Top Words of 2010

Yep, it's officially list season and The Global Language Monitor (whatever that is) has announced that 'spillcam' is the Top Word of 2010 in its annual global survey of the English language.  The words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, so that'sapprox 1.58 billion speakers.

 

THE OFFICIAL TOP 10

10.  Simplexity – The paradox of simplifying complex ideas in order to make them easier to understand, the process of which only adds to their complexity. This just sounds like something Stepehn Colbert made up.

9.  Shellacking - President Obama’s description of the ‘old-fashioned thumpin’ in George W. Bush’s words, that Democrats received in the 2010 US Mid-term elections.

8.  3-D – Three-dimensional (as in movies) but also as a way of generally describing ‘robustness’ in products ie toothpaste can now apparently be a 3D experience.

7.  Snowmagedden (and ‘Snowpocalypse’) words used to describe the record snowfalls in the US East Coast and Northern Europe last winter.

6.   Deficit – A growing and possibly intractable problem for the economies of most of the developed world.

5.   Guido and Guidette — another repercussion of the Jersey Shore "situation.

4.  Refudiate — Conflation of “refute” and “repudiate” (un)officially coined by Sarah Palin.

3.  The Narrative – Though used at least since The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was written in 1845,  ‘The Narrative’ has recently been gaining traction in the political arena, replacing the need for a party’s platform. 

2.  Vuvuzela — Brightly colored plastic horns that came to prominence at the South African World Cup.

1.  Spillcam — The BP Spillcam instantly beamed the immensity of the Gulf Spill around the world to the dismay of environmentalists, BP’s PR staff and the President.