Each year, the American Dialect Society, which is a board of linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, historians, grammarians and other qualified individuals, publishes a list of “Word of the Year” nominations. It can be quite entertaining and it’s generally a good reflection of contemporary American culture. As expected, the trend for the last few years is that the nominations have been increasingly tech-related, especially with regard to social networking. However, at the end of 2009 it was time to decide on the word of the decade.

Here is the list of nominees, who can guess the winner?

9/11

blog

google

green

text

war on terror

And the winner is…

Google. I’m not surprised. The official definition is “verb: to use an internet search engine, particularly Google.com,” and I have to say I completely agree with the choice.

At the beginning of the decade I was 11 years old. I remember on my home P.C. I had just downloaded Napster and started to burn CD’s. In those days I spent a lot of time tying up my family’s phone line while downloading Metallica songs at 56 kb/s (ironically, or maybe not, it was Metallica’s drummer who filed the lawsuit to shut Napster down). Then, I would use AskJeeves to search for the lyrics. By the way, if you remember the old AskJeeves, you should check out the new 3-D version of the namesake mascot – they do still exist. Anyways, Google was not far behind Old Jeevesy, and within a couple years it was the default homepage on my school’s computers. It’s permeated my life in ways I never would have imagined. Aside from being the starting point for dozens of research papers and providing thousands of hours of internet-browsing fun, it’s become what I refer to as the modern day Oracle in the Temple of Apollo that is the World Wide Web. I’ve been saying for years that my biggest regret from high school is asking for money as a graduation gift when I should have just asked for Google stock shares HINT: they’ve gone up… a lot. Maybe I wouldn’t have applied for a Bridge card last week if I had thought of this at the time.

So there you have it, Google wins and continues wiping decent companies and lexicons into obsoleteness.

Perhaps more entertaining is the “Word of the Year” nominations. It’s an extensive list with mostly humorous categories, despite the otherwise solemn nature of the American Dialect Society.

Here are a few of my favorite categories and their winners:

MOST UNNECESSARY: sea kittens- fish (according to PETA)

MOST EUPHEMISTIC: hike the Appalachian Trail- South Carolina Governor Mark Sandford’s term for his romantic visits to Argentina with illicit lover.

MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED: twenty-ten- a pronunciation of the year 2010, as opposed to saying “two-thousand ten” or “two thousand and ten.”

LEAST LIKELY TO SUCCEED: Any name of the decade 2000-2009, such as Naughties, Aughties, Oughties, etc.

But the winner of “Word of the Year”? Tweet. “Noun, a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message.”

Twitter is something I refused to get on board with, as I originally did with facebook. But kind of like the childhood urge to stare at the sun, I proceeded to burn my retinas and get further sucked into the black hole of social networking media. Don’t get me wrong, social networking is great for keeping in touch with people you otherwise wouldn’t be in contact with, or for promoting businesses, it’s just that it’s also great for wasting time indoors staring at a screen. I am amazed at the rapid growth Twitter experienced in the last year, and, like “google” for the decade, “tweet” seems to be an appropriate winner for the year. I barely knew what Twitter was (some type of distilled facebook?) and then all of a sudden every business, whether it was a restaurant or a television channel or a shoe company, was urging me to “follow” them. For me, Twitter has simply become a source of comic relief throughout the day, as most of the people I follow are my favorite comedians – if you haven’t searched for yours, I highly recommend it. Being really funny in 160 characters is not easy. Hey, kind of like advertising!

But back to their question of what to call the last decade… When forced to think of what I’ve titled it, I realized I must have always sidestepped any type of moniker. “The Aughts” is the technical term, but it sounds so unpleasant. It can’t roll off the tongue like “Sixties” or “Seventies,” and I can’t imagine seeing VH1’s “I Love the Aughts.” Actually, after consulting the oracle, I realized VH1 also sidestepped and simply used “I Love the New Millenium.”

What about next year? What will it even be called, two-thousand eleven? Two thousand and eleven? Twenty-eleven? I think it’d be cool to truncate it to a number of its own, one I call “Twentyleven.” It flows perfectly, the long “e” sound of the last part of “twenty” forming the beginnings of “eleven.” Can I patent that?

Anyway, I’d like to hear some nominations for 2010 word of the year so far, and maybe you could provide a definition if it’s obscure. I’d bet that something to do with Twilight Vampires (which I know nothing about) will be on there, or universal healthcare, or maybe something with the BP oil spill ­– What do you think?

*You can download the press release PDF for the American Dialect Society Word of the Year and Decade, plus nominations, here.

Tags: American Dialect Society, Google, Twitter, Word of the Decade, Word of the Year

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.