Your hint about the outcome of this year’s Word of the Year vote at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society (ADS) is right there in the headline.
It was a lively gathering on a frigid Friday night in the Hilton Minneapolis, where we were all happy to have this very good excuse to be indoors. As always, we voted on other categories too, such as Most Outrageous, Most Useful, Most Creative, etc. You may have heard about other word-of-the-year votes over the past couple of months (e.g., Oxford University Press voted for selfie in November), but the ADS vote is the longest standing, and we wait until the year is over to vote. Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of ADS and a blogger here on Lingua Franca, started the meeting by noting: “We’re like the Oscars. We are the last. We are the best.”
Let me you give you the winners of all the categories and some highlights from our discussions here; the final vote counts are available on the ADS website. If you find you’re not sure what some of the categories mean, you’re in good company. As Allan Metcalf explained at the beginning of the meeting (of several hundred people), “We made these categories up many years ago. We never fully understood what they meant. They are open to interpretation.” Everyone present at the meeting can vote; we vote by raising our hands, and the count is, let’s say, a little approximate. The most important rule: You can vote with only one hand.
Word of the Year for 2013: because (introducing a noun or noun phrase, or sometimes an adjective—e.g., “because reasons,” “because Internet,” “because tired”). It’s not that the word because is new, of course (it dates back to the 14th century). The word won, well, because language change. And at ADS, we like to celebrate the most interesting forms of language change we can find. In the last year, grammatically innovative uses of because have taken off in informal online writing—and now informal talk more generally. It used to be that because had to be followed by a full clause, but now you can just put a noun or adjective after it: “I’m stressed because grad school” or “I’m staying in tonight because -16 degrees.” Pretty cool grammatical stuff, featured in The Atlantic in November. The other contenders for Word of the Year: slash as a conjunction or coordinator (see Most Useful below); selfie (“a photo taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone and shared on social media”); twerk (“a mode of dance that involves vigorous booty-shaking and booty-thrusting, usually with the feet planted”); and Obamacare (“term for the Affordable Care Act that has moved from pejorative to matter-of-fact shorthand”).
Most Useful Word of the Year: because + noun/noun phrase, adj. It was a runoff between because + noun and slash. I nominated slash for this category and am fascinated by what I’ve learned from students about how they use the word slash in texting and online (which I’ve written about here on Lingua Franca)—for example, “That new coffee shop is great. Slash shall we go there on Tuesday?” That said, in the end, I voted for because. Because frequency. Because useful.
Most Likely to Succeed: binge-watch (“to consume multiple episodes of a series, maybe even a whole season, in one sitting”). Because Netflix.
Most Creative: catfish (“to misrepresent oneself online, especially as part of a romantic deception”—a term that came to prominence in national news last January when it was leaked that Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o’s girlfriend was a hoax). It came down to cats and dogs, so to speak: a runoff between catfish and doge. For those of you not familiar with doge, it is an Internet meme with intentionally ungrammatical exclamations (e.g., “much wow” and “how pronounce”) superimposed on an image of a dog, typically the Shiba Inu breed. “Such creative,” one supporter argued in support of doge. But in the end, catfish prevailed.
Most Unnecessary: sharknado (“a tornado of sharks, as featured in the Syfy Channel movie of that name”). This one required no discussion. Really? A tornado of sharks?
Most Outrageous: underbutt (“the underside of buttocks, made visible by certain shorts or underwear”). How can this word not make you laugh? So while underbutt had some very outrageous competitors in the category (such as revenge porn, “vindictive posting of sexually explicit pictures of someone without consent” and s(c)hmeat, a blend of sheet + meat used to refer to meat product grown in a lab), the word seemed destined to win.
Most Euphemistic: least untruthful (“involving the smallest unnecessary lie” [used by James Clapper, director of national intelligence]).
Least Likely to Succeed: Thanksgivukkah (“confluence of Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah that will not be repeated for, well, a long time”).
Most Productive/Best Combining Form: -shaming (from slut-shaming). We added a new category for this year because we realized we had a lot of really good combining forms (a term linguists use sometimes when we’re not prepared to call something a suffix). It started with –(el)fie, as in selfie, drelfie (drunk selfie), shelfie (a portrait of your bookshelf), and twofie (selfie with two people). That form quickly had competition: -hack (< lifehack, and now studyhack, marriagehack, etc.), -spo (< thinspo, and now fitspo, sportspo, etc.), -coin (< bitcoin, and now peercoin, namecoin, etc.), -splaining (< mansplaining, now whitesplaining, journosplaining, etc.), and –shaming (< slut-shaming, and now fat-shaming, pet-shaming, etc.). In the end it was a –splaining vs. –shaming runoff, and no amount of linguistisplaining was going to stop –shaming’s momentum.
Our weighty voting responsibilities complete, we headed to the ADS happy hour.
May 2014 bring us many worthy lexical innovations to celebrate next January!