Fritinancy

Words of the Year/Decade: Final Edition

At its annual meeting in Baltimore last Friday, the American Dialect Society selected tweet (noun and verb) as its 2009 word of the year and google (verb) as its word of the decade 2000-2009.

Grant Barrett, chair of the society's New Words Committee, had this to say about the winners:

Both words are, in the end, products of the Information Age, where every person has the ability to satisfy curiosity and to broadcast to a select following, both via the Internet.

In a first for the society, whose vote is the longest-running anywhere and the only one not tied to a commercial interest, both of the winning names are also proprietary terms with trademark protection. Lower-case google ("to search the Internet") is a genericization of the corporate name Google. And Twitter, Inc., filed for trademark protection of Tweet in April 2009. (I wrote about it here.)

A bit of background from ADS about criteria for selection:

Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just words but 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.

Tweet beat out the suffix -er (as in birther, deather, and teabagger); fail (noun or interjection); H1N1 (the swine flu virus); public option (a controversial element of the health-insurance debate); and Dracula sneeze (covering one's mouth with the crook of one's elbow while sneezing, and resembling Count Dracula while so doing). The count had his revenge, however: Dracula sneeze was voted Most Creative Word of the Year. And fail won as Most Useful.

Other category winners:

• Most Outrageous: Death panel.

• Most Euphemistic: Hike the Appalachian Trail.

• Most Likely to Succeed: Twenty-ten (as opposed to "two thousand and ten").

• Least Likely to Succeed: Any nickname for the decade 2000-2009.

More information about the vote appears on the ADS website. Baltimorean John McIntyre, who blogs at You Don't Say, attended the voting session and filed a report. Also read Ben Zimmer's summary at Visual Thesaurus (and don't miss the video embedded at the end—a word nerd's delight).

In a separate session at the Baltimore meeting, the American Name Society selected Salish Sea as its name of the year. I haven't yet found an online press release, but an email from the society's Cleve Evans provided this background for the selection:

This name, created by marine biologist Bart Webber in 1988, was officially adopted as the collective name for the interior ocean waters of British Columbia and Washington state. The Salish Sea stretches from Olympia, WA to Desolation Sound in BC and includes Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Strait of Georgia. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names approved the name on November 12, 2009, after it had previously been accepted by the Geographic Names board of Canada.  Webber wanted a single name for this entire body of water because forms a connected marine ecosystem.  “Salish” was chosen because most of the Native American nations who lived in the area spoke languages that were part of the Coast Salish family.

Salish Sea was also voted Place Name of the Year.

Other ANS names of the year, from the Evans email:

• Twitter was chosen as Trade Name of the Year. Although Twitter was launched in 2006, this was the year it was taken seriously as a global phenomenon. It played a major part in the protests in Iran after the disputed June election. "Twitter" was the year's fastest-rising Google search, and it made Google’s global list (at #4) for the first time ever.*

• Max was voted Fictional Name of the Year because of the child hero of the classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and the 2009 film based on it. The fact that many young parents were read the book as a child helps account for Max, Maxwell, and similar names being popular baby names today.

• Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III was voted Personal Name of the Year. The name of the pilot who safely landed an airliner on the Hudson River last January illustrates how a name some might find odd and even nerdish can gain a heroic image from current events.

• ANS members also voted to created a special Miscellaneous Name of the Year for H1N1, the name of the influenza virus that caused worldwide concern in 2009. The replacement of the term “swine flu” by this scientific clinical term was an unusual example of government pronouncements successfully changing a popular public term.

Read my report on the 2008 Name of the Year vote, which I attended.

Read my posts on Words of the Year 2009, Words of the Decade, Brands of the Year, and Brands of the Decade.

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* Twitter was my own submission for trade name of the year, and the citation above appears to be identical to my nominating statement.

Goodbye to All That

I'mma let you finish 2009, but not without a few parting links:

The 15 Most Stupid Products of the Decade, including Vista, the UroClub, and—talk about the Walk of Shame!—Crocs. (Hat tip: Irene Nelson.)

Laurel Sutton of Catchword Branding selects the ten best and worst Internet company brands of the decade. Best feature of the list: the categories (The Letter-Dropper, The Misspeller, etc.).

Lake Superior State University, in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, presents its 2010 List of Banished Words. (Full title: "Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.") The list—the 35th annual—is compiled from reader suggestions, and includes the predictable peeves: tweet, app, chillaxin', etc. I'm not crazy about the "banishment" concept (and who's that queen, anyway?). But I can't resist citing the tweet from Steve Silberman that notified me of the list: "Tweet czars say stimulus apps a toxic asset." (If you aren't following Steve on Twitter, I suggest you do so immediately.)

John McIntyre, former Baltimore Sun copyeditor, offers the one statement that, for him and his colleagues, "fitly epitomizes the year that is gasping its last today."

Finally, a bit of horn-tooting in the guise of public service: Amy Rosenberg of the Philadelphia Inquirer sums up the year in words and catchphrases: Octomom, hopium, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and much more. (I confess I had to look up J-Roll.) Yes, I am quoted therein, and my "word etc. blog" is named. Thank you, Ms. Rosenberg!

Happy New Year, all! And special thanks to everyone who commented, corrected, and sent links and tips for blog posts. See you in the future.

December Linkfest

Didn't get everything on your Chanukah list? Haven't received any Festivus invitations? Cheer up: I have goodies to spare.

First course, more year-end lists:

• The Guardian (U.K.) selects its "Noughtyisms," a year-by-year list of the decade's best words. They place cougar in 2005; I had it on my 2009 list. Hat tip: Sherry Noik.

• Separated by a Common Language announces the best American-to-British and British-to-American imports of 2009.

• Minneapolis naming agency Pollywog picks its best and worst brand names of 2009. I disagree about Bing—I think it's a pretty good name—but I agree about the rest.

• This just in: The German word of the year is Abwrackprämie (literally: "wrecking premium"), the equivalent of "cash for clunkers." Runner-up: kriegsähnliche Zustände, or “war-like conditions,” used to describe the situation faced by German troops in Afghanistan.

And looking toward the new year:

• From Trendwatching, 10 consumer trends to watch in 2010, including "(F)luxury," "Maturialism," and "Urbany."

A couple of enjoyable time-wasters—uh, research opportunities:

• SlangSite, "a dictionary of slang, webspeak, made-up words, and colloquialisms." I'm partial to qiken (pronounced chicken), "used to describe chicken cooked in an Asian style." Hat tip:  Dick Margulis, author of an excellent blog on writing, publishing, editing, and web design.

• WordCount, a brilliant interactive display of the 86,000+ most commonly used words in (British) English. Hat tip: Descriptively Adequate.

In anticipation of Festivus, with its annual Airing of Grievances, here are a couple of grievances about relationships between designers and clients. Equally applicable to name developers and copywriters, to be sure. (I'll air more grievances on the actual holiday, Dec. 23.)

• Eight ways to kill an idea. Beautifully illustrated, painfully true. Hat tip: Catch This.

• How a web design goes straight to hell. With very few changes, could apply to writing and naming projects.

Finally, here's a bit of, uh, breaking naming news you may have missed: The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education has announced a new name for the hymen: vaginal corona. In Swedish: slidkrans. Thanks a million for that link, Wes Phillips.

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Image: Festivus ice cream, a seasonal flavor produced by Ben & Jerry's in the early 2000s, brought back by popular demand in 2006, and now retired.

Words of the Decade: Fritinancy Edition

End of the year, end of the decade. Time to do some retrospecting, don't you think? Over the next couple of weeks I'll be posting my lists of words and brands that (IMHO, of course) have made the greatest impact during 2009 and during the Naughties.

The American Dialect Society will announce its own Word of the Decade at the society's annual meeting in January. To create my own list, I've observed the ADS criteria, selecting words that were, in my estimation:

• especially prominent or important throughout the years 2000-2009
• indicative of trends, fads, upheavals, groundswells, or sea changes which affected history, culture, or society throughout the years 2000-2009.

As you'll see, the 9/11 attacks and the wars they precipitated had a big effect on the decade's vocabulary.

If you don't see a word you think belongs on the list, it may be because it had its heyday in a previous decade. Or it may have risen to prominence in 2009, in which case there's a good chance I'll be including it in my Words of the Year post (coming soonhere!).

In alphabetical order: