[lg policy] WTF is 2010 Word of the Year

Chris Allen Thomas chthomas at DOLPHIN.UPENN.EDU
Mon Dec 27 15:10:25 UTC 2010


what the F***??

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christina Paulston" <paulston at pitt.edu>
To: "Language Policy List" <lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu>
Sent: Sunday, December 26, 2010 4:03:47 PM
Subject: Re: [lg policy] WTF is 2010 Word of the Year



So what is WTF an acronym of?  Christina 










On Dec 25, 2010, at 11:10 PM, Dennis Baron wrote: 



There's a new post on the  Web of Language : 


WTF is 2010 Word of the Year 


Each December the Web of Language chooses one word or phrase which best exemplifies the spirit of the year gone by. It may be a new word, like "refudiate," chosen as word of the year this year by the Oxford American Dictionary, or an old one, like "austerity," Merriam-Webster's choice. It could be a word that lasts: "blog" and "information superhighway" were words of the year. But it could be an obscure word as well: "locavore," for example, which few people had a taste for, or worse yet, "plutoed," a word with the visibility of a very dim comet (neither word was Web of Language approved). Then there was "roadside bomb." That morbid phrase appeared in so many daily headlines about the War in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 that it was the Web of Language word of the year two years running.  


WTF, this year’s word of the year, rolls up into a single acronym the popular reaction to the most salient events of the year gone by. It's the perfect response to just about anything. Exit polls taken during the mid-term elections in November showed that, regardless of age, gender, economic status, sexual preference, or party affiliation, the most common voter reaction before, during, and after the election was, “WTF?” The word had an even greater following among nonvoters, who frequently used WTF as their excuse for staying away from the polls. 

read the rest of this post on the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/weblan 








____________________ 

Dennis Baron 
Professor of English and Linguistics 
Department of English                       
University of Illinois   
608 S. Wright St. 
Urbana, IL 61801                                                


office: 217-244-0568 
fax: 217-333-4321 


http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron 


read the Web of Language: 
http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage 










_______________________________________________ 
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list 
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu 
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list 


_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list

-- 




PhD Candidate, Educational Linguistics 
Graduate School of Education 
University of Pennsylvania 

LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisallenthomas 

  

_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list



More information about the Lgpolicy-list mailing list