Oh Hey There

words of the year, words of the decade

Sent a few nominations to the American Dialect Society’s word of the year and word of the decade poll.

For 2009 words, I chose birther, tea party and beer summit on the grounds that a person sent in time from 2008 might not comprehend a sentence like “birthers held signs at the tea-party protest”. One might say “beer summit, how dated!” which is the point of these things: WOTY for 2005 was truthiness, 2006 plutoed (nowadays we’d probably say plutowned), 2007 subprime, and 2008 bailout.

For decade words, I chose the adjective meta which is very zeitgeisty (and diagnostic) for the “hip young people online” subculture to which we all deny being a part of. I also picked meme because I was thinking about meta and then I remembered that Xzibit “yo dawg” meme which is meme about things being meta (how “meta”). No real chance in hell for these tetragrams (at least against blog), but I wanted linguists, lexicographers and philologists of all stripes to think about them.

I still have to come up with more interesting words to send in, so I’m opening this up to answers and I’ll send in whatever submissions I get. For the record, tweet and tw- appeared on the 2008 list.

What words can you think of?

Posted December 2, 2009 at 7:54pm in language linguistics | Comments || home