2011 has been a very eventful year, and it’s reflected in Time magazine’s Top 10 buzzwords of the year.
Their number one word is “occupy”, with this summation:
In 2011, occupy became this generation’s sit-in, a word connoting peaceful but uncompromising objections to the status quo.
The other words that made it into their top five are:
2. Winner/winning (in honour of Charlie Sheen)
3. Planking (see photo)
4. Carmageddon (what was supposed to happen when part of one of LA’s highways closed)
5. Super PAC (“super PACs are committees that can spend unlimited amounts of money in elections to support or oppose candidates — as long as they do it independently”)
See the rest of the list over at Time magazine.
The US and UK have agreed on something – the Word of the Year 2011!
So what’s the word? Squeezed middle.
Americans may be unfamiliar with this term, used by the British Labour Party’s leader Ed Miliband. It describes “those seen as bearing the brunt of government tax burdens while having the least with which to relieve it”. The squeezed middle are in between the rich (able to weather financial downturn) and the poor (who are eligible for government assistance).
Other words that made the US shortlist include:
Arab Spring n.: a series of anti-government uprisings in various countries in North Africa and the Middle East, beginning in Tunisia in December 2010. [After Prague Spring, denoting the 1968 reform movement in Czechoslovakia.]
Fracking n.: the forcing open of fissures in subterranean rocks by introducing liquid at high pressure, especially to extract oil or gas. [Shortened < hydraulic fracturing.]
The 99 percent: the bottom 99% of income earners, regarded collectively.
What’s your word of 2011?
(Source: Oxford University Press)
As we stumble to the end of another year, the first of a new decade, it’s time for the annual round of Word of the Year lists.
There are many floating around, but I like this one from the New York Times as the words are organised into handy categories, from the economy to pop culture to the more generic ‘things’.
‘Thing’ being my word of the year every year (it has so many uses), here’s an excerpt from that category:
double rainbow: A phrase from the hugely popular YouTube video by Paul Vasquez, featuring his breathless amazement at the sight of two rainbows at Yosemite National Park. It spawned parodies, television commercials, dance mixes, Auto-Tune versions, parties and Halloween costumes, and is now used to refer — ironically and not — to something amazing.
E.V.: An electric vehicle. While the term has been around for decades, there are now more cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt, which makes it more than an environmentalist’s pipeless dream.
Let’s hope for more awesome/useless new words in 2011!
Politics? Pah! She’s got her own TV show, and now Sarah Palin has something else to add to her resume: Coiner of a word of the year.
Last summer Palin posted a Twitter message including the non-word “refudiate”. Critics were quick to jump on this and ask if perhaps she meant something else. Now the New Oxford American Dictionary has named refudiate their word of the year. Apparently she wasn’t the first to use it however:
From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used “refudiate,” we have concluded that neither “refute” nor “repudiate” seems consistently precise, and that “refudiate” more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of “reject.”
Although Palin is likely to be forever branded with the coinage of “refudiate,” she is by no means the first person to speak or write it—just as Warren G. Harding was not the first to use the word normalcy when he ran his 1920 presidential campaign under the slogan “A return to normalcy.” But Harding was a political celebrity, as Palin is now, and his critics spared no ridicule for his supposedly ignorant mangling of the correct word “normality.” (Source: OUP blog)
Word lovers can perhaps breathe a sigh of relief – although it’s been named word of the year, “refudiate” is not guaranteed to make it in to the dictionary. Yet.
