"full of win"

[Grant Barrett]

On May 30, 2009, at 22:47, Neal Whitman wrote:

> I think it's a more general process of turning any part of speech
> into a
> mass noun. I've heard it with an adjective, when someone told me
> earlier
> this year that she'd met a celebrity and he was "completely made of
> awesome." I also heard it with an interjection in the movie _Juno_,
> when the
> title character emphatically rejects a pass someone makes at her,
> telling
> him it's "a great big bag of No!"

Yes, this is something I had an entry for when I wrote the NYT 2008
buzzwords list. Alas, the editors cut it, though I was able to
shoehorn a bit of the notion into the item Arnold quoted.

Every year I'm caught in the old trap: if they haven't heard of
something on my list, then they think it can't be genuine. If they
have heard of it, then they think it's old hat. Then they suggest I
include words or lexical items that they themselves noticed in the
week before the piece is edited because those items feel both new and
genuine to them.

I sometimes prevail and am able to persuade them to leave items in (or
out) but they are the New York Times and I am an outsider of low
status so they win most of the time.

Grant Barrett
gbarrett at worldnewyork.org

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