political catchphrases of the year

[Chris Waigl]

On 20 Dec 2008, at 18:01, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>
> Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic has an online poll for the most
> memorable political catchphrase of 2008:
>
> http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/12/yearend_poll_political_catch_p.php
>
> The nominees (none of which made Fred Shapiro's list of the top 10
> quotes of the year) are:
>
> "Fire It Up. Ready to Go." [sic]
> "Yes We Can."
> "Therefore, I'm suspending my campaign...."
> "I'm in it to win it."
> "A F*$)^* Valuable Thing."

As an aside, "Yes, we can" made the German (Gesellschaft für deutsche
Sprache) Wort des Jahres shortlist, at place 10. (Also, in German,
'Wort' can also mean '(idiomatic) expression' or '(catch)phrase', in
addition to 'word', and the two senses take different plural forms
('Worte' vs 'Wörter'. This is a bit of a grey area, though, as the
German list definitely may contain short phrases, but you'd still talk
about "Wörter des Jahres".)

Best,

Chris Waigl
hoping that mail.app encodes the iso-8859-1 Umlaute in an ADS-L
compatible way

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