The Dictionary of Change

Every year, with a certain regularity, various newspapers, publishing houses, bloggers and other organs of social commentary like to announce their words of the year: lexical items which, for their editors, embody some truth about language, current affairs, popular culture, technology or similar from the year in question. The most widely publicised of these (and among the most thoughtfully chosen) are typically those by lexicographers and linguists, especially those by the New Oxford American Dictionary (which picked ‘unfriend’ as its word for 2009) and the American Dialect Society (which picked ‘tweet’). These picks are always fun, even where they are less insightful than the NOAD and ADS selections. As well as telling us a little about trends in pop culture, their endurance reflects both an interest in the formation and propagation of new (or newish) words and a continued belief that there is an intimate, or at least interesting, connection between language change and culture change.

Read the rest of this entry »