WORD(s) of the Year

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WORDmeister’s NOTE: Call the TSA! Someone needs to do something about security at St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose. After a 6.5 earthquake struck near the care facility in far-northern California yesterday, the WORD snuck out disguised as canned goods that had tumbled from shelves across the region, as attendants—who had been debating the new pick for Word of the Year—ran in circles screaming, “Tweet!” and “Dracula Sneeze!” and “Onomatopoeia!” So we’re back again to trouble a deeply disturbed world. Happy new year, everyone!

New Year, New WORDs

“We’re living in a time of wildfire word creation, with no gatekeeper for slang and no way to settle on a term that will please everybody, says Jack Lynch, author of The Lexicographer's Dilemma. Purists have always lamented the erosion of ‘proper’ language, but it’s a lexicographer’s duty to describe the flux, not prescribe a paradigm.... ‘Language has been going to hell since forever,’ Lynch says. ‘Let’s not worry about English. It’s been doing fine for 1,500 years and it's going to outlive us all.’”

—Story on the “Word of 2009” and the “Words of the Decade”
by Dan Zak, The Washington Post, Jan. 9, 2010

Editor’s Note: “Anyone for ‘sexting’?”
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