In the News

Reprinted with permission from The San Francisco Chronicle
The Word

What We Said, and Why We Said It

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January 7, 2001 (The Boston Globe) - For most people, the first week of the year is a time to ponder self-improvement. For word people, it's a time to review the bests, worsts, and notables of the past 12 months (or decade, or millennium) - an exercise that has no effect on where usage will go, but offers a forum for sharing grievances and a fair helping of entertainment.

First into the Y2K fray was yourDictionary.com, the ever-expanding collection of online dictionaries, which issued its Top 10 Word Lists of 2000 last month. YDC covered categories from general (chad was the big winner) to color word (periwinkle, cornflower). The result is rather a grab bag: sometimes YDC is merely recording a word's ubiquity, sometimes congratulating ("Best New Product Name: Celebrex"), sometimes condemning (edgy is "amazingly irritating"). The commentary, too, is sometimes debatable: Has A-Rod, the nickname of that record-bustingly rich baseball player, really become a verb meaning "to do something successfully"?

Lake Superior State University's list, by contrast, is all peeves, all the time: It solicits nominations only for words to be banished from the language, a bias that produces results just as odd as YDC's anything-goes attitude. For instance, LSSU's list also has chad at the top, but it condemns the word merely for overexposure. Well, we may have learned more than we wanted to know about chad in all its varieties, but the Great Chad Debate exposed ballot problems that deserve to be addressed. As long as there are ambiguous chads, the word has every right to a place in our vocabulary.

Also on the list, under Business Babble, is the verb leverage, which one complainant calls "a false verbification of the noun leverage." But hold on - that's no "false verbification," it's just a plain old verb derived from a noun, like hand, mask, and summer. And in the investment world, leverage is no more mysterious than "compound interest"; banishing it because it's overused is surely a case of blaming the victim.

On the other hand, the spread of diva to describe not only any female singer but even some males deserves to be opposed. Diva, it should be noted, comes from "goddess," so etymologically it refers not to singing talent but simply to fabulousness. But it's properly applied only to females - and, I suppose, to really good female impersonators.

Both these collections have a slapdash, unedited feel, but in the case of YDC, the word list is just a lure to get readers to the site, a rich collection of multilingual dictionaries, reference works, and links to other language sites. (And for LSSU, the annual posting is a way to remind the public of the university's existence.)

The best list, though, comes from the American Dialect Society, a group with an ear for usage, a sense of humor, and a solid foundation of scholarship. The 2000 compilation, alas, comes out after our deadline, though it should be on the ADS Web site any time now: www.americandialect.org.

No need to wait, though - there's plenty to see now on the ADS site, which made its millennial selections last year. The choice for most important word of the past 1,000 years - and it's unlikely to be eclipsed by chad - was she. Why? Because in the year 1,000, the word didn't exist; there was only heo, "which singular females had to share with plurals of all genders because it meant they as well." I guess we really have come a long way, baby, at least in the pronoun department.

On the site, you'll also find ADS's words of previous decades, which (like LSSU's archives) record linguistic moments we may have forgotten. In 1990, the word of the year was the flash-in-the-pan Bushlips, "insincere political rhetoric"; in 1991, it was Mother of All (thank you, Saddam). And Newt Gingrich, at the height of his influence, made the list twice, in 1994 as gingrich (a short-lived verb for doing as Newt did) and in 1995 as newt (both verb and combining form, as in Newtspeak).

ADS will also give you the latest queries on usage from the Dictionary of American Regional English: For instance, "pumplefoot: All three of our examples for this word, meaning 'a clubfoot,' come from Maine or New Hampshire. Is it still recognized there?" And does anyone outside Maine say push row to mean "to row facing forward"? If you've got answers, Joan Hall wants them: E-mail jdhall@facstaff.wisc.edu, and make DARE's new year a little brighter. As we grope through the language labyrinth, it's better to light a candle than to curse the chads.