Words of the year from around the globe!
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As usual, Oxford Dictionaries was first out of the gate, nearly a month ago, with its WOTY choices. And the winner was… vape.
As e-cigarettes (or e-cigs) have become much more common, so vapehas grown significantly in popularity. You are thirty times more likely to come across the word vape than you were two years ago, and usage has more than doubled in the past year.
Which means I may have been just a little ahead of schedule when I included vape on my 2013 words-of-the-year list.
(“Hard to imagine a more vapid choice,” scoffed Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society.)
Oxford’s list of runners-up includes bae, budtender (a Fritinancy word of the week in August), and normcore (a Fritinancy word of the week in March).
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Merriam-Webster’s word of the year—based on a spike in number of lookups on the dictionary’s website—is culture:
Culture is a big word at back-to-school time each year, but this year lookups extended beyond the academic calendar. The term conveys a kind of academic attention to systematic behavior and allows us to identify and isolate an idea, issue, or group: we speak of a “culture of transparency” or “consumer culture.” Culture can be either very broad (as in “celebrity culture” or “winning culture”) or very specific (as in “test-prep culture” or “marching band culture”).
This year, the use of the word culture to define ideas in this way has moved from the classroom syllabus to the conversation at large, appearing in headlines and analyses across a wide swath of topics.
Runners-up include nostalgia, insidious, legacy, and feminism.
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The kanji of the year, chosen by the Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society, is zei (“tax”):
The twentieth Kanji of the Year took a total of 8,679 votes, or 5.18% of the total 167,613. The reasons for its selection are clear: on April 1 this year the government raised Japan’s consumption tax for the first time in 17 years, bringing it from 5% to 8%. Meant to bolster funding for the country’s future social security needs, this tax hike impacted Japanese wallets and brought about drastic swings in the economy as a whole, with consumers front-loading major appliance, vehicle, and home purchases ahead of April 1 and curtailing spending after the higher rate went into effect. Two straight quarters of negative growth thereafter convinced Prime Minister Abe Shinzō to put off the next planned rate hike, from 8% to 10%, until the spring of 2017.
Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp and Richard Smart.
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The German word of the year is lichtgrenze, the “border of light” created by thousands of illuminated helium balloons that were released November 9 to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall. Other words on the German list were less celebratory: “It was a year of terror, strikes, and football frenzy.”
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Geoff Nunberg, the linguist-in-residence on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” picked God view as his word of the year:
It’s the term that the car service company Uber uses for a map view that shows the locations of all the Uber cars in an area and silhouettes of the people who ordered them. The media seized on the term this fall when it came out that the company had been entertaining itself and its guests by pairing that view with its customer data so it could display the movements of journalists and VIP customers as they made their way around New York.
Nunberg continued: “What we’re talking about here, of course, is the sense that the world is getting more and more creepy. … Creepy is a more elusive notion than scary. Scary things are the ones that set our imagination to racing with dire scenarios of cyberstalkers, identity thieves or government surveillance — whereas with creepy things, our imagination doesn't really know where to start.”
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Also in radioland, Ben Schott presented the most ridiculous words of the year, from the ridiculous active nutrition (“sports nutrition for people who don’t exercise”) to the appalling catastrophic longevity (“insurance-speak for people living too long”). Schott writes the Jargonator column for Inc. magazine; he spoke with NPR’s “The Takeaway.” (Link includes full audio and partial transcript.)
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Here’s a reminder that there are as many Englishes as there are words of the year: the Australian National Dictionary Centre selected shirtfront as its word of the year for 2014. It’s a verb, it comes from the vocabulary of Australian Rules football, and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott used it in a threat to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin:
The term was little known outside of its sporting context, although the figurative use has been around since at least the 1980s. Abbott’s threat to shirtfront Putin, and the word itself, was widely discussed and satirised in the Australian and international media.
The ANDC’s shortlist includes man-bun, Ned Kelly beard, and coward punch.
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Baby Name Wizard’s choice for name of the year is not a “real” name. Or is it?
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Writing for Slate’s Lexicon Valley blog, Jane Solomon, senior content editor and lexicographer at Dictionary.com, suggests some candidates for technology WOTY, including glanceable, digital detox, and disconnectionist. (Hat tip: Anthony Shore.)
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Finally, a non-WOTY link (unless you consider swear words to be perennial words of the year): Two of the best ling-writers around, Stan Carey (in Galway, Ireland) and James Harbeck (in Toronto), have launched Strong Language, “a sweary blog about swearing.” It’s a group blog, with many fine writers signed up as authors. (I hope to contribute occasionally as well, on the topic of vulgarity in advertising.) So far, you can read Gretchen McCulloch on the syntax of “fuck,” Mededitor on synonyms for “prostitute” in The Sot-Weed Factor, Iva Cheung on “shit” as a contronym, Karen Conlin (Grammargeddonangel) on “jackass,” and James Harbeck on the phonology of cusswords. You can follow Strong Language on Twitter, too.
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I’ll publish my own Words of the Year list later this month. And on January 9, at its annual meeting in Portland, the American Dialect Society will announce its winning candidate. Stay tuned.
