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As the selection of the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year approached, a certain air of inevitability had begun to surround occupy, the word revitalized by the Occupy protest movement. And sure enough, when the assembled throngs met in Portland, Oregon, where the ADS held its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, occupy emerged victorious as the Word of 2011.
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Greetings from Portland, Oregon, where the American Dialect Society is having its annual conference. As chair of the New Words Committee, I had the honor of presiding over the nominating session for the Word of the Year. On Friday evening, winners will be selected from the different categories, and then nominations will be made for the overall category of Word of the Year. What do you think the category winners should be, and what should be crowned the Word of 2011?
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In day-to-day discourse, we don't usually encounter terms that are genuinely problematic. If someone throws something at us that's clearly wrong, like calvary for cavalry, we still get it. If my dialect is "She took a cake to the party," whereas yours is "She brought a cake to the party," I'll still understand you.
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On his Sesquiotica blog, writer, editor, and designer James Harbeck has a regular feature that he calls "Word Tasting Notes." "Words are delicious and intoxicating," Harbeck writes. "So why not taste them like a fine wine?" Here, he delves into the history of a word we frequently hear (or mishear) during the holiday season: hark.
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Death has been in the news lately, with the passing of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and former Czech president Vaclav Havel within hours of each other. Despite the very different legacies of the two world leaders, most English-language news outlets used the same wording to describe their deaths: in obituaries, both Kim and Havel simply died. But English, like many other world languages, has a rich vocabulary of terms for dying, from the blunt to the euphemistic.
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