Two years ago, the American Dialect Society selected hashtag as its word of the year for 2012. Last week, for its 2014 word of the year, the ADS chose an actual hashtag, #blacklivesmatter, the slogan that—as the press release put it—“took on special significance in 2014 after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. and Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., and the failure of grand juries to indict police officers in both cases.” It was the first time in the contest’s 25 that a hashtag had been selected for the distinction. The vote at the Hilton in Portland, Oregon, was nearly unanimous, but the response has been anything but. (“It’s not a word” and “It’s too political” were two of the negative reactions.) Read Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee, on the WOTY selection (and on other words discussed at the meeting). For supporting viewpoints, see Anne Curzan’s post on the Lingua Franca blog (“The linguistic work of hashtags is especially interesting”) and linguist/librarian Lauren B. Collister’s post on her own blog (“a pretty historic moment for the field of linguistics for a number of reasons”). For a dissenting view, see Schnaufblog: “Call me old school -- I like the idea of a word as a combination of form (sound, gesture, writing) and meaning (lexical or grammatical) that can combine with other words according to the rules of grammar to form a clause.”
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Also meeting in Portland last week: the Linguistic Society of America, where Constantine Lignos and Hilary Prichard presented some groundbreaking research of special interest to branding and marketing folks: Why do we like frenemy but disdain framily? Why is it so hard to figure out what brinkles are? Happily for those of us who couldn’t attend the talk, Lignos and Prichard have posted the slides from “Quantifying Cronuts: Predicting the Quality of Blends” online.
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In last month’s roundup of other words of the year, I neglected to include a noteworthy one: exposure, chosen by Dictionary.com. Exposure was used in multiple contexts in 2014, Dictionary.com’s editors wrote; the Ebola epidemic was just one of them.
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Set aside a goodly chunk of time to read Stefan Fastsis’s long and fascinating story for Slate about the past, present, and future of dictionaries. Fatsis—the author of Word Freak and A Few Seconds of Panic—gained access to the inner sanctum of Merriam-Webster, “America’s premier dictionary publisher,” to report on the making of a new, online-only update of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, which was published (in print, of course) more than half a century ago. “By the time the Third gets close to being a Fourth,” writes Fatsis, “it’s not clear how people will use a dictionary, or even what a dictionary will be.” Bonus feature: a quiz that tests your knowledge of some of the most-looked-up words of 2014.
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Speaking of reference books: “Welcome to the dictionary, ‘banh mi,’ ‘halloumi,’ ‘mochi,’ and ‘saison’! A Vietnamese sandwich served on baguette, a brined Cypriot cheese, a Japanese treat made from rice paste, and a fruity Belgian ale may have little in common as foods, but they sure give a good picture of the established food trends of 2014.” Britt Peterson reports for the Boston Globe on how food words are accepted into mainstream dictionaries.
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If a Microsoft employee is a Microsoftie and a person who works at Amazon is an Amazonian, what would you call someone employed by Tableau Software? Mike Pope, who is himself such a person, sought out the answer and got a good one: Tabloids. “Tabloid” is an interesting word with an unusual history; I wrote about it back in 2009.
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It sounds like a plot line from “Portlandia,” but in fact it was a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal: a report on “the snuggling industry,” in which “professional cuddlers” charge $80 an hour and find clients through apps like Cuddlr and businesses named Cuddle Therapy, Cuddle Up to Me, and The Snuggle Buddies LLC. One professional cuddler is raising money for the first-ever CuddleCon, a convention to be held next month in—yes—Portland.
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The Name Inspector, Christopher Johnson, calls out the weirdest startup names of 2014. Just one example: Anonymess, which you’ll be surprised to learn is not a private app for photos of unmade beds.
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At last, a grammar quiz that’s neither stupid nor peevish. Written by Tom Freeman and Andrew Ingram for the British publication Management Today, it puts you, the reader, in the position of a professional copy editor and asks whether you’d, say, change can to may or insist on treating data as a plural. As you’ll see, there’s a lot more to grammar and style than memorizing rules.
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Carp girls, wall bumps, killer drugs, and other Japanese buzzwords of 2014, translated and annotated for Westerners by Mark Schreiber. The trendy words are compiled in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Words, an annual publication that this year—this utterly astounded me—runs to 1,484 pages. (Via Rochelle Kopp.)
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