Inside the Search for 2012's Word of the Year
Dictionary.com has announced blusteras its 2012 Word of the Year. As far as words of the year go, this is an OK if not too terribly innovative one (sorry, guys), combining patterns weather (Sandy) with patterns political (an election year)."'We liked the the double meaning of weather and communication,' Jay Schwartz, Dictionary.com's Head of Content, told The Huffington Post on the telephone from the company's headquarters in Oakland, CA."
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We'll acknowledge that there was a time in early November when bluster was happening both weather and politics-wise. But right now, we don't feel very blustery. Can it really be word of the year, then? Thankfully, it's not your only Next Top Word option for 2012. Just last week, Oxford Dictionaries,the OED's hip-ish online arm, dubbed GIF its word of the year for America and omnishambles as the British word of the year. America (and the UK, and Castle) sort of freaked outreally, GIF? What is this, 1994?But truly,none of these words are really working for me as Words of the Year:GIF,regardless of the part-of-speech clarification made later by Oxfordthey meant it as a verb, not a nounseems very nearly past tense; omnishambles, while a great word, is decidedly British, and bluster, while perhaps we were weathering it in November, is not really a verb most people use at all. When we speak of words of the year, they should reflect our times, not just a weather pattern, no?
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Merriam-Webster does the Word of the Year a little differently, as a measure of vocabulary curiosity. Editor at Large Peter Sokolowski told us, "We're currently looking at the raw data from the year's worth of lookups at the online dictionaryover a billion pageviewsto get a picture of what the culture was thinking about according to what words sent them to the dictionary. Sometimes these words are from specific events or utterances, but the most looked-up words usually do reflect the zeitgeist (think of bailout in 2008 and austerity in 2010). We will look for words that have shown spikes of interest over the past year or years, and announce our results in early December."
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Elsewhere on the Internet, the American Dialect Society is accepting nominations for Words of the Year (#woty). Linguist-about-the-InternetBen Zimmeris chair of the New Words Committee for ADS, and as such, has "something of a vested interest in the wholeWord of the Yearbusiness," he told The Atlantic Wire, giving us a brief history of the program, which he calls "the granddaddy of all the WOTYS." It started back in 1990, when "it was the only game in town," a way to generate publicity for the organization. He says, "Some selections have made more of a splash than others: the 2005 choice ofthe Colbert-ismtruthinessgot a little out of hand. For dictionary programs that have joined the WOTY bandwagon, it's also clearly a public-relations opportunity, one of the few surefire ways for a dictionary publisher to get some media attention. I was part of that marketing machine when I served as editor for American dictionaries for Oxford University Press and was responsible for the 2007 choice oflocavore. (ANew York Times piecethat year went with the meta angle, reporting not so much on the word itself but on my efforts in publicizing the selection of it.)" A list of Zimmer's 2011 WOTY favorites ishere.
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Having a word of the year, though, is about more than just publicity. "Sometimes, as in the case oflocavore, a WOTY nod can draw attention to an interesting new lexical formation that might be on the cusp of hitting mainstream acceptance. Even when a WOTY choice is not a brand-new creation, it can say something meaningful about developing trends in our language and culture. Sometimes, it's an old word used in novel ways, such as last year's ADS choice,occupy, which had been transmuted into an all-purpose verb, noun, and combining form by the Occupy movement," Zimmer says. Sometimes the nuances of parts of speech shifting (see GIF) are lost on the mediabut that doesn't mean such semantic aspects are any less fascinating to people in the business of words. As Sokolowski told us, "I think the various 'words of the year' are all valuable. Most of them are chosen to represent the spirit of the times and how English is evolving as a reflection of that spirit. They give us perspective on language change. Language changes just fast enough that we notice, which is why many usages that seem new are precisely those that annoy us. But once the change is absorbed, there is no longer much controversy (think of verbs like finalize, contact, or accessall were highly criticized when they first became commonly used). Year's end is a good moment to take stock."
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Inside the Search for 2012's Word of the Year