Wordorigins.org

This Washington Post article really captures the spirit and atmosphere of the American Dialect Society’s word of the year selection. Dan Zak obviously has a keen eye for the human aspects behind a story.

It has a couple of faults. Normally, any article that quotes Paul J.J. Payack as some kind of expert isn’t worth the reader’s time, but in this case the strength of the rest of the article overcomes this lapse in judgment. And he gets the title Jesse Sheidlower’s excellent book wrong. It’s The F-word, not F***. (I’ll bet someone told him the book was titled “the F-word” and he took that to be a euphemism on the speaker’s part, and then there was a failure to check his facts. One of the problems with laying off copyeditors is an increase in factual errors in reporting.)

The accompanying video is kind of interesting. It’s various linguists talking about their personal choices for word of the year.

On Friday, 8 January, at its annual meeting in Baltimore the American Dialect Society voted for tweet as the word of the year for 2009 and google as the word of the decade.

The “word” in word of the year is interpreted as “vocabulary item,” and phrases are also in the running. The word does not have to be new, but only newly prominent or notable during the past year. While informed by academic expertise, the selection is done in and for fun and is not an official induction of words into the language, but as an appreciation of the diversity and inventiveness of the English language.

This, while preliminary, is pretty amazing. Scientists have been able to synthesize speech from the electrical impulses produced by the human brain at near conversational speeds and with fair accuracy. A blog post about it is here. The research paper can be found here.

300 quatloos for the newcomer!

Tip o’ the hat to the Lousy Linguist.

Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett give a list of buzzwords of 2009 in the NY Times.

Back in February 2008, Anne Trubek wrote an article for Good advocating that penmanship no longer be taught in schools. What is surprising is the vehemence with which people reacted to the idea that we should stop ranking children on what is an antiquated and irrelevant skill. Over 2,000 people wrote comments in complaint—some 700 of which had to be deleted for violating standards of decency. Would these people also have us require all children to learn horsemanship as well?

Trubek has followed up with a longer article on the history of handwriting. Her original article is here.