Offering thanks in advance
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If you missed the year-end rehash stories while vacationing abroad or simply pinned under a mammoth hangover, let me present mine.
Not the usual encyclopedic recap demonstrating how you've already forgotten things you thought were important. (Harold Camping, I'm looking at you. Because we're both still here.)
I prefer the condensed version: a survey of the words of the year. Words of the year distill all the turmoil into a handful of evocative terms, or even one single adjective. This can be displayed on your desk or washed down with a shot of whatever you like with zeitgeist. Campari, possibly.
The popular choice for 2011's word of the year is, not surprisingly, "occupy." Starting strong with an official movement, it quickly made the jump to popular satiric usage, as in "I'm ready to clock out and occupy a bar stool."
"Occupy" was the top choice of the American Dialect Society, beating out "job creator" (plutocrat), "bunga bunga" (thank you, Silvio Berlusconi, age 9), and "brony" (Google it. Not dirty, just ... mm).
Also nominated were words I'd never heard, like "humblebrag": boasting disguised as false humility, as raised to an art form by celebrities on Twitter. Stuff like, "I'm so tired of being pulled over all the time for nothing I'm so getting rid of this lambo!" Or "Last night was such a blur. OMG did I really win an Oscar?"
Mr. Humblebrag sounds like a Dickens character. Nattertwit Humblebrag.
"Twinkling" is the word for those jazz-hands gestures of support or disapproval at Occupy events, but "amazeballs" represents a true breakthrough: an even more annoying embellishment of an already overused word.
"Amazing" tops the annual Lake Superior State University list of words proposed for banishment due to overuse or worthlessness. Martha Stewart gets a lot of blame for using a word meant to describe divine grace for toast or shoes, but "amazing" is the methadone we're substituting for "awesome" because it sounds marginally less middle school.
LSSU rose up against the ubiquitous "occupy," along with "shared sacrifice," "blowback," "the new normal" and "win the future," all plausible titles of self-help books written by shiny-headed guys in tailored suits.
LSSU has also had enough of "baby bump," a term reducing the miracle of motherhood to a trendy celebrity accessory. It's a fetus in there, not hair extensions.
"Man cave" and "ginormous" now cloy, and "pet parent" is, I'm sorry, slightly spooky. I do love the dog in my life, but I have no plans to teach him to drive, encourage him to go out for Little League or drama club, cook him dinner or hope he can get a fetch scholarship to an Ivy League school.
LSSU also targets "thank you in advance" as the passive-aggressive veiled threat it is.
The Oxford Dictionaries gave nods to "occupy," "bunga bunga" and local favorite "fracking," among others, though Merriam-Webster went with "pragmatic" as word of the year due to the number of people looking it up to make sure it wasn't an insult; you'd certainly get that impression from this Congress.
But Dictionary.com somehow settled on "tergiversate," which is apparently a word. (Unlike "conversate," which you are far more likely to hear.) It means, essentially, "waffle" but sounds much more like a neurological disorder. The only two citations were from The Times of London and The New Yorker, publications quite comfortable with sending their readers to Dictionary.com.
Sadly, you can't say "tergiversate" to your football buddies because there is some disagreement about whether the accent is on the first or second syllable. Saying it wrong would make the effect less amazeballs. You won't get any bunga bunga that way.
So please be pragmatic about the use of ginormous words. Thank you in advance.
First Published January 12, 2012 12:00 am
