As the end of 2018 grows near, members and friends of the American Dialect Society once again prepare to choose its Word of the Year. The group will announce its choice at its annual meeting, in January. What word or phrase will best characterize 2018?
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As the end of 2018 grows near, members and friends of the American Dialect Society once again prepare to choose its Word of the Year. The group will announce its choice at its annual meeting, in January. What word or phrase will best characterize 2018?
The practice began at the society’s 1990 meeting. Since then the leading dictionary companies in England (Oxford University Press) and America (Merriam-Webster, Random House) have made their own choices, and so have others. They announce their decisions before the year is over. But ADS can claim to be the first ever to do so, and the last to make each year’s decision — viewing the others as nominations for the society’s vote.
Trumpian terms are obvious candidates; last year’s WOTY was “fake news.” But there are, of course, others as well.
At the meeting in January of the American Dialect Society and the Linguistic Society of America, Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS’s New Words Committee, will preside over the nominations on Thursday, January 3, and a vote the next day.
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David Barnhart, an up-to-the-minute lexicographer from a family of lexicographers, always has a slate of nominees for ADS. He’s worth attending to, because daily he gathers coinages from the news and writes them up in proper dictionary form, for his Never-Finished Political Dictionary of the 21st Century.
When the recent U.S. Supreme Court appointment was announced, for example, Barnhart had already written entries for anti-Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh bashing, Kavanaugh effect, Kavanaugh-mania, post-Kavanaugh, and pro-Kavanaugh, based on citations he found. Here’s a sample:
Kavanaugh-mania, n. {W} approval of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Standard (used in informal contexts dealing especially with U.S. politics; frequency?)
Composite (compound): formed from (Brett M.) Kavanaugh (born: 1965), U.S. Supreme Court justice (2018-present), + -mania (OED: 1788), the combining form, as in Gorby-mania (DC 6.1: 1987).
Barnhart also picked up TV examples for denialist, climate denialist, and climate-change denialist. I asked him about his nominees for 2018, and he replied with a list of well more than 50, declining to say which are his favorites. “I love all my babies,” he wrote, and “there’s plenty of time left in the year. I like to see what OUP, M-W, and RH and the others come up with. Everything’s just candidates, as you can well appreciate.”
That’s a proper stance for a serious lexicographer. I couldn’t resist, however, noticing some intriguing candidates on his list: Five Eyes relationship, dox (verb), Giuliani (verb), marble ceiling, PESD (post-election stress disorder), red-flag law, shouting head, tweetstorm.
This year may be one when no word or phrase is the obvious choice. We’ll have to wait and see.
