I Heart Word Nerds

The Washington Post had an interesting (and awesomely nerdy) article on linguists and lexicographers choosing a word of the year. Merriam-Webster picked "admonish" (boring). The Oxford English Dictionary picked "unfriend." The Global Language Monitor's media-analysis software made "Twitter" the word of the year and "global warming" the word of the decade. The American Dialect Society chose "tweet" for 2009 and "Google" as the word of the decade.

The article has all kinds of nerdy tidbits and dialogue:

*The American Dialect Society's first ever Word of the Year, in 1990, was "bushlips" (ouch. I bet there's some regret there...).

*In 2000, the American Dialect Society picked "web" to represent the 1990s, "jazz" for the 20th century, and "she" for the millennium.

*Merriam-Webster's online dictionary gets 1.3 billion page views a year. Look-ups for "empathy" shot up during the Sonia Sotomayor hearings; "philanderer" during the Mark Sanford confessions; "emaciated" after the news of Michael Jackson's death; "indigenous" after the premiere of the movie Avatar.

*Merriam-Webster adds 100 words to its database each year.

*Urban Dictionary receives 2,000 reader submissions a day.

*Global Language Monitor calculates that a new English word is born every 98 minutes.

An editor at the American Heritage Dictionary recently got a tattoo of this phonetic vowel chart on his back. That is awesomely nerdy.

*Jack Lynch, author of The Lexicographer's Dilemma says we're living in a time of rapid word creation, with no gatekeeper for slang. He said purists have always complained about the erosion of "proper" language, but he said a lexicographer's job is to describe the flux, not prescribe a paradigm. "Language has been going to hell since forever. Let's not worry about English. It's been doing fine for 1,500 years and it's going to outlive us all. "

In the behavior spectrum of American conferencing, the linguists and lexicographers fall on the social end, confides a waiter at the hotel's "tavern". They gab. "They're not like the scientists, who sit alone and order coffee without looking up," the waiter says. "And they linger."

In meeting rooms at the hotel, they ramble about Vedic Sanskrit and Oregon English and chide one another for talking too fast. The lobby echoes with chatter about clitics and fricatives and vowel fission. Conclusions are reached about Northern Virginia (natives have begun to speak like they're from Ohio rather than the South) and the effect of first names on longevity (people whose names begin with "D" seem to die soon than others). Talks are given on "Learning to Talk Like a Heterosexual" and "The Effect of Dialect Features Under Intoxication" and how "Abbrevs is Totes the Lang of the Fuche."

Thirty students and scholars show up for Thursday's nominating session in a meeting room. They jaw about the possible displacement of "search" by "Google," how the flu-prevention term "Dracula sneeze" translates into American Sign Language. They argue the merits of "Salahi" as a verb and the pronunciation of H1N1 as "heinie."

The man in the bow tie is a 68-year-old dictionary editor from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and he stops by a table in the hotel tavern Thursday night to greet four fellow wordmen. The average age at the table is about 60, and there's a preponderance of tweed, cufflinks, and monogrammed dress shirts. The 41-year-old Oxford English Dictionary editor literally wrote the book on the F word, and Allan Metcalf, executive director of the American Dialect Society since 1980, literally wrote the book on "OK" (subtitle: "America's Greatest Invention").

There's a posse of rebel linguists who won't let "sea kittens" and "Dracula sneeze" die. A gentleman in a gray suit argues against "H1N1" as word of the year because it would mean succumbing to the pork lobby. There are speeches against "9/11" as word of the decade because it would mean the terrorists win. Every two minutes someone shouts, "Fail!"

*At the American Dialect Society conference, when taking suggestions for word of the decade, a 69 year old man suggested, "Anyone for 'sexting'?" To which someone in the audience replied, "Well if you give me your number!"

*Two linguist students from William & Mary are annoyed that "unfriend" came up as a suggestion for the word of the year. "'Un' is like 'opposite', whereas 'de' connotes 'taking away.'"

*During final arguments, someone from the crowd says, "I'd like to speak against all of these arguments for 'tweet' because they are all over 140 characters long."

In conclusion, I really liked this quote by Richard Bailey, a professor emeritus of English from the University of Michigan: "Language is an index of our social identity."