By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 9, 2010; C01
BALTIMORE -- "Anyone for 'sexting'?" asks the 69-year-old man in the navy blazer and brown loafers.
"Well if you give me your number," comes a voice from the crowd, which erupts in laughter.
Bunch of comedians, these linguists and lexicographers. They've crammed themselves in a dim, beige, boxy meeting room at the Hilton to vote on a word of the year and a word of the decade, a solemn task that falls to just about everyone these days.
Other outlets have already named words of the year for 2009 -- Merriam-Webster picked "admonish" (huh?) and the Oxford English Dictionary went with "unfriend" (hrmph) -- but the 121-year-old American Dialect Society thinks of itself as the granddaddy of them all, the first and last word in words of the year. Its hour-long quest must yield two words that are accurate, exciting and durable (never mind that their first-ever word of the year, in 1990, was the now-regrettable "bushlips"). Two words must satisfy both the crusty generation of veteran scholars and the giddy linguistic students whose jargon is a step ahead. It's a tricky exercise, and the result always feels slightly off, given that words are evolving at a frenzied pace and everyone has become his own lexicographer with his own definitions.
There's no smaller time capsule than a single word. In 2000, the American Dialect Society picked "web" to represent the 1990s, "jazz" for the 20th century and "she" for the millennium. Ten letters can evoke an entire epoch.
This past year can be distilled into single words using the top look-ups on Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, which gets 1.3 billion page views a year. "Empathy" shot up during the Sonia Sotomayor hearings. "Philanderer" was a hit-magnet during the Mark Sanford confessions. Michael Jackson's death sent the world scrambling for "emaciated."
The top look-ups are the linguistic nerve endings of people's curiosities at any given moment, says Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster. He regularly tweets the top look-ups to his 2,000 followers. Most recent blockbuster: "indigenous," which has trended since the premiere of the movie "Avatar."
Making these distinctions is "a way to have stillness in the midst of chaos," says Paul J.J. Payack, president and chief word analyst for the Global Language Monitor, whose media-analysis software made "Twitter" the word of 2009 and "global warming" the word of the decade. "You can take a look at a group of words and say, 'These defined what happened.' "
Merriam-Webster adds 100 words to its database each year. Urban Dictionary draws 2,000 reader submissions a day. Global Language Monitor calculates that a new English-language word is born every 98 minutes and that 1.58 billion people are re-sculpting English as they use it as a universal linguistic currency.
"Language has been going to hell since forever," Lynch says. "Let's not worry about English. It's been doing fine for 1,500 years and it's going to outlive us all."
Steve Kleinedler has a tattoo of a phonetic vowel chart on his back. He yanks up his shirt to reveal the spider-webby design between his shoulder blades. He got the tattoo three weeks ago, which left time for it to heal before the Linguistic Society of America's conference, which started Thursday and provides the stage for the American Dialect Society's votes.
"Stylistically I think it looks interesting," says Kleinedler, 43, an editor at the American Heritage Dictionary. "It's got symbols. I'm a big font geek. And it speaks directly to my job."
Linguists' meet-and-geekIn the behavioral spectrum of American conferencing, the linguists and lexicographers fall on the social end, confides a waiter at the hotel's "tavern." They gab. "They're not like the scientists, who sit alone and order coffee without looking up," the waiter says. "And they linger."
In meeting rooms at the hotel, they ramble about Vedic Sanskrit and Oregon English and chide one another for talking too fast. The lobby echoes with chatter about clitics and fricatives and vowel fission. Conclusions are reached about Northern Virginia (natives have begun to speak like they're from Ohio rather than the South) and the effect of first names on longevity (people whose names begin with "D" seem to die sooner than others). Talks are given on "Learning to Talk Like a Heterosexual" and "The Effect on Dialect Features Under Intoxication" and how "Abbrevs Is Totes the Lang of the Fuche."
The gimmicky sideshow of this syntactic circus is the word of the year/decade debate and vote. It's the conference equivalent of an open bar: a free-for-all, slap-happy slugfest with words and phrases instead of booze.
Thirty students and scholars show up for Thursday's nominating session in a meeting room. They jaw about the possible displacement of "search" by "Google," how the flu-prevention term "Dracula sneeze" translates into American Sign Language. They argue the merits of "Salahi" as a verb and the pronunciation of H1N1 as "heinie." Then comes the slightly more awesome task of nominating words of the decade. A blue PowerPoint slide pops onto a screen and asks a simple question.
So who were we and what were we in the last decade?
"Confused," quips a man in a bow tie at the back of the room.
Celebration of wordsThe man in the bow tie is a 68-year-old dictionary editor from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and he stops by a table in the hotel tavern Thursday night to greet four fellow wordmen. The average age at the table is about 60, and there's a preponderance of tweed, cufflinks and monogrammed dress shirts. The 41-year-old Oxford English Dictionary editor literally wrote the book on the F word, and Allan Metcalf, executive director of the American Dialect Society since 1980, literally wrote the book on "OK" (subtitle: "America's Greatest Invention").
Sipping white wine, the men muse on the word of the year, which was a publicity stunt initially -- the society was tired of meeting in the shadow of the Modern Language Association -- but grew into an important tradition that has been copycatted over 20 years.
"It's a celebration of words," says Bill Kretzschmar, an English professor at the University of Georgia.
"It's exploration," says the dictionary editor from Poughkeepsie, Dave Barnhart.
"It's like all things in academia: the lower the stakes, the larger the passion," jokes Ron Butters, an emeritus professor of English at Duke.
"No, it's not, it's important," counters Richard Bailey, another professor emeritus, from the University of Michigan. "Language is an index of our social identity."
"The point of the word of the year thing is that choosing words reflects reality," says Jesse Sheidlower, the author of "F***." "If you choose wrong, you've failed in some important way."
At the opposite end of the hotel, in a noisy lounge, linguist students from William & Mary drain their martini glasses and hoot and holler about the word of the year. They think a variation of "Kanye" should've been in the running and they are irritated that "unfriend" came up as a possible nominee. The Oxford English Dictionary already made that blunder.
"We make fine semantic decisions that our parents would never make," says Kira Allmann, 22, a linguistics major. " 'Un' is like 'opposite' whereas 'de' connotes 'taking away.' "
"You're dealing with older white men from academia," says Erica Wicks, 22, earlier in the day, just after the nominating session. She and Elyssa Winzeler, 24, are editors of the Linguist List in Ann Arbor, Mich.
"I wonder how often 'Dracula sneeze' is used by younger people," Winzeler says.
"People who are 40 years older than us say they use 'search' more than 'Google,' but we don't," Wicks says. "But -- what's the line? History is made by those who show up."
And the winner is . . .
"I'd like to speak against all of these arguments for 'tweet' because they are all over 140 characters long," says someone back in that dim, beige, boxy room Friday evening, in which final arguments are made and raised hands are counted.
The jokes keep on coming. A couples therapist makes a case for "hiking the Appalachian trail" because she appreciates the euphemism, and her husband, with expert timing, stands up to second the motion. There's a posse of rebel linguists who won't let "sea kittens" and "Dracula sneeze" die. A gentleman in a gray suit argues against "H1N1" as word of the year because it would mean succumbing to the pork lobby. There are speeches against "9/11" as word of the decade because it would mean the terrorists win. Every two minutes someone shouts, "Fail!"
"I think my life has been more affected by 'Google' than '9/11,' " says a college student.
"People are currently tweeting that 'tweet' is being nominated for word of the year," observes someone else.
After much discussion, the final vote. A year and a decade, both recently laid to rest, receive the briefest kind of epitaph. The two words meant to evoke the feeling of this moment years from now: "tweet" for 2009 and "Google" for the Aughts.
After making some history, there's only one thing to do: pick up the free tote bag, head down the hall to the reception and suck down some chardonnay.
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