Words of the year for 2016 include bigly, a mishearing of big-league; hygge, a Danish word that has to do with coziness; and Brexit, a portmanteau that denotes the exit of Britain from the European Union. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Words of the Year 2016”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
And it’s the time of year when I’m thinking about WOTY, W-O-T-Y, Words of the Year.
2016 has been a heck of a year.
Yes, it has.
And a lot of language has come to the fore, of course, a lot of having to do with the presidential election.
Yes.
But a few other things as well that caught my eye, and I wanted to share a few of those right now with you.
Please do.
One of them I think we have to talk about is the supposed word bigly, B-I-G-L-Y.
And what this is is the way that Donald Trump says the word big league, and he uses big league as an adjective, as an adverb, kind of as an intensifier to make something seem really important or really severe or really extreme.
Bigly, though, is the way that people are hearing it.
So a lot of people have taken the word bigly, B-I-G-L-Y, and they’re running with it in a different direction.
Another word for word of the year is hygge, H-Y-G-G-E.
I talked about it on a previous show and mentioned that it’s so popular now that people are fighting back against it because it’s being overused.
It’s in every Christmas email.
It’s all over the place.
Magazines have it on their cover.
And it’s this idea of well-being or general good feeling or promoting kind of a convivial atmosphere or just cocooning kind of experience where you just the whole house is set up to make you feel comfortable.
Yeah, and it’s a Danish word, right?
Yeah, Danish, H-Y-G-G-E.
Cool to look at, hard to say because it doesn’t match the pronunciation in English, but a nice concept.
You think that one’s going to be the winner?
I think that probably Brexit really has this huge international implication.
Had a lot of legs, as we like to say in the old Hollywood parlance.
It still keeps going Brexit and Brexiteers and all the different forms of that.
Just keep being used in unironic and easily understood ways, which is a sign that a word has really succeeded.
Well, we talk about words all year long, so give us a call, 877-929-9673,
Or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.
