Words of the Years

Michael Quinlon’s weekly emailer, World Wide Words, today summarizes the awards by the American Dialect Society last night in San Francisco:

• Most Outrageous: “assoline“, methane used as a fuel.
• Most Euphemistic: “daisy cutter“, a bomb used by US Air Forces in Afghanistan (not new, but definitely a distinguishing word of 2001).
• Most Useful: there was a tie between “facial profiling“, videotaping a crowd to identify criminals and terrorists, and “second-hand speech“, overheard cell-phone conversation.
• Most Creative: “shuicide bomber“, a terrorist with a bomb in his shoe.
• Most Unnecessary: “impeachment nostalgia“, longing for the superficial news of the Clinton era
• Least Likely to Succeed: “Osamaniac“, a woman sexually attracted to Osama bin Laden
• Most Inspirational: “Let’s roll!“, the words of the late Todd Beamer, who mobilised passengers on Flight 93 on 11 September to overcome the terrorists who had hijacked the plane.

Previous awards are viewable here. Previous Most Likely to Succeed were:

2000: muggle (27). Other candidates: m-commerce (14), buying and selling over a cell phone, and WAP (3), Wireless Application Protocol, a specification that enables wireless devices to connect with one another.

1999: dot-com (31) company doing business on the World-Wide Web. Others: portal (9) entry site to the Web, e-tail (7) retail business conducted on the Web, baby Bills (2) companies that Bill Gates’ Microsoft might be broken up into as a result of the government’s antitrust lawsuit.

1998: “e-” 25 votes. Others: “rage” as in “road rage,” etc. (18); “moment” as in “senior moment,” “Kodak moment” (12).

1997: “DVD” (30) Digital Versatile Disk, optical disk technology expected to replace CDs. Others: “handheld” (4) (noun) handheld digital device; “push” (2) automatic delivery of customized Internet content to one’s desktop; “be dilberted” (2) to be mistreated or taken advantage of by one’s boss.

1996: “drive-by” (25) designating brief visits or hospital stays as in “drive-by labor,” “drive-by mastectomy,” “drive-by viewing.” Runner-up “nail” (7) to accomplish perfectly, as an Olympic feat, election victory, or movie role.

1995: “World Wide Web” and its variants.

1994: No Most Likely to Succeed but Most Promising was Infobahn.

1993: Quotative like with a form of the verb be to indicate speech or thought.

1992: snail mail , s-mail, mail that is physically delivered, as opposed to email.

1991: rollerblade , skate with rollers in a single row.

1990: notebook PC , a portable personal computer weighting 4-8 pounds, and rightsizing , adjusting the size of a staff by laying off employees.

Not a bad record, although choosing a word as most likely to succeed because the technology it denotes is likely to succeed strikes me as a bit craven.

Here are the group’s Word of the Year awards:

• 1990: Bushlips (insincere political rhetoric)
• 1991: Mother of All
• 1992: Not!
• 1993: Information Superhighway
• 1994: Cyber, Morph
• 1995: Web, Newt
• 1996: Mom
• 1997: Millennium Bug
• 1998: E-
• 1999: Y2K
• 2000: chad

In 2000, the group widened its scope for its awards:

Word of the Year 1999 was Y2K.
Word of the 1990s Decade was web.
Word of the Twentieth Century was jazz.
Word of the Past Millennium was she.

Yes, she, the feminine pronoun. Before the year 1000, there was no she in English; just heo, which singular females had to share with plurals of all genders because it meant they as well. In the twelfth century, however, she appeared, and she has been with us ever since. She may derive from the Old English feminine demonstrative pronoun seo or sio, or from Viking invasions.

So, before 1000, there was no direct way to differentiate between a reference to a woman and a reference to a group of indeterminate sex? That is very weird.

In response to my challenge to come up with neologisms, Ken Meltsner writes:

I came up with (I believe) “”netstalgia”” — musings on how the Internet used to be.

Joe Murphy writes:

There’s a thread on Plastic.com about this very topic. Do you Plastic?

My favorite so far is:

Neolojism:

A combination of neologism and jism meaning the end result of this particular type of linguistic masturbation.

Oh. My other favorite is:

For Canadians only: A friend of mine refers to our far-right newspaper as the Notional Past.

Yes, Rich Hall’s 1984 Sniglets lives (and was followed by More Sniglets, Sniglets for the Soul, Who Moved My Sniglets and this year’s Gnozo Sniglets). (If you haven’t had enough, you can go to The Atlantic Monthly’s Word Fugitives compiled by Barbara Wallraff.)

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