I’m sure that, unless your name is Bill Gates, you needed a little restraint in your spending at some time during the past year. Perhaps you thought twice about buying a new car, or you decided two spoons of sugar in your coffee represented an extravagance your corset would not allow.
I have been looking at some of the “word of the year” finalists. The Merriam-Webster people from the United States have decided their word for 2010 is austerity. I can understand their thinking, although I still have nightmares over their choice of that stupid non-word w00t for 2007.
Austerity was on everybody’s lips, or so the Merriam-Webster people tell us, during 2010 as the world grappled with the financial crisis.
And what came second in their list? Pragmatic. That word means something like “an acceptance of the position”. In other words: “We’re broke, but so what?”
Then came, in order from three to ten: Moratorium, socialism, bigot, doppel-ganger, shellacking, ebullient, dissident and furtive.
These words apparently came from user look-ups on Merriam-Webster.com.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember having much use for any of those words during the past year. I was broke, yes, but that didn’t make the list.
As a matter of interest, the Merriam-Webster words of the year for the past few years were: 2009 admonish, 2008 bailout, 2007 w00t (I can’t accept that as a word), 2006 truthiness, 2005 integrity, 2004 blog and 2003 democracy.
Some other groups have also named their “word of the year”.
The American Dialect Society seems to have sat in a room, locked the door and had a show of hands.
The “word of the year” was app. Older people have probably had little use for the word app, but it is becoming increasingly popular in this technological age. App is an abbreviated form of application.
The American Dialect Society did show a bit of inventiveness.
The most useful word was nom (from Sesame Street).
Just think about it. Who would throw nom into the conversation and then say “I heard the Cookie Monster use it on Sesame Street”? The most creative was prehab, something to do with drug use and actor Charlie Sheen; most unnecessary was refudiate, previously publicised in these columns, a word made up by Sarah Palin, the woman who had her sights on Russia; and most outrageous gate rape, an expression that has its origins in the airport pat-down procedures that apparently thrill some people and repel others. The word “most likely to succeed” was said to be culturomics, something to do with a statistical approach to word research.
But not a mention of vuvuzela — or perhaps it got lost in the din.
In the distant past, an expression often heard emanating from the newspaper subs’ room was “how fast was the tree going?’ This was the sarcastic response to young reporters’ words about “a car colliding with a tree”.
Although some dictionaries are coming around to accepting the car colliding with the tree (what about very unique and partially pregnant?), another word would suit their purposes. This is not collide, but allide.
Collide has been generally accepted to mean the impact of two moving objects; allide has related to the impact of one moving object into a stationary object.
But, the nature of our ever-changing language means that collide will soon be accepted to mean both definitions, while allide will sink without trace — if it has not done so already.
lbword@midcoast.com.au
