The most annoying thing about this time of year is the endless recaps, reviews and predictions for the new year. Yawn.<\/p>\n
The best thing about this time of year is the linguistic analyses of word trends in the past year. I am such a word geek!<\/p>\n
For instance, we have from the New York Times<\/em>, this capricious and completely subjective list of some of the best slang of 2007<\/a>. From LOLCATS to astronaut diapers, I’m feeling mighty hip to have at least a passing familiarity with these and about half a dozen other terms on the list. There’s plenty here for us online obsessives, quelle surprise<\/em>. I liked these ones: <\/p>\n Life-streaming<\/strong>: “to make a thorough, continuous digital record of your life in video, sound, pictures and print.” (But, erm, isn’t this already called “blogging”?)<\/p>\n E-mail bankruptcy<\/strong>: “what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them.” (Ha! I’d been doing this, rather surreptitiously and with great guilt. Somehow I feel more justified in doing it knowing it’s enough of an epidemic to have an official term for it!) <\/p>\n Bacn<\/strong>: “impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like.”<\/p>\n Kinnear<\/strong>: “to take a candid photograph surreptitiously, especially by holding the camera low and out of the line of sight. Coined in August by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee of the Yarn Harlot blog when she attempted to take a photograph during an encounter with the actor Greg Kinnear at an airport.” (I favour this one because I love the idea of a blogger coining a word that makes an NYT year-end list, especially one as clever and likeable – and Canadian! – as the Yarn Harlot<\/a>!) <\/p>\n So now that you can talk the hip talk of 2008, make sure you don’t make the faux pas of using one of the Banished Words of 2008<\/a>, as compiled annually by Lake Superior State University (I love this list and blogged about it in 2007<\/a> and 2006<\/a> too!)<\/p>\n This one pains me, because my speech is peppered with some of these terms. Heck, “back in the day” is the title of my archives; I’ve been known to utter an appreciative “Sweeeeet!” or two; and, “Webinar” is a huge part of what I’m doing at work right now. But I’m happy to bid a permanent adieu to “emotional”, “under the bus” and especially “random” – that last one has always grated on my nerves.<\/p>\n The comments have always been fun on this post. What words or phrases would YOU banish this year?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The most annoying thing about this time of year is the endless recaps, reviews and predictions for the new year. Yawn. The best thing about this time of year is the linguistic analyses of word trends in the past year. I am such a word geek! For instance, we have from the New York Times, … Continue reading “Best and worst of words, 2008 edition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-the-universe-and-everything"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}