"The gimmicky sideshow of the syntactic circus"

What a great line! Dan Zak of the Washington Post has written a delightful article on this week's American Dialect Society meeting. He not only reports on the selection of the 2009 word of the year ("tweet") and word of the decade ("google") but also on Steve Kleinedler's new tattoo! Check out the debate--sadly, no illustration of Steve's embellishment--at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803692.html. You can also visit ADL's more sober account of the proceedings, over which ADS executive secretary Alan Metcalf and American Speech columnist Grant Barrett presided, at http://www.americandialect.org/.

More on "distracted driving"

Citing the choice by Webster's New World College Dictionary of "distracted driving" as its word of the year, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has announced an initiative to eliminate the practice in 2010. According to LaHood, the phrase's "rapid intrusion into our national vocabulary shows what an epidemic distracted driving has become."

No word on what the government intends to do about "unfriending."

More Words of 2000-2009 -- dot.com flavored

Catchword, a naming company (wow, what a concept), has identified the 10 biggest dot-com naming trends of the decade-- and their picks for best and worst examples. Check out the story at http://search.sys-con.com/node/1229917 or the full version at http://tinyurl.com/yamx72w. (The company has no relation to the DSNA singing group.)

Affect, Esurient, Bush and Perseverence (Perserverence? Perseverance? hmmm)

Year-end tributes to popular words and neologisms continue with this press release from Dictionary.com: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dictionarycom-reveals-its-top-searched-words-of-2009-78208067.html. Listing the words that its users most often looked up in 2009, as well as gainers, losers and most often misspelled words, the release suggests that these searches reflect "insights and trends." My graduate students, however, point out that searches often reflect classroom assignments ("Don't ask me how to spell the word, Jimmy, look it up!").

So what are elementary school students studying these days? Monty Python's Flying Circus? Ben Zimmer's commentary today on the Visual Thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/) includes a gratifying link to the Cheese Shop sketch--which, he notes, is the only reason most of us know the word "esurient" in the first place.

And the Word of the Year from Merriam-Webster...

is admonish.

"Admonish shot to the top of the list three days after Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during a speech made by President Obama, and it remained among our top lookups for weeks," said Peter A. Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's Editor at Large. "When the House announced plans to 'admonish' Rep. Wilson, the word was understood to be technical or official, and it has been repeated often in coverage of recent contentious political issues. While this particular story wasn't very important in the context of a year's worth of news, it triggered enormous interest in this word." Visit http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/09words.htm for the rest of the story and the runners-up, including my favorite, "repose." I think of "repose" as Miss Congeniality.

New Oxford American Dictionary weighs in

The Word of the Year festivities continue: The New Oxford American Dictionary has friended "unfriend." Check out their blog, which explains the selection process and offers a gloomy list of the runners-up: http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/.

"Distracted Driving" is one Word of the Year: Here we go

Webster's New World has announced that "distracted driving" is the word of the year, beating out such contenders as "wallet biopsy" and "too big to fail." Visit http://newworldword.com/ for the complete story, and check out the Visual Thesaurus's related commentary on hypallage, http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/2053/.

My word of the year is "relatable" meaning "sympathetic." My students are all using it. Alas! it's so limp.