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.

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Climate and other gates

There can be something a bit precocious and annoying about new words, can’t there? There’s also no shortage of them: it seems to be a sport among journalists and tech people, in particular, to come up with new coinages. Few of them stick.

In my post on heatist, though, I made the point that new words, even if they don’t last, can tell us a lot about the attitudes of the people who coined them. One way of finding those attitudes is to look for meaningful similarities to existing words. Linguists call these groupings of similar words classes. Classes may group words by their forms (often called lexical or morphological classes): words ending in -ing, for example, or words than pluralize in -en (e.g. ox, child). They may also group words by their functions: the parts of speech are classes. They may even group words by their meanings: thesauruses are lists of quite tightly-defined semantic classes.

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A note on ‘heatist’

Andrew Gilligan’s Telegraph piece on some of the operating costs of putting on the Copenhagen climate summit introduced me to a new word in its description of the climate protests taking place in the city.

In the city’s famous anarchist commune of Christiania this morning, among the hash dealers and heavily-graffitied walls, they started their two-week “Climate Bottom Meeting,” complete with a “storytelling yurt” and a “funeral of the day” for various corrupt, “heatist” concepts such as “economic growth”.

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When do people start planning for Thanksgiving?

Today is Thanksgiving in the USA and for Americans everywhere. So to celebrate, despite the fact that keyword tracking is at the nursery end of computational linguistics, let’s see when people start searching for and talking about Thanksgiving online.

Google searches (suggesting people are getting down to some planning) start to rise in early October, then spike into mid-November. The long view first:

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A wordcrunching manifesto

There’s been a gap in posting to this blog as I’ve been moving from London to Cape Town. There are also a few changes. From now on, posts will be:

a) shorter;
b) more frequent; and
c) more focused on language and communications.

As well as being a strategic planner, I’m a linguist, so rather than writing Just Another Strategic Planning Blog, I’ll be trying to take a recognisable ‘language angle’ on things.

Other than that, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s still just a blog.

And, in true communications fashion, with the new focus comes a new name. So goodbye Common Parlance, and hello Wordcrunching.

If it contains numbers, it must be an insight

Looking for crime statistics the other day, I came across an article 
from the Evening Standard in 2007, whose headline told
me:

Average age of murdered teenagers is just 16

Given that we’re talking about people who aged between 13 and 19, you
wonder what the authors of the piece thought their average age might
be.
 
And, as if to labour the point, we later find out…

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Just because you read it on a blog doesn’t mean it’s not rubbish

Dave Trott at CST Advertising thinks he knows about the origins of on one’s tod, meaning on one’s own. What he shows with his post is that a) he doesn’t, and b) he cares more about winning arguments than being right.

In fairness, that’s his point. The blog’s argument, which is ultimately about advertising, is that in an ad pitch ‘whoever wins makes the best argument’, and that ‘all that wins is the best argument, not necessarily the best ad’. This is probably true, and he concludes quite neatly:

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