WOTY

Oops! Due to lack of internet over the holidays, I missed the American Dialect Society’s word of the year! Never fear, if you haven’t been enlightened, you may be so below:

Although I am disappointed in the drabness of the actual word-of-the-year … the other categories are very interesting.
Here are this year’s winners:

- Word of the Year: red state, blue state, purple state: together, a representation of the American political map.
- Most Useful: phish: to acquire passwords or other private information (of an individual, an account, a web site, etc.) via a digital ruse.
- Most Creative: pajamahadeen: bloggers who challenge and fact-check traditional media.
- Most Unnecessary: carb-friendly: low in carbohydrates.
- Most Euphemistic: badly sourced: false.
- Most Likely To Succeed: red, blue, and purple states.
- Least Likely To Succeed: FLOHPA: The collective abbreviations of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, states said to have been important in the 2004 American presidential election.
*taken from article on the subject

I believe that without this valuable context, if I’d heard the verb “to phish” I would think that it meant something like: to eat cheese sandwiches in the back of a vintage van while experimenting with mind altering drugs.

But more to the point, I’d like to be considered a Pajamahadeen. Once it was explained to me who the Afghani Mujahideen were, it alllll made sense. What I particularly like about this analogy is that standard news media are represented by the USSR’s ground troops. Unfortunately, the definition includes the words “fact” and “check” … maybe I’ll have an easier time making my blog badly sourced.