To Pluto or not to Pluto?
The American Dialect Society released the results of their "Word of the Year" vote on Friday. From the site:
"(The) Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just wordsbut phrases. The words or phrases do not have to be brand new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year, in the manner of Time magazine’s Person of the Year."
And the winner is:
to pluto/be plutoed: to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened
to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International
Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet.
The full press release is available on the site, which includes the complete list of nominations for categories such as Most Useful, Most Creative, Most Unnecessary and Most Outrageous. It's definitely worth a read, as it is a hilarious display of tongue-in-cheek informal lexicography. For example:
- sudden jihad syndrome: an outburst of violence from a seemingly stable and normal Muslim.
- Fox lips: lips colored and lined with makeup to seem more prominent, said of female anchors on Fox News.
- Cambodian accessory: Angelina Jolie’s adopted child who is Cambodian.
Labels: language
posted by Sharon @ 10:17 PM
2 Comments:
When I saw this on the news yesterday I just about puked. How many people had heard the phrase "to be plutoed" until this dumb story came about? None.
This is an attention grab and nothing else. Shows how crappy our news media are though...that they pick the story up without a second thought.
It sounds like the ADS simply ropes together the year's most popular and fantastic stories in news media and culture, then creates words and phrases from it - I don't think it's supposed to be taken as seriously as say, Webster's "Word of the Year." I think of it as a fun filler story.
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