Here are some words that dominated popular culture in Australia, the US and UK during the last year. Interesting for English, social science and popular culture classes!
Macquarie Word of the Year 2012 (Aust)
Announced today 6 Feb…..and the winner is….phantom vibration syndrome – an obsessional conviction that your phone has vibrated for an incoming call, when in fact it hasn’t.
Honourable mentions: crowdfunding, technomite, marngrook, First World problem.
People’s Choice winner: First World problem – a problem that relates to the affluent lifestyle of the First World eg. settling for plunger coffee when the espresso machine is broken.
Some category winners:
Technology: technomite – a young child who is adept in the use of digital media.
Internet: crowdfunding – obtaining small donations from individuals contacted through social networks, to fund a project.
Health: diabesity – obesity accompanied by diabetes.
Environment: green tape – bureaucratic regulations and paperwork deriving from environmental legislation.
Colloquial: wine flu – a hangover.
Sport: marngrook – an early influence on AFL, played by pre-European Aboriginal people.
See all shortlisted words in categories: http://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/anonymous@9c9986628003/-/p/dict/WOTY12/index_winner.html
Global Language Monitor
Their 13th annual global survey of the English language. Number of words in the English language: 1,019,729.6 (est. 1/1/13)
Top word: apocalypse
Top phrase: Gangnam Style
Top 20 list includes: meme; MOOC; the Cloud; hen (Swedish attempt to create a gender-neutral pronoun to replace him or her); obesogenic; omnishambles; hashtag; drones; superfood; fracking AND adorkable – the rise of the nerds – adorable dorks!
http://www.languagemonitor.com/number-of-words/words-of-the-year-2012/
American Dialect Society Word of the Year 2012
Winner: hashtag – a word or phrase preceded by a hash symbol, used on Twitter to mark a topic or make a commentary.
Runner-up: marriage equality. Also popular: YOLO ( You Only Live Once); * -(po)calypse, -(ma)geddon (hyperbolic combining forms for various catastrophes); Gangnam Style; fiscal cliff (threat of spending cuts and tax increases looming over end-of-year budget negotiations).
http://www.americandialect.org/hashtag-2012
Merriam-Webster (US) Words of the Year 2012
Based on the volume of user lookups at Merriam-Webster.com. The presidential election influence can be seen.
Joint winners: socialism and capitalism. The rest of the top 10: touché; bigot; marriage; democracy; professionalism; globalization; malarkey; schadenfreude; meme.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/2012words.htm
Oxford Dictionaries UK Word of the Year 2012
Winner: omnishambles – Coined by the writers of the satirical television programme The Thick Of It, an omnishambles is a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, and is characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.
Others considered: Eurogeddon, green-on-blue, pleb, to medal, mummy porn, e-rotica (the phenomenon was fuelled by a surge of erotic book sales on e-readers); second screening (the activity of watching television whilst simultaneously using a smartphone, laptop, etc., often so as to be able to use a social media site to post about what was happening).
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/uk-word-of-the-year-2012/
Oxford Dictionaries USA Word of the Year 2012
Winner: to GIF (verb) – to create a GIF file of an image or video sequence, especially relating to an event.
(The GIF is a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations. It turned 25 this year).
See the winning word revealed as a GIF: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/11/us-word-of-the-year-2012/
Other popular contenders: Eurogeddon; superstorm; YOLO; MOOC (Massive Open Online Course – a university course offered free of charge via the internet); homophobia; Higgs Boson.
In January the New York Public Library launched stereogranimator <http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/3-d-it-yourself-thanks-to-new-library-site/> allowing visitors to create GIFs of 40,000+ digitized stereographs from its collection and share them.