2012 in Words: Hashtag, Gangnam Style, Alpacalypse

Via The Drum

At the beginning of the new year, ‘hashtag’ was voted as the word of the year 2012 by the American Dialect Society. The word of the year is chosen according to its prominent occurrence in the traditional and new media. According to Ben Zimmer, a committee member of the Society, 'hashtag' was most memorable due to its widespread use on Twitter and its role in creating online trends. Apart from the 'word of the year', the Society also voted for words of 2012 in categories such as 'most useful', and 'most euphemistic'. Here's a list of the winning words of every category:

• Word of the year: hashtag – a word or phrase preceded by a hash symbol, used on Twitter to mark a topic or to make a commentary
• Most useful: -(po)calypso, -(ma)geddon – hyperbolic combining forms for various catastrophes
• Most creative: gate lice  – airline passengers who crowd around a gate waiting to board
• Most unnecessary: legitimate rape – type of rape that Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin claimed rarely results in pregnancy
• Most outrageous: legitimate rape – see meaning above
• Most euphemistic: self-deportation – policy of encouraging illegal immigrants to return voluntarily to their home countries 
• Most likely to succeed: marriage equality – legal recognition of same sex marriage
• Least likely to succeed (two winners): phablet – midsized electronic device between a smartphone and a tablet; YOLO – acronym for ‘You Only Live Once,” often used sarcastically or self-deprecatingly
• Election words: binders (full of women) – term used by Mitt Romney in the second presidential debate to describe the resumes of female job candidates that he consulted as governer of Massachusetts

Via The Telegraph

What I particularly like about this word list (click here for the full list) is that it gives a nice reflection of the social and cultural trends in that year (obviously it's a bit biased because of its Americanisms). Also, these kind of lists tend to offer good insight into word formations of new (slang) words. Most new words tend to be created with reference to popular culture: Gangnam Style (Korean pop song which makes fun of a rich district (Gangnam) in Seoul); Gray Thursday (name for Thanksgiving as a shopping day before Black Friday), Frankenstorm (term for hurricane Sandy alluding to monster of Frankenstein). Other words are invented through a process called blending: meggings (male + leggings), phablet (device inbetween a smartphone and tablet), acronyms: YOLO (You Only Live Once), MOOC (massive open online course), alluding to characteristics of (well-known) people: Eastwooding (actor Clint Eastwood), Obamaloney (president Barack Obama), Romnesia (Mitt Romney), and shortening of words: feels (for 'feelings'), and cray-cray (for 'crazy'). 

 My personal favourites of the nominees list (and which I might consider using) are:

Via quickmeme

• Hate-watching: continuing to follow a television show despite having an aversion to it
• Dunlop effect: when one’s stomach protrudes over ill-fitting pants (“belly done lop over the belt”)
• Dancelexia: inability to pull of dance moves
• Big data: large collections of digital information used for revealing behavioural insights (this would be a great term to put into my thesis)

What's your favourite word of 2012?

OED Appeals: Lexicography and the general public

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is like the bible among linguists; it is said to be THE authoritative source of the English language. But as language changes constantly, so does the OED need to be updated from time to time. Their latest project OED Appeals, which started in October last year, is a call for help to the general public in tracing the earliest records of words in the English language. Terms of which the origin tends to be iffy are present-day slang words or expressions. The latest appeal, for example, is 'gangster':

The earliest OED record of 'gangster' dates back to 1896, but new evidence has shown that the term was used at least ten years earlier. So if you happen to find an earlier record of words like 'party animal' (1982) 'rock paper scissors' (1954), or 'easy-peasy' (1976), you can submit your evidence by leaving a comment on their website. I think this is a fantastic collaboration between linguists and non-linguists in preserving the English language.

In my research data, I also found the usage of a term which is older than the OED citation. According to the OED, the first occurrence of the term 'cull' was in 1698 in a work called In Vino Veritas:

However, I found the use of the term in the cant sense in one of the Old Bailey Proceedings (which are trial reports) published in 1693 (see below):

And that when she was taken, she said she was a dead Woman, and her sweet Life must pay for it, and that she was heard to say, That she got the old Cull out to drink, and so did her business effectually (Trial Elizabeth Davis, 13 July 1693)

I might have a word with the editors to check whether they need any help in uncovering and revising the history of eighteenth century slang words in the OED...