my personal woty

ronbutters at AOL.COM ronbutters at AOL.COM
Thu Jan 12 22:11:00 UTC 2006 

<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><HTML><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2">I suppose the reason that "roadside bomb" is not in dictionaries is that it is almost totally transparent. If you know what "roadside" means and what "bomb" means, you know what "roadside bomb" means. "Dog food" gets 2.400,000 Google hits, but it isn't in NOAD.<BR>

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In a message dated 1/11/06 10:26:24 PM, debaron at UIUC.EDU writes:<BR>

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<BLOCKQUOTE CITE STYLE="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px" TYPE="CITE"></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Geneva" FAMILY="SANSSERIF" SIZE="2">Speaking of truthiness, when NCTE gave Jon Stewart the George Orwell <BR>

Award for Excellence in Analyzing public discourse, he totally <BR>

ignored us, so whatever you think of truthiness, at least Stephen <BR>

Colbert acknowledged the gesture. My own candidate for WOTY for the <BR>

past 2 years running has been roadside bomb, a suggestion that no one <BR>

picks up on (not found in dictionaries, btw). See the following for <BR>

the google count (as of mid-December) and the Lexis/Nexis count for <BR>

Nov-Dec.:<BR>

<BR>

Roadside Bomb: The Word of the Year for 2005<BR>

<BR>

by Dennis Baron<BR>

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The word of the year for 2005 – actually a phrase –  is roadside <BR>

bomb. It was my choice for word of the year for 2004, and in the <BR>

absence of an exit strategy for the war in Iraq, it looks to be the <BR>

word of the year for 2006 as well.<BR>

<BR>

Although it’s not in any dictionary, roadside bomb is not a new <BR>

phrase. It appears in a 1979 AP story about Basque terrorists, and <BR>

roadside bombs were popular with insurgents in Lebanon and Bosnia. <BR>

“Roadside bomb” may not be as old as the related “car bomb,” used in <BR>

Northern Ireland in 1972, or “suicide bomber,” with a destructive <BR>

history going back at least to 1941. Nor is it as popular on the <BR>

Internet. Googling “roadside bomb” nets 1,010,000 hits, a three-fold <BR>

jump since last year. But car bombs are stronger, at over 3 million, <BR>

and suicide bombers lead the hit parade, with more than 3 Å,
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