I'm Monumentous in Canada

Well, monumentous-ish. Reporter Misty Harris of the Canwest News Service quotes me in her article about the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year competition:

Sharing that finger-on-the-pulse quality is "staycation" (a vacation that doesn't involve travel), which has been nominated as the ADS's Word of the Year by professional wordsmith Nancy Friedman. She also likes "monumentous," which was broadly deployed in reference to the Obama phenomenon.

"It seemed to be used by people who had no idea they were making up a word," says Friedman, founder of Wordworking.com. "It was like there were no words in the dictionary adequate to describe what was going on."

The article was published yesterday in the Calgary Herald and its sister publications in Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Saskatoon, and Nanaimo. (Do they observe NaNoWriMo in Nanaimo? I certainly hope so.)

Read more about staycation and monumentous.