COMING SOON: WORD OF THE YEAR 2006. As you might recall, the Word of the Year 2005 was truthiness, according to the American Dialect Society. What about 2006? We'll know soon--on January 5!

Here are some of the findings to date. I don't have the juice to define all of them here, but you should be able to use the links to look them up. It's worth the effort!

At the New Oxford American Dictionary, the words are

carbon neutral
CSA (community-supported agriculture)
DRM (digital rights management)
dwarf planet
elbow bump
fishapod
funner
ghostriding
pregaming

At Webster's New World Dictionary the staff picks are

Crackberry
netroots
neuroeconomics
carbon footprint

On Lynne Murphy's blog separated by a common language, the words are

muffin top (American English to British English)
wanker (British English to American English)
Googleschaden (reader coinage)

And then there are these nominations from American Dialect Society insiders Grant Barrett and Wayne Glowka.

From Grant Barrett:

anchor baby/anchor child
chief memory officer
data Valdez
digiroid
Fox lips
God wink/God breeze
human directional
Hummer house
husband-sitter/hubby-sitter
Johnny Jihad
Katrina brain
marble ceiling
Nork
seven-thousand-mile screwdriver
sharrow
sneeze
spaghetti bowl
subzero
sudden jihad syndrome

From Wayne Glowka:

Axis Envy
blue-dog Democrat
Brokeback
Cambodian accessories
car-parazzi
chesticles
consensus science
CrackBerry addict
cut and jog
ecosexual
entreprenegro
foleyed
Fed-Ex
gauging
grill
lyric malfunction
m-, man-, men- compounds
Mel Gibson
new castrati
nicotini
rainbow sheep
sock puppet
speaker-in-waiting
spew
tramp stamp
White House Reporter Syndrome

On the mailing list for the American Dialect Society, these seem to have some buzz:

carbon neutral
decider
macaca
NSFW
Plutoed

As for my own, supremely uninformed, "nominees"(not that I actually get to participate), here goes:

dataveillance (surveillance via data trail)

firecrotch (Most Inflammatory Vulgarism)

macaca (Most Reviled Revival)

perfect storm (various factors coming together to create a bigger situation; common inside the Beltway)

Pluto (Most Dramatic Redefinition)

twatwaffle (Vaguest Vulgarism)

willie pep (Most Neglected Useful Expression; "The act of two people attempting to go in opposite directions who wind up blocking each other's path by spontaneously moving back and forth rapidly, but always remaining directly in front of the other person."--Frank Gannon; word named after featherweight boxer Willie Pep, who died in November; see below for video)

YouTube (or You) (Words Whose Time Has Come; notable in that "You" is the sort of Person of the Year choice that Time had avoided for decades...until 2006)

Here's Willie Pep via YouTube:



Source