[lg policy] WTF is 2010 Word of the Year

[Christina Paulston]

So what is WTF an acronym of?  Christina





On Dec 25, 2010, at 11:10 PM, Dennis Baron wrote:

> 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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>
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