THE year’s end has come. As the hangover from January 1st recedes, it is time to work off another kind of hangover: a look back at the wonderful, weird and terrible things the English language did in 2013. At the end of the year, various dictionary-publishers, language societies and other assorted word-nerds published their “words of the year”. With what result?
Different outfits chose their words in different ways. Merriam-Webster, a dictionary-maker, chose the word that saw the biggest spike in online lookups. Unfortunately, that led to the boring triumph of “science”, which had a 176% jump. Merriam-Webster’s Peter Sokolowski gamely tried to explain our fascination with the meaning of “science”:
It is a word that is connected to broad cultural dichotomies: observation and intuition, evidence and tradition. A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, from climate change to educational policy. We saw heated debates about ‘phony’ science, or whether science held all the answers.
All true, but does any of this particularly scream “2013”?
The Oxford Dictionaries, a division of Oxford University Press, nailed the spirit of 2013 a little better by choosing “selfie”. For those who avoided the…Continue reading
from Prospero http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/01/word-year?fsrc=rss
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