the -er suffix. Then it was on to Word of the Decade, and the verb google took the crown, beating out blog, 9/11, green, the war on terror, and other nominees.
Reactions to the vote are already coming in. On the American Dialect Society mailing list, John Baker pointed out that both tweet and google are proprietary names. Google is obviously a trademark of the powers-that-be at the Googleplex (who are no doubt unhappy about the dilution of the brand name by having it treated as a generic verb). But tweet is also a service mark owned by Twitter, filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on April 16, 2009 and pending registration.
The vote is getting a fair amount of press attention too. There's an early report in the Washington Post that captures some of the convivial spirit at the WOTY vote. The online version is accompanied by a short video with ADS members talking about their favorite words of the year — you'll see me in there, lobbying for fail.
Join the conversation:
Post a comment at the bottom
As for the word "fail" is one of the words I dislike most.
Is it not strange to read that “The first category voted on was Most Useful, and I'm happy to say that my nominee fail (used as a noun or interjection) emerged victorious”?
Would the word “fail” been most useful, then one might have thought that the nomination of the word “fail” would have failed (for the sake of showing its usefulness for once and its truthfulness to itself and to its meaning). However, the nomination succeeded! The nomination was victorious!
And the word “victorious”, its antonym, was not even nominated!
My curiosity goes as far as to ask: what kind of reasoning lead to the nomination of this particular word, the word “fail”?
As for my support for fail in its innovative forms (as interjection, noun, and even adjective), there's some justification in my column, "'Fail' for the Win!" (and the New York Times Magazine column that it followed up on).
To answer Karen D., I found some websites showing that people are interested in this matter (BEAUTIFUL SOUNDING WORDS and WORDS TO INSPIRE BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS), as a survey was conducted (a British survey, which spanned 46 countries), with the result that the top ten most beautiful words in the English language were found to be: Mother, Passion, Smile, Love, Eternity, Fantastic, Destiny, Freedom, Liberty, Tranquillity:
http://languagestyle.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_english_languages_most_beautiful_words
For nice sounding words in different languages:
http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=122397
Alphadictionary is another site concerned with the beauty of words:
http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/100_most_beautiful_words.html
Why such words are useful? Well, in my view, and I dare think that’s not only mine, such words have the role not only of beautifying our speech, but also of directing our thoughts. And such words are most likely to be found in great books and not in “the Age of Trash Triumphant”, to use an expression I found on the very interesting site below:
http://www.nationalgreatbooks.com/crisis/minority.asp
Not being familiar with the very words used in these great books, inevitably leads to the avoidance of these great books with the result of having what we have these days, indeed aptly coined, Trash Triumphant.
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Aest/AestRoef.htm “the verbal medium, the linguistic sign to the extent it correlates the signifier and the signified, i.e. sensuous presentation and meaning, corresponds most closely to the parity between sensuous embodiment and meaning which is the very characteristic of the aesthetic experience.”
Another interesting survey:
http://www.msstate.edu/web/media/detail.php?id=3491
So, should not language, too, provide us with an aesthetic experience?
I cannot see why the American Dialect Society would not be willing to consider introducing the categories I’m talking about when it seems that so many people show their interest for them already.
For those of us who do not have a teen ager living with us, we are at a loss
If in the category "most useful," it simply does not meet the definition as if not familiar to a large part of the population, it cannot be most useful. My opinion!
Tish
And Tish, I have no teenager living with me, but the words are still useful. Teens aren't the only ones who use them...
Karen, I think that I have already answered to your question, when I gave (above) examples of websites talking about the beauty of words in both senses. Certainly some words might be beautiful because of their sounds and because of their meaning at the same time. Also, though, some words might have beautiful sounds, depending on their association with other words, they will have their beauty decreased or increased, or have the capability of enhancing the words they are associated with. We might take as an example “murmuring” and associate it with different words and see what happens in both senses:
“murmuring mills”, “murmuring murlins” , “murmuring murkiness”, “murmuring murals”, “murmuring moribund”, “murmuring murth”, “murmuring motility”. Could we say that one association is better than any other in both senses (sounds and meaning)? What would be your answer?
Karen, of course, at least in my view, one way of finding out that we like a word strictly because of the way it sounds, would be to listen to the words of a language we do not know, as the words would have no meaning for us. This idea came to me as I did a similar test, only it is not related to sounds, but to vision.
I have tested myself in relation to Chinese characters, a language I do not know. I picked up characters that seemed to me beautiful and then I looked for their meaning (I still have no idea how they sound). Below are three characters I’ve picked up as I found them very beautiful, and after finding their meaning (which you can see below) I have wondered (as the meanings do not seem to me negative in any way) whether we are born wired, so to speak, to express and recognize (at least visually, in my case, related to this test of mine with myself) something beautiful or at least positive (I could have picked characters I dislike most, but as an adept of positive psychology, I did not).
? {Verb} be in, deal with, dwell, handle, live, manage, position: be in a position of, reside, sentence, stay
{Noun} bureau, department, location, office, part, place, point, respect, spot
? {Verb} alter, change, correct, rectify, revise, right: put right, switch over, transform
? {AUX} measure word for sentences
{Noun} sentence
Needless to say that I would have loved to have been not the only participant in my Chinese characters test. Though I have studied psychology (and not only), as no one is willing to employ me as a psychologist, I can only hope that some employed psychologist might be willing to take my test further. I have also devised a test (as a student of psychology) related to the sounds of words (something of interest here), stating that one’s profession would influence the way one would hear a word (verbal transformation effect and phonemic restoration effect). The words were:
Shin- The front part of the leg below the knee and above the ankle.
and
Shim - A thin, often tapered piece of material, such as wood, stone, or metal, used to fill gaps, make something level, or adjust something to fit properly.
and the professions were medical doctor and architect (where I was saying that an architect would most likely hear shim when the word shin is uttered, and a medical doctor would most likely hear shin when the word shim is uttered). And though the tutor thought that such a test proposal would be a splendid research idea I should take further and develop during a PhD, the head of the subject failed me because the report had 3000 words instead of 1500 words, and no one dared to read beyond the word number 1500! (That’s another test I would love an employed psychologist to take further). And speaking of “fail”, I failed for understanding and knowing more, rather than less, and especially for having a thinking mind! I was living in “The Age of Trash Triumphant”, though I did not know it at the time. I had the realization after, when I saw that constantly those who were ignorant (in the real sense of the word) were promoted and those who were competent (in the real sense of the word) were discarded. That’s how the history is written (if you see the mark I had for the subject you’d think that I’m an idiot!). Shall we change the subject now and talk about history (of words, of course!)?
Certainly, from time to time we would try again to initiate a new dialogue with the hope of finding people with a similar mental makeup in order to share and exchange ideas (I might learn from Plato, disagree or agree with Plato, but Plato will not answer back to me, disagreeing or agreeing with a new thought I might have) and when such a thing happens we feel very much invigorated, as nothing is more enjoyable, at least in my view, than continuously enriching one’s mental life in as many ways as possible.
http://www.margotjack.webs.com/
under Psychology
The reality of things is this: so many people are simply not endowed with the ability to engage in what I find as "interesting" conversations. They are often too busy judging your own stupidity of things they have no knowledge!
I clicked on the website you posted as I was hoping to read some medical papers. But the website http://rdpmd.com/ is the address of Blogger Home, where I was asked to sign in to access my own account. So I suppose you left something out when you typed it. Consequently I could not visit your site.
Re. my site; you have to select the blog title, "Cognitive Matrix"