Can a Word Capture the Zeitgeist of a Year? No. Maybe. Yes It Can.

A couple of nights ago I was a participant in a very popular annual event, held this year in New York: the choosing of the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year. The Empire Ballroom at the Sheraton Times Square was equipped with half a dozen large display screens and high-end amplification to support the word-guru Ben Zimmer’s chairing of the session, assisted by a team of high-speed raised-hand counters. A winner was ultimately chosen, after a couple of remarkable plot twists. But what I think I saw in that ballroom may not be quite what other people thought they were seeing.

The very idea of a Word of the Year suggests that words have an existence of their own and can do things, like encapsulating a zeitgeist or even influencing the tides of human affairs. But I don’t think that’s right.

What I saw in the Empire Ballroom was a rapidly shifting pattern of ethical, aesthetic, and political sentiment that inclined people, apparently in an extraordinarily subjective way, to feel more or less warmth toward particular suggested words or phrases. (The Word of the Year is often a phrase rather than a word. My occasional efforts to encourage the ADS to adopt a stricter and more properly lexical notion of what a word is have never succeeded.)

No one should imagine that when the world’s media report (as they always do) on the ADS Word of the Year they are providing facts about a word. They are not. They are reporting on the dynamic flow of emotions in a room where a small group of mammals — about 300 intellectuals of linguistic bent — are conducting a light-hearted debate and responding to currents of feelings.

The ages of the attendees spanned seven or eight decades. And you could not have swung a baseball bat in that room without injuring some prominent lexicographer or linguistic journalist, because the place was thick with famous experts: In addtion to Ben Zimmer (The Wall Street Journal), I saw Geoff Nunberg (NPR and the University of California at Berkeley), Lane Greene (The Economist), Gretchen McCulloch (Wired, Lingthusiasm), Lynne Murphy (University of Sussex), John McWhorter and Jesse Sheidlower (Columbia University) ... every wordie I could think of was there.

Attendees are not checked to see whether they are ADS members. The event is open to anybody attending the ADS meeting, or the much bigger Linguistic Society of America conference, or their spouse, or their children, or their dog.

Participants ran to the aisle microphones when Zimmer called for comments, and made short but impassioned speeches in hopes of influencing the room. Their ages ranged from 12 to about 80.

And these speeches sometimes made a massive difference. On the list of nominees for the subcategory of Most Creative word of 2018 was girther, defined as a person who takes a skeptical view regarding whether the annual health check on the president gives a true indication of the data for computing body-mass index. It is funny and clever, with its punning allusion to the birther conspiracy theory about the previous president. I thought it might stand a chance of winning. But a woman stepped up to the mike to oppose it on grounds that it alluded to the shaming of somebody for their body shape, and all support for it immediately collapsed to about 3 percent of the votes.

The final round, when everyone had voted the winners of the subcategories (Political WOTY, Digital, Slang, Most Useful, Most Likely to Succeed, Most Creative, Euphemism, Emoji of the Year, etc.), involved choosing an overall Word of the Year that could be from any of the special categories or even a new suggestion nominated from the floor. And in that round a huge divergence between the young and the old became evident: The youngest people in the room were arguing enthusiastically for yeet. This is an interjection of extremely vague meaning, expressing excitement or something like that. It has been known since about 2008, but has evidently been expanding its range and increasing in frequency in the past year.

I confess that in a moment of cynicism I went with the young and actually voted for yeet. A trivial interjection of little meaning, I thought; just the right sort of word to hang on a horrible year of chaos provoked by pusillanimous politicians in both of the nations I love most (I have citizenship in both the United Kingdom and the U.S.A.).

But suddenly a dark horse took the field and overtook the entire pack to win by several lengths. And its win was sparked entirely by a few words from one prestigious man.

Geoff Nunberg went to the mike and professed himself shocked that everyone had paid so little attention to the ghastly government euphemism tender-age shelter (also tender-age camp, tender-age facility, and other variants), applied to the places in three towns about 300 miles outside Houston where migrant children separated from families that crossed the Mexican border are being interned.

The phrase, which The Chronicle wrote about in August, and even nominated for this contest (though many others did too), had not even won in its own subcategory, Euphemism of the Year. It got 45 votes as against 223 for racially charged. But after Nunberg’s brief rebuke it was if every older person in the room was suddenly stricken with shame at the thought of an interjection of excitement winning the title in a year like 2018. Tender-age shelter won with 147 votes over yeet (which still got 135 from the young, plus me in a misguided moment).

It’s not exactly a word, of course, but it’s a layered compound noun, and just looking at it should make us twitch with embarrassment. If the Word of the Year competition can do something as political as that, one has to acknowledge that it is a very worthy event.

Geoffrey K. Pullum is a professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. With Rodney Huddleston he wrote The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language in 2002. His most recent book is Linguistics: Why It Matters.