This is the time of year when the linguistically inclined offer their opinions on which “Words Of The Year” best capture the zeitgeist of the year that has been. Some of our favorite nominators of this year’s Word include Geoff Nunberg, Ben Zimmer, and Nancy Friedman. But it’s the American Dialect Society that “officially” — though “just for fun” — anoints the Word Of The Year (WOTY), which they have been doing every year since 1990. So, for a little time travel and historical perspective, here are the WOTYs for each of the past twenty years (via Wikipedia):
- 1990: bushlips (similar to “bullshit” – stemming from President George H. W. Bush’s 1988 “Read my lips: no new taxes” broken promise)
- 1991: The mother of all (as in Saddam Hussein’s foretold “Mother of all battles”)
- 1992: Not! (meaning “just kidding”)
- 1993: information superhighway
- 1994: cyber, morph (to change form)
- 1995: Web and (to) newt (to act aggressively as a newcomer)
- 1996: mom (as in “soccer mom”)
- 1997: millennium bug
- 1998: e- (as in “e-mail”)
- 1999: Y2K
- 2000: chad (from the 2000 Presidential Election controversy in Florida)
- 2001: 9-11
- 2002: weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)
- 2003: metrosexual
- 2004: red state, blue state, purple state (from the 2004 presidential election)
- 2005: truthiness, popularized on The Colbert Report
- 2006: plutoed (demoted or devalued, as happened to the former planet Pluto)
- 2007: subprime (an adjective used to describe a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage, or investment)
- 2008: bailout (a rescue by government of a failing corporation)
- 2009: tweet (a short message sent via the Twitter service)
- 2010: app
Some of these past WOTYs have clearly plutoed since Y2K and prior, but others, such as 9-11 and red state / blue state, are likely to be with us for a long time. And some — see subprime and bailout — we will be all to happy to forget and consign to history’s dustbucket.
My vote for the 2011 WOTY, which the ADS will pick at their annual January meeting in Portland, Oregon, agrees with those of Nunberg and many others: Occupy. You can still nominate your favorites for consideration on the ADS page, What’s Your Word of the Year?.
UPDATE January 6, 2012: The 2011 Word of the Year is Occupy.