Friday, December 4, 2009

Words of the Year, Over the Years

Published by the American Dialect Society

* 1990: bushlips (similar to "bullshit" – stemming from President George H. W. Bush's 1988 "Read my lips: no new taxes" broken promise)
* 1991: mother of all (as in Saddam Hussein's foretold "Mother of all battles")
* 1992: Not! (meaning "just kidding")
* 1993: information superhighway
* 1994: cyber, morph (to change form)
* 1995: web and (to) newt (to act aggressively as a newcomer, like Speaker Newt Gingrich during the Contract with America)
* 1996: mom (as in "soccer mom")
* 1997: millennium bug
* 1998: e- (as in "e-mail")
* 1999: Y2K



* 2000: chad (from the 2000 presidential election controversy in Florida)
* 2001: 9-11
* 2002: weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)
* 2003: metrosexual
* 2004: red state, blue state, purple state (from the United States presidential election, 2004)
* 2005 : truthiness (popularized on The Colbert Report)
* 2006: plutoed (demoted or devalued, as happened to the former planet Pluto)
* 2007: subprime (an adjective used to describe a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage, or investment)
* 2008: bailout (in the specific sense of the rescue by the government of companies on the brink of failure, including large players in the banking industry.)
* 2009: Unfriend (to remove someone as a "friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook.)


source: Wikipedia, recyclable fountain of the collective consciousness post-2000

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