Words of the Year

  As the first few weeks of 2007 continue to slip past us, there are some who are still putting the finishing touches on 2006.  Among them is the American Dialect Society (ADS), which convenes early each year to discuss the previous one.  It’s a tradition that tends to serve them well, raising their public profile, as they decide on their “Word of the Year.”

  And while it usually gets them a lot a press, there is nothing official about their word of the year.  You won’t necessarily find it in a dictionary, but you are likely to hear it on the streets and around the office.  It may not be as historic as Merriam-Webster’s annual list of new dictionary inclusions, but it certainly says something about us, culturally.

  The ADS is primarily comprised of scholars, linguists, and wordsmiths—both amateur and professional.  It was founded in 1889, and has ever since been devoted to studying the evolution of the English language.  That is their official charge, but we generally only hear about them after their annual meeting, when their “Word of the Year” is decided upon.

  The society last year decided upon a word coined by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert as 2005’s Word of the Year.  “Truthiness,” which Colbert defined as “truth that comes from the gut, not books,” edged out “podcast” and “intelligent design” to receive the honor.  Colbert went on to state, “I don’t trust books.  They’re all fact, no heart.”

  Last Friday, Society members met in Anaheim, CA, and made their decision on 2006’s “Word of the Year.”  And for Las Crucens, it hits a little close to home.  On Friday, the ADS decided on “plutoed” as its word for 2006.  The word, as defined by the ADS, means “to demote or devalue someone or something,” a reference to the one-time planet’s recent downgrading by the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union.

  I shouldn’t have to explain the local connection to lifelong Las Crucens.  But, for the record, Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered our solar system’s ninth planet in 1930, taught at NMSU for 18 years and lived in the City of Crosses of 42 years, until his death in 1997.

  “Plutoed” beat a host of other nominees, including “YouTube” (as a verb, “I wasted my day YouTubing”), “murse,” a man-purse, and “macaca,” a word that has come to describe discrimination against American-born people of foreign descent. 

  The Society also voted on words in other categories.  Winning the Most Useful category, “climate canary,” defined as “an organism or species whose poor health or declining numbers hint at a larger environmental catastrophe on the horizon,” defeated “data Valdez,” “an accidental release of a large quantity of private or privileged information,” as in the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 in Alaska.

  My favorite word was the winner of the “most creative” division.  A “lactard,” or a person who is lactose-intolerant, won that distinction.  Kinda reminds me of a word that I coined in 2006, actually.  I referred to myself, in a particularly moment of technological ineptitude as a “technotard.”  (Feel free to use that one as your own.)

-From Pulse
  January 11, 2007