Nominations for Word of the Year 2007

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. And Grant, it’s that time of year when various organizations start declaring their choices for Word of the Year.

Now, you’re a member of the American Dialect Society, that group of linguists who chose truthiness and Pluto for the past couple of years.

But really, Grant, how seriously are we supposed to take this whole Word of the Year thing anyway?

It’s incredibly important. You’ll be tested on it later.

Oh, no.

No, really.

No, no.

It’s whimsical.

Whimsical?

Well, I actually can speak for a couple of dictionary publishers.

All of these word of the year things aren’t to be taken too seriously.

None of the people, including the American Dialect Society, none of these groups are official, august bodies of pointy-headed intellectuals, you know, inducting words into the English language.

There’s just no such thing.

All they are is a bunch of people goofing off and kind of just bringing to light some words that they found throughout the last 12 months that are worth paying attention to.

Well, what are some of the big contenders for Word of the Year this year?

I don’t know about big contenders, but I have my own list.

I have 60-some-odd words, as a matter of fact, that I’m going to nominate in various ways in various places.

Yes, there’s lots of stuff, and that’s a fraction of the stuff.

But one of the words is actually kind of boring, but I think you’ll see right away that the word subprime actually had a really important role to play in this last year.

You’re kidding.

Think about the mortgage crisis, for example, and all these exploding mortgages, as they’re called, when people can’t afford to pay them.

And it’s bad for not only the person who’s taken their mortgage out, but it’s bad for the bank.

And it’s turned out this year to be bad for the hedge funds that take those bad or risky mortgages and bundle them together and turn them into investment properties.

And they’ve lost billions, billions on these things.

So the word subprime, boring and jargony, but highly indicative of something that took place this year.

So it doesn’t have to be overly clever or anything.

It just has to be significant within the life of the year.

Yeah, that’s right.

Clever is fun, and I have a bunch of those.

But, yeah, it’s kind of like Time Magazine’s Man of the Year or Person of the Year, so to speak.

Only a word.

Well, sometimes they’re Hitler, you know, and sometimes they’re Lee Iacocca.

So sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad.

Well, you know what my nomination is for Word of the Year?

No.

I would say Facebook used as a verb.

Oh, that’s so three years ago.

Oh, is it?

I don’t know.

I finally just heard it at a party.

I was leaving a party, and I heard this young woman say, hey, Facebook me.

And it just, I don’t know, maybe I’m an old fuddy-duddy.

Oh, did they say that, really?

Oh, yeah.

Is that the new call me, and they don’t really mean it?

Yeah, I think it is.

I think it’s, you know, Facebook me.

Let’s have lunch, and now it’s room to replace with, oh, Facebook me.

Because then they can refuse to be friended by you, right?

Yeah, friended.

That’s another great one.

Yeah, I think this whole social networking phenomenon is really significant.

And I don’t know.

Maybe it just now trickled down to me.

But I’m kind of fascinated by Facebook.

Oh, I’m just mocking you old people, you know.

Sometimes it takes you a while to catch up.

Right.

You use it all the time.

You know, to your credit, though, at least you didn’t say, I heard about this thing, the Facebook.

On the internets.

On the internets.

And the tubes connecting it all together.

Okay.

Well, the young whippersnapper here and I would love to hear your nominations for Word of the Year.

What word or expression really stood out for you in 2007?

You can talk about it right now in our discussion forum.

That’s at waywordradio.org.

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