The American Dialect Society released the results of their “Word of the Year” vote on Friday. From the site:

“(The) Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just wordsbut phrases. The words or phrases do not have to be brand new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year, in the manner of Time magazine’s Person of the Year.”

And the winner is:

to pluto/be plutoed: to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened
to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International
Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet.

The full press release is available on the site, which includes the complete list of nominations for categories such as Most Useful, Most Creative, Most Unnecessary and Most Outrageous. It’s definitely worth a read, as it is a hilarious display of tongue-in-cheek informal lexicography. For example:

• sudden jihad syndrome: an outburst of violence from a seemingly stable and normal Muslim.
• Fox lips: lips colored and lined with makeup to seem more prominent, said of female anchors on Fox News.
• Cambodian accessory: Angelina Jolie’s adopted child who is Cambodian.

Wouldn’t it be great to be on the voting panel?

I find it fascinating when words from popular culture transcend everyday speech and are officially canonized onto the pages of a reference manual – the most memorable example being “Google” in recent years (I’ll follow the Oxford English Dictionary-acceptable capitalized version).

To my surprise, I read about the reverse today – an academic institution in the U.S. that releases an annual list of words and phrases they wish to ban from the English language. Since 1976, a committee based out of Lake Superior State University sorts through thousands of nominations every year and whittles it down to a handful of words that they believe should disappear from the lexicon all together.

My “favorites”: combined celebrity names (TomKat be gone!), “pwn” (which, until today, I did not know had its genesis in World of Warcraft, though I should have guessed), and “went missing” (from the article: “‘It makes ‘missing’ sound like a place you can visit, such as the Poconos. Is the person missing, or not?’ asked Robin Dennis of Texas.” Too true). I was, however, surprised to see Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” on the list – perhaps the academics veer to the right?

Full article here.