YET MORE WORDS OF THE YEAR

YET MORE WORDS OF THE YEAR

In early January each year, members of the American Dialect Society vote at their Annual Meeting for their
words of the year in various categories. The winners this time were:

Most Useful: "climate canary", an organism or species whose poor health or declining numbers hint at a larger environmental catastrophe to come;

Most Creative: "lactard", someone who is lactose-intolerant;

Most Unnecessary: "SuriKat", the supposed nickname of the baby girl of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes;

Most Outrageous: "Cambodian accessory", Angelina Jolie's adopted child (who is Cambodian);

Most Euphemistic: "waterboarding", the US interrogation technique in which the subject is immobilised and doused with water to simulate drowning;

Most Likely to Succeed: "YouTube", as a verb, to use the YouTube Web site or to have a video of oneself posted on the site;

Least Likely to Succeed: "grup", a Generation-Xer who doesn't act his age (the word is said to derive from an ancient episode of Star Trek in which it was a mangled form of "grown-up").

The overall winner of the Word of the Year was: "to pluto" or "to be plutoed": to demote or devalue
someone or something (you may recall this happened to the former planet Pluto when the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet).

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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 522 Saturday 13 January 2007
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK