Lots of late-breaking X-of-the-year news:
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Laura Wattenberg, astute observer of baby-naming trends, selected Blue Ivy as the Baby Name Wizard name of the year. The story of the name, she writes, is “all about the essence of intellectual property rules: invention, identity, exclusivity and control.”
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In a commentary for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” linguist Geoffrey Nunberg defended “Big Data,” his choice for the 2012 word of the year: “It’s responsible for a lot of our anxieties about intrusions on our privacy, whether from the government's anti-terrorist data sweeps or the ads that track us as we wander around the Web. It has even turned statistics into a sexy major.” Nunberg also talked about the political buzzwords of 2012 – right to work, entitlement, evil, and more – in a Bill Moyers Q&A.
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The Australian National Dictionary Centre’s word of the year is green-on-blue: “(used in a military context) an attack made on one’s own side by a force regarded as neutral.” It beat out qubit, fourth age, brotox, and fossil farming – none of which, I’m fairly confident, are on any US WotY lists.
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Collins Dictionary (UK) didn’t pick a single word of the year: it picked 12, from broga (yoga for men) to fiscal cliff.
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From the Wordnik blog: the best TV words of 2012, from anaphor to unwindulax, and the best language stories of 2012, from Rick Santorum’s “blah people” to the New York Times’s “offensive adjective inappropriate for family newspaper” – which wasn’t an adjective at all.
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In the New York Times, Grant Barrett’s annual roundup of the year’s notable words and expressions includes some by-now-familiar contenders – Eastwooding, 47 percent, Gangnam style – as well as some surprises, including doga (yoga with a dog), nomophobia (a Fritinancy word of the week in February), and pet shaming.
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Lynne Murphy of Separated by a Common Language picked the best American-to-British import (“wonk”) and the best UK-to-US counterpart (“bollocks”). Influencing her choice of “bollocks” was Newcastle Brown Ale’s “No Bollocks” ad campaign – used in the US but not in the UK.
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The Brand New blog identified the year’s best visual identities (logos) and the worst.
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The year in maps, from The Atlantic Cities, includes, at #5, the delightful Metrophors map of geographic X-is-the-Y-of-Z metaphors (“THE Ukraine is THE Ohio State University of European countries”). (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)
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Coming next week: the American Dialect Society’s word-of-the-year vote. If you’re in Boston on Friday, January 5, get yourself over to the Marriott Copley Place to support your favorite words. Everyone’s welcome, and it’s a total hoot. I attended the January 2009 vote in San Francisco and wrote about it here.
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And in case you missed my earlier posts, here are my words of the year, brand names of the year, (other) names of the year, and (possibly) the name of the year.
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