BALTIMORE — “Anyone for ‘sexting’?” asks the 69-year- old man in the navy blazer and brown loafers.
“Well, if you give me your number,” says a voice, and the crowd erupts in laughter.
Bunch of comedians, these linguists and lexicographers. They have crammed themselves in a dim, beige, boxy meeting room at the Hilton to vote on a word of the year and a word of the decade, a solemn task that falls to just about everyone these days.
Other outlets have already named words of the years for 2009 — Merriam-Webster picked “admonish” (huh?) and the Oxford English Dictionary went with “unfriend” (hrmph) — but the 121-year-old American Dialect Society thinks of itself as the granddaddy of them all, the first and last word in words of the year.
Its hour-long quest must yield two words that are accurate, exciting and durable. Two words must satisfy both the crusty generation of veteran scholars and the giddy linguistic students whose jargon is a step ahead.
Frozen in time
There is no smaller time capsule than a single word. In 2000, the American Dialect Society picked “web” to represent the 1990s, “jazz” for the 20th century and “she” for the millennium. Ten letters can evoke an entire epoch.
This past year can be distilled into single words using the top lookups on Merriam- Webster’s online dictionary, which gets 1.3 billion page views a year.
“Empathy” shot up during the Sonia Sotomayor hearings.
“Philanderer” was a hit-magnet during the Mark Sanford confessions.
Michael Jackson’s death sent the world scrambling for “emaciated.”
The top lookups are the linguistic nerve endings of people’s curiosities at any given moment, says Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster. He regularly tweets the top lookups to his 2,000 followers.
Most recent blockbuster: “indigenous,” which has trended since the premiere of the movie “Avatar.”
Merriam-Webster adds 100 words to its database each year. Urban Dictionary draws 2,000 reader submissions a day. Global Language Monitor calculates that a new English- language word is born every 98 minutes and that 1.58 billion people are resculpting English as they use it as a universal linguistic currency.
We’re living in a time of wildfire word creation, with no gatekeeper for slang and no way to settle on a term that will please everybody, says Jack Lynch, author of “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma.”
“Tweet” fun
Back with the American Dialect Society:
“I’d like to speak against all of these arguments for ‘tweet’ because they are all over 140 characters long,” says someone back in the room Friday evening, in which final arguments are made and raised hands are counted.
The jokes keep on coming. A couples therapist makes a case for “hiking the Appalachian trail” because she appreciates the euphemism, and her husband, with expert timing, stands up to second the motion. There’s a posse of rebel linguists who won’t let “sea kittens” and “Dracula sneeze” die.
“I think my life has been more affected by ‘Google’ than ‘ 9/11,’ ” says a college student.
After much discussion, the final vote. A year and a decade, both recently laid to rest, receive the briefest kind of epitaph. The two words meant to evoke the feeling of this moment years from now: “tweet” for 2009 and “Google” for the aughts.
Words of 2009
Merriam-Webster: “admonish”
Oxford English Dictionary: “unfriend”
American Dialect Society: “tweet”
Global Language Monitor: “Twitter”
