belated WOTY

[David Bowie]

From: "Miller, Jerry" <MILLERJ at FRANKLINCOLL.EDU>


: I'm sure I am very late in chiming in on the Word of the Year (and I am
: probably repeating what someone else suggested but I missed), but, in a
: mental flash of lightning, it dawned on me what the WOTY had to be. That
: would be "bad" used as a noun, as in (cybertalk) "my bad."
: This all came to me when I heard a sports announcer for one of the bowl
: games on TV use it to explain why a player tapped his own chest after a
: play was botched. It gets very scary when Internet shorthand edges toward
: standard usage.

I don't know that i'd think of this as a WotY candidate for 1999 or 2000,
since in my observation it actually seems to be *decreasing* in general
usage since it was all over the place (in the mid-Atlantic, at least) in the
mid-80s (predating its use as 'net shorthand, BTW).

David Bowie                                       Department of English
Assistant Professor                            Brigham Young University
db.list at pmpkn.net              http://humanities.byu.edu/faculty/bowied
   The opinions stated here are not necessarily those of my employer