Word of the Year: The Early Votes

The American Dialect Society is accepting nominations for the 2006 word of the year. (Last year's ADS WOTY was the Stephen Colbert coinage "truthiness.") The ground rules:

Remember, the word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as a “vocabulary item”—not just single words but phrases can be nominated, too. Nominated terms do not have to be brand new, but they should be newly prominent or notable in the past year, usually by being a part of widespread discussion or importance.

Early nominations have already been submitted by a couple of linguistic luminaries. Wayne Glowka, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and editor of the column “Among the New Words” in the journal American Speech, sent 26 submissions, including:

chesticles    Man boobs

cut and jog   Cut and run at a slower pace

ecosexual   Person choosing dates according to a partner's green habits

nicotini   Tobacco-flavored cocktail (for smokeless bars)

tramp stamp   Tattoo at the base of a woman's spine

And from Grant Barrett, editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, come 16 nominations, including:

anchor baby    A child born of an immigrant to the United States, and a device by which a family can find legal foothold here

chief memory officer   A person in charge of maintaining an organization's collective knowledge, experience, and history

God wink   Something taken as evidence that a higher power is at work; a coincidence

Hummer house   An overly large single-family residence

You can nominate, too. Send words to wayne.glowka@gcsu.edu -- and add a comment here to let us know what you're nominating.

Comments

[daveblake]

Gotta be "macaca moment". If its instant utility wasn't a sufficient qualification on its August blurtdate, its immortality was completely solidified by its clear role in tipping the Senate blue. 200k Google & 125k Yahoo hits for the exact phrase today, and within a week of the gaffe most of the references had nothing to do with George Allen. Here's some from before November: "Charles Rangel's macaca moment" ("Mississippi gets more than their fair share back in federal money, but who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?"), "John Kerry's macaca moment" (his umpteenth clumsily delivered misinterpretable joke, about Bush, Iraq and lack of education), and retrospectively, "Thinking back to Schwarzenegger's macaca moment in the governor's office"and "Mel Gibson repeats his macaca moment."
Def: "Formed after the structure of 'senior moment', a 'macaca moment' is a verbal slip that instantaneously, inarguably and irrevocably exposes a fatal character flaw behind a public persona meticulously crafted to camouflage it."

dave blake