word of the year

[Dennis Baron]

As some ADS-ers make their way to Boston for the annual meeting and
the annual election of the word of the year, I thought that since I
can't make it-yet again-I'd send along my comments on woty for your
information.

Best, Dennis

The Word of the Year, 2003
by Dennis Baron

I am pleased to announce my choice for word of the year for 2003.
WOTY, the Word of the Year, is not as glamorous as the Oscars, not as
cutthroat as the Booker, not at silly as the Daytime Emmys. There's
no money attached to the word of the year, no gold statuette or
platinum CD, no certificate suitable for framing. The word of the
year may not even rate a dictionary appearance. Nonetheless,
competition is fierce, for the word of the year reflects the state of
the language and, by extension, the state of the world.
        Last year, the war in Iraq generated the word of the year:
weapons of mass destruction (phrases may also win). But since there
were no weapons of mass destruction, this year's entries from
Iraq-Saddamize, Iraqification, and roadside bomb-have had their
contender status downgraded from orange to yellow. Spider hole-the
excavation where Saddam Hussein was found hiding-might have had a
chance for word of the year, but since it first appeared in World War
II, it can only enter in the category "best revival." It looks like
Iraq won't be the source of this year's word of the year unless
someone can figure out how to use Halliburton as a verb.
        The world of gender produced some good candidates for word of
the year. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court thrust gay
marriage onto the national consciousness in November when it decided
that same-sex partners could not be excluded from the benefits,
legal, conjugal, and taxable, that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
affords to married couples.
        Gay marriage is controversial enough that conservatives want
to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban it. Less likely to raise
hackles is another WOTY possible, metrosexual, an urban straight male
who is unashamedly into fashion, food, and personal grooming.
Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean acknowledged his
metrosexuality, but later backed away from the term, claiming he
wasn't sure what it meant.
        Perhaps the most successful gender phrase of the year has
been queer eye, from the Bravo cable network show "Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy," in which a group of five gay men turn a volunteer
Oscar Madison into a metrosexual. So far there have been no threats
from the right to make queer eye unconstitutional, though a group of
fashion-challenged gays is suing in Massachusetts for equal access to
makeovers.
        That brings us to the winner, this year's word of the year.
It's a phrase that's been lurking in the background for over a
decade, but like a film that opens on Christmas so that it can make
the Oscar deadline, this phrase suddenly hit everyone's lips on
December 22: it's mad cow.
        The radio announced news of the first U.S. cow to test
positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy just as I was dishing
up a nice sesame ginger beef stir fry. The sauce had just the right
amount of sherry, lots of fresh shaved ginger, roasted sesame seeds,
some perky fresh-squeezed lime, crisp straw mushrooms, whole baby
corn, and the thinnest slices of bully American beef, all on a bed of
wheat noodles which had been boiled for exactly three minutes and
then flash fried.
        We talked about mad cow disease all through dinner. A friend,
who was also cooking beef stir fry, called to say, "I told you so."
When we finished eating, all that remained was the
delicately-flavored beef, which we moved nervously around our plates
with our chopsticks.
        As we sit down to holiday meals, business lunches, and
midnight snacks, we face the daunting prospect that the anorexics had
it right: there is nothing safe to eat. Poultry harbors salmonella,
green onions give you hepatitis, fish is full of toxins, and pork
inspires so much terror that two of the world's major religions ban
it. It won't be long before scientists discover tofu fever. Once beef
merely clogged our arteries. Now it can make holes in our brains.
Beef may or may not continue to be what's for dinner in this country,
but it's clear that mad cow, the word of the year for 2003, will
dominate American dinner table conversation-and economic activity-for
much of the new year as well.

--
_______________
Dennis Baron
office: 217-244-0568
Professor of English and Linguistics        mobile: 217-840-0776
Department of English                                         fax: 217-333-4321
University of Illinois                          www.staff.uiuc.edu/~debaron
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, Illinois 61801