[lg policy] WTF is 2010 Word of the Year

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

WTF is 2010 Word of the Year

Each December the Web of Language chooses one word or phrase which best exemplifies the spirit of the year gone by. It may be a new word, like "refudiate," chosen as word of the year this year by the Oxford American Dictionary, or an old one, like "austerity," Merriam-Webster's choice. It could be a word that lasts: "blog" and "information superhighway" were words of the year. But it could be an obscure word as well: "locavore," for example, which few people had a taste for, or worse yet, "plutoed," a word with the visibility of a very dim comet (neither word was Web of Language approved). Then there was "roadside bomb." That morbid phrase appeared in so many daily headlines about the War in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 that it was the Web of Language word of the year two years running. 
WTF, this year’s word of the year, rolls up into a single acronym the popular reaction to the most salient events of the year gone by. It's the perfect response to just about anything. Exit polls taken during the mid-term elections in November showed that, regardless of age, gender, economic status, sexual preference, or party affiliation, the most common voter reaction before, during, and after the election was, “WTF?” The word had an  even greater following among nonvoters, who frequently used WTF as their excuse for staying away from the polls.

read the rest of this post on the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/weblan

____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English                    
University of Illinois 
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801                                               

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage








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