As we’re charging our glasses this New Year’s Eve, and mulling over an extraordinary year – a year of civil war and uncivil strife, of natural disasters and unnatural acts of violence – we should spare a thought for the good men and women of the American Dialect Society, whose mission it is to select just one word from the multitudinous melting pot of English that will stand as a monument to this turbulent twelve months. Inaugurated in 1991, the ADS’s Word of the Year has been dominated in recent times by coinages of a technological nature. In 2010, ‘App’ took the honours, while in 2009 the laurels fell to ‘Tweet’. Nominations for the Word of the Decade showed a similarly hi-tech bias. ‘Blog’ and ‘Wi-Fi’ both made the shortlist, while the winner, ‘Google’ (the verb, not the noun), looks perfectly at home next to its predecessor, ‘Web’. [More here.]Read Stephen Romei's comments on this essay, and other comments, at Ragged Claws, here.
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