RESULTS! ARE! IN! Well, the American Dialect Society has chosen its Word of the Year for 2004. I'm disappointed that my favorites were barely represented in the voting, but the results are still fun to consider.

So the Word of the Year is red state, blue state, purple state. That's a fine selection, certainly common parlance since the 1980 presidential election (when I first noticed the "red" and "blue" designation). From what I've been reading, the "red" and "blue" code system may go back at least a century, though "purple state" seems to be a much more recent coinage, a dark cherry newly placed on a red and blue sundae.

A noteworthy runner-up was mash-up, defined as "a blend of two songs or albums into a single cohesive musical work." I heard some great ones in 2004. "Mash-up" was a two-time loser, coming in second to "red, blue, and purple states," in the run-off for Most Likely to Succeed.

The really big news might be that santorum ("the frothy residue of lube and fecal matter which sometimes is the result of anal sex") won Most Outrageous. The term was coined by sex columnist Dan Savage and his readers in 2003 in "honor" of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. Santorum's dream is to gain political capital at the expense of sexual privacy in the United States; Savage's dream is for "santorum" to enter the language and come up whenever anyone Googles the Senator's name.

In the category of Most Creative, the winner was pajamahadeen (bloggers who challenge and fact-check traditional media"), which defeated lawn mullet ("a yard neatly mowed in front but unmowed in the back") in a run-off. That's fine too, but it's a shame that the tersely functional (if possibly bigoted) military slang term hillbilly armor ("scavenged materials used by soldiers for improvised bullet-proofing and vehicle hardening, esp. in Iraq") was overshadowed in the process. (I sincerely apologize to anyone who considers the use of "hillbilly" in "hillbilly armor" to be derogatory. Not everyone realizes it, but "hillbilly" is, in fact, used harshly in some parts of the United States.)