by MERRILL PERLMAN
Word of the Year lists
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Time for all the familiar clichés, misused or mispunctuated tho’ they may be, and time for the meaningless “XXX of the Year” lists.
But who are we to sniff at such treasured traditions? For people who deal with words, the “Words of the Year” lists can be interesting, if specious.
As we said at the beginning of 2012, the picks for WOTY are frequently so fleeting that many “do not survive much beyond the year in which they were singled out.” In 2011, for example, dictionary.com, which picks a WOTY because it “captures the character” of the year, “regardless of its popularity or ubiquity,” chose “tergiversate,” which means, effectively, to flip-flop. It has not yet caught on in popular usage. This year’s dictionary.com selection was “privacy,” which at least is a word most people know, even if they and their government don’t agree on what it means.
For the first time, dictionary.com also picked the “misspelling of the year”: “furlough,” which was misspelled “furlow,” “furlo,” and “ferlow” by people looking it up on the site. (It’s hard to believe, as the site says, that no one looking up “sequester” or “sequestration” misspelled those.)
Before the lists were released, one safe bet seemed to be “twerk” (rhymes with “jerk”). But Oxford, which publishes dictionaries throughout the English-speaking diaspora and requires that its WOTY “demonstrate some kind of prominence over the preceding year or so,” chose “selfie.” “Twerk” was on its shortlist, as were “bedroom tax” (from a UK plan to penalize households “that were receiving housing benefit and that were judged to have bedrooms surplus to their requirements”) and “olinguito” (a mammal discovered in South America), among others.
Columbia Journalism Review for more