2005 Words of the Year

January 9th, 2006 · No Comments

Trackbacked at basil’s blog, Adam’s Blog:

For the past 15 years, the 116-year-old American Dialect Society has chosen Words of the Year — a word or phrase that best reflects the language and preoccupations of the year gone by. The society chose its Words of the Year 2005 on January 6, 2006, at its annual meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

But before we go to the 2005 Words of the Year let’s look at some past year’s winners:

** 1990 **

Word of the Year: bushlips, insincere political rhetoric.
Most Likely to Succeed: (tie) notebook PC, a portable personal computer weighting 4-8 pounds, and rightsizing, adjusting the size of a staff by laying off employees.
Most Useful: (tie) technostupidity, loss of ability through dependence on machines, and potty parity, equalization of toilet facilities for the sexes.
Most Original: voice merging, the oral tradition of African-American preachers using another’s words.
Most Amazing: bungee jumping, jumping from a high platform with elastic cables on the feet.
Most Unnecessary: peace dividend, anticipated saving in military spending due to improved relations with the Soviet Union.
Most Outrageous: politically correct, PC, adhering to principles of left-wing social concern.

** 1995 **

Word of the Year: (tie) World Wide Web on the Internet, and newt, to make aggressive changes as a newcomer.
Most Likely to Succeed: World Wide Web and its variants the Web, WWW, W3.
Most Useful: E.Q. (for Emotional Quotient), the ability to manage one’s emotions.
Most Original: postal or go postal, to act irrationally, often violently, from stress at work.
Most Unnecessary: Vanna White shrimp, large shrimp for the restaurant market.
Most Outrageous: starter marriage, a first marriage not expected to be the last.
Most Euphemistic: patriot, one who believes in using force of arms if necessary to defend individual rights against the government.

More recent ones include:

1997 Most Original: prairie dogging, popping one’s head above an office cubicle for the sake of curiosity.
1998 Most Original: multislacking, playing at the computer when one should be working.
1999 Most Outrageous: humanitarian intervention, use of military force for humanitarian purposes.
2000 Word of the Year: chad, a small scrap of paper punched from a voting card.
2001 Most Useful: second-hand speech, cell phone conversations heard by others in public places.
2002 Most Likely to Succeed: blog, from “weblog,” a website of personal events, comments, and links.
2003 Most Creative: freegan, person who eats only free food.
2004 Most Euphemistic: badly sourced, false.

And now, without further ado, here are the winners of the 2005 Words of the Year:

Word of the Year: truthiness, the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.
Most Useful: podcast, a digital feed containing audio or video files for downloading to a portable MP3 player. From the brand name MP3 player iPod + broadcast.
Most Creative: whale tail, the appearance of thong or g-string underwear above the waistband of pants, shorts, or a skirt. Also known as a longhorn.
Most Unnecessary: K Fed, Kevin Federline, Mr. Britney Spears.
Most Outrageous: crotchfruit, a child; children. Perhaps inspired by the expression the fruit of one’s loins, this term began among proponents of child-free public spaces, but has since spread to parents who use it jocularly.
Most Euphemistic: internal nutrition, force-feeding a prisoner against his or her will.
Best Tom-Cruise-Related Word: jump the couch, to exhibit strange or frenetic behavior. Inspired by the couchbouncing antics of Tom Cruise on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in May. It derives from an earlier term, jump the shark, meaning to (irretrievably) diminish in quality; to outlast public interest or popular support.
Most Likely to Succeed: sudoku, a number puzzle in which numbers 1 through 9 must be placed into a grid of cells so that each row or column contains only one of each. The current craze started in Japan, caught on in the U.K. in 2004, and then exploded in the U.S. in 2005.
Least Likely to Succeed: pope-squatting, registering a domain name that is the same of a new pope before the pope chooses his new name in order to profit from it.
My personal favorite: muffin top, the bulge of flesh hanging over the top of low-rider jeans. Ugh. May this be never seen by my eyes again in my lifetime.