Friday, February 03, 2006
The American Dialectic Society
The American Dialectic Society announced its word of the year last month: "truthiness," made famous by the great Stephen Colbert. As well as choosing a grand prize, they hand out awards in a variety of other categories. (This year they have an award for being the best tom-cruise-related word.) If you go here you can see the whole list in PDF format. Highlights include ‘podcast’, and ‘crotchfruit’; neither of which are in my spellchecker... yet. If you scroll down a little further, past the general info and protocols and such and suches, you’ll find a list of previous winners covering the past sixteen years. Interestingly, they started handing awards out at just about the same time I was expanding my vocabulary beyond my Dick and Jane reader.
In 1990, ‘PC’, or ‘politically correct’ was most outrageous. Apparently ‘bungee jumping’ was new to the scene, and ‘notebook PC’ was granted, quite rightfully, the honour of most likely to succeed. I wonder whatever happened to ‘bushlips’—defined as “incinsere political rhetoric.” Seems like it’s about time that one came back into style. I can still remember my mom, curiously commenting on a ‘rollerblade’ phenomenon circa 1992; about that time, ‘gender feminism’ was quite unnecessary. I beg to differ. ‘Soccer mom’ broke onto the scene in 1996 at the height of the minivan era. I wonder what happened to 1994’s most promising word, ‘Infobahn’. The ‘World Wide Web’ (grand prize 1995) and its synonyms get honours under a variety of categories throughout the nineties. When’s the last time you heard someone talk about the ‘information superhighway’ (grand prize 1993)? ‘Web’ actually takes the cake for the decade. I hope they got it right when they declared “Blog” the most likely succeeds in 2002; they must have been slightly off their game in 2000 when they bestowed the same honour to ‘muggle’. I didn’t realize there were enough wizards around to make that one relevant. The new millennium has been marred by politics and war, as indicated by a shift away from the optomistic tech words of yore, to grand prize words like ‘chad’ (2000), ‘9/11’ (2001), ‘WMD’ (2002), and ‘blue/red/purple states’ (2004). ‘Daisy cutter’ (2001), ‘regime change’ (2002) and ‘pre-emptive self-defence’ (2003) have all been awarded most euphemistic. Nestled between them, ‘Meterosexual’ (Grand prize 2003) seems out of place.
In 1990, ‘PC’, or ‘politically correct’ was most outrageous. Apparently ‘bungee jumping’ was new to the scene, and ‘notebook PC’ was granted, quite rightfully, the honour of most likely to succeed. I wonder whatever happened to ‘bushlips’—defined as “incinsere political rhetoric.” Seems like it’s about time that one came back into style. I can still remember my mom, curiously commenting on a ‘rollerblade’ phenomenon circa 1992; about that time, ‘gender feminism’ was quite unnecessary. I beg to differ. ‘Soccer mom’ broke onto the scene in 1996 at the height of the minivan era. I wonder what happened to 1994’s most promising word, ‘Infobahn’. The ‘World Wide Web’ (grand prize 1995) and its synonyms get honours under a variety of categories throughout the nineties. When’s the last time you heard someone talk about the ‘information superhighway’ (grand prize 1993)? ‘Web’ actually takes the cake for the decade. I hope they got it right when they declared “Blog” the most likely succeeds in 2002; they must have been slightly off their game in 2000 when they bestowed the same honour to ‘muggle’. I didn’t realize there were enough wizards around to make that one relevant. The new millennium has been marred by politics and war, as indicated by a shift away from the optomistic tech words of yore, to grand prize words like ‘chad’ (2000), ‘9/11’ (2001), ‘WMD’ (2002), and ‘blue/red/purple states’ (2004). ‘Daisy cutter’ (2001), ‘regime change’ (2002) and ‘pre-emptive self-defence’ (2003) have all been awarded most euphemistic. Nestled between them, ‘Meterosexual’ (Grand prize 2003) seems out of place.
// posted by Nicholas @ 12:55 PM 
