Category: American Dialect Society

Choice of Words

1/5/2019

From our resident logophile, Angstrom Dickinson:

The American Dialect Society chose “tender age shelters” as their Word of the Year (WotY) for 2018 last night thus bringing the annual Word of the Year season to a close. Information about the ADS vote is HERE.

The Word of the Year season opened in November when Collins Dictionary announced “single-use” as their word of the year. Other dictionaries followed suit with their announcements of these choices:

Dictionary.com

Misinformation

Cambridge Dictionary:

Nomophobia (a fear of being without your mobile phone)

Oxford English Dictionary:

Toxi

Merriam-Webster:

Justice

Others posted words of the year lists too. Word guru Nancy Friedman published her picks HERE. The countdown from the Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum of 2018’s Words of the Year is HERE. The ELD Museum chose “GUILTY” – the word most closely associated with the Trump administration and its corrupt cronies – as the Word of the Year. Our report includes other ways 2018 was rife with guilt.

Now that the WotY season is complete, logophiles turn their attention to 2019 to watch, study and listen to the words that will shape the year. We’re just five days in, and already some words are emerging as contenders for WotY status:

Acting (as in Acting AG, Acting Chief of Staff, Acting UN Ambassador, etc.)
Shutdown / Trump Shutdown
#ImpeachTheMF

Join us next December when we count down the words that will characterize the year. All the fun will happen HERE.

Below: The nominated words at the meeting of the American Dialect Society on January 4, 2019. The winners in each category are highlighted.

NOTE: In the "WTF Word of the Year" category, "deleted family unit" was added with a nomination from the floor, and it won the category.

Below: Here's how the vote went down:

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Civil Engineering

12/27/2017

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From our master grammarian & resident logophile, Angstrom Dickinson:

From January 4 through 7, 2018, the Linguistic Society of America will meet concurrently with the American Dialiect Society (ADS), American Name Society (ANS), North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS), Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL), Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (SPCL), and the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in Salt Lake City.

While on the surface this will be a collegial gathering of linguists, glottologists, grammarians, lexicographers, linguisticians, philologists, polyglots and legophiles, there is a dark underbelly of suspicion, intimidation & hostility between the groups.

Tensions have run so high at recent conferences, that the LSA found it necessary to update its policies on conduct by participants at meetings and conferences. The recently approved Civility Policy outlines expectations for conference attendees, and reminds them that all forms of incivility and harassment are serious forms of professional misconduct.

“Work centered on the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics all seems dull enough,” said Zita Kidgerbury, the Chief Directives Architect and Future Accountability Officer of the LSA, “but when debates turn personal, tempers can flare.”

PIctured at the right: Zita Kidgerbury, Chief Directives Architect and Future Accountability Officer of the LSA

Kidgerbury relayed an incident from a few years ago when members of the American Collective Noun Society (ACNS) proposed “anthology” as a new collective noun for a group of librarians. However, LSA members from the west side wanted to stick with the more traditional "catalog."

“Things got ugly fast,” said Kidgerbury.

Last year in Austin, TX, “all hell broke loose,” she said.

At that time, rival factions from the various professional organizations debated the syntactic ambiguity in the Kinks’ seminal hit “Lola.” A line in the song states, “she walk like a woman and talk like a man,” followed later by, “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola.”

Some at the conference argued that that line meant “Lola and I are both glad I’m a man.” Others insisted that the line meant, “I’m glad Lola and I are both men” and “I’m glad I’m a man, and Lola is also a man.” Later a fourth faction challenged the feuding groups and maintained that the song meant, “I’m glad I’m a man, and Lola is also glad to be a man,” and the entire conference broke into a melee that caused thousands of dollars of damage to the Grand Ballroom at the JW Marriott Hotel.

The LSA first drafted Civility Policies after the Great LSA Riots of 1963 in Mobile, Alabama. The 1963 annual meeting experienced a complete breakdown in civil discourse when the Committee on Contronyms announced they had overlooked new verbs for consideration. Half of the attendees thought the committee had actually reviewed a list of verbs to consider as contronyms, and the other half thought the committee had neglected their duties.

“The whole issue stemmed from a misunderstanding,” said Contronym Committee Chair Noah Lott, “and our efforts to stem the confusion failed.”

Unrest within the conference quickly turned into demonstrations and disturbances in the streets, and to this date, the LSA annual conference is not welcome in Mobile.

Pictured below left and right: The Great LSA Riots of 1963 in Mobile, Alabama

Conference planners are on edge this year. They are worried about an ongoing debate over the past tense and the past perfect tense associated with the policy update.

“We had a need,” said Kidgerbury, “but some still insist that we had had a need, so who knows what sort of clashes and confrontations we’ll have – or will have had.”

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Playing with Fire!

1/7/2017

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From our master grammarian and resident logophile Angstrom Dickinson:

The Word of the Year season is now officially over. Last Friday night, the members of the American Dialect Society voted on their choice for the 2016 Word of the Year, and they – the very group that started the trend 27 years ago – ended the WotY season by dubbing “dumpster fire” as Word of the Year (yes, in this case, words). The ADS has multiple categories (Digital Word of the Year, Slang Word of the Year, Euphemism of the Year, etc.), so information about "dumpster fire" and a link to their complete WotY list is HERE.

We finished our own countdown of Words of the Year on New Year’s Eve, and “divided” took the top honor. Our complete list is HERE, and we wrote some background on selecting "divided" for the top honor HERE.

Below is a list of some of the other chosen words for 2016:

"Dumpster fire" is not new. It’s been around for a while; its “top definition” on Urban Dictionary dates back to 2008. However, the Word of the Year does not have to be a new word. David Bowie (at least that’s @socilox’s name on Twitter), a sociolinguist and dialectologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, noted that words often “get in under the ‘not new, but newly (re)emergent’ rubric” – and we suspect everyone would agree that most of 2016 was nothing more than uncontrollable dumpster fire.

As a matter of fact, “dumpster fire” took a political turn in 2016 when it morphed into “trumpster fire,” thanks to the trumpster fire that is Donald Trump.

Pictured above and left: Urban Dictionary's definitiions for "Dumpster Fire" and "Trumpster Fire." Click the images to enlarge.

The origins of “dumpster fire” actually date back to the late-1800s when Emmett Lee Dickinson (Emily Dickinson’s third cousin, twice removed – at her request) first used the term in his now classic poem “The Dumpster Fire we've all known" (below on the left). Dickinson wrote the poem about Fredreich Drümpf, a distant relative of Donald Trump. Information about Drümpf is HERE. Dickinson’s poem also inspired third cousin Emily to pen her poem “The largest Fire ever known" (below on the right).

Of course, we now begin our year-long quest for the 2017 Words of the Year. We are keeping our fingers crossed that there's no reason for "launch ready alert" & "thermonuclear" to make the list!

By Emmett Lee Dickinson:

The dumpster fire we’ve all known
Occurred throughout our sphere –
And so it came as no surprise
It’s now Word of the Year –
Logophiles will report to men
This honor now attained
With hopes some future morning
We won’t get burned again.

By Emily Dickinson:

The largest Fire ever known
Occurs each Afternoon –
Discovered is without surprise
Proceeds without concern –
Consumes and no report to men
An Occidental Town,
Rebuilt another morning
To be again burned down.

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Oh No They Di-in't? Oh Yes They Did!

1/10/2016

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Members of the American Dialect Society met in Washington, DC, last week, and they voted “they” – or more specifically the use of “they” as a third-person singular pronoun – as the Word of the Year for 2015.

Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the ADS (and the executive editor of Vocabulary.com and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal), wrote that the “lowly pronoun” was selected due to it use as a “gender-neutral alternative to he and she,

with special attention paid to its use as an expression of ‘non-binary’ gender identity.” Zimmer’s blog post is HERE, and more from the American Dialect Society is HERE.

Of course, the use of “they” as a singular pronoun has been around for years. As a matter of fact, Emmett Lee Dickinson (Emily Dickinson’s third cousin, twice removed – at her requested) first advocated the use of gender-neutral pronouns in the middle of the 19th century.

Dickinson believed that since we used the same pronoun “you” for all second-person singular and second-person plural cases, we should do the same for first person (“we” – sometimes referred to as the “royal we”) and third person (“they”).

In the mid-1800s Dickinson wrote a short poem entitled “Let our third person be just they” to promote the use of “they” as a gender-neutral alternative to he and she. His poem inspired third cousin Emily to write “Let my first knowing be of thee.”

By Emmett Lee Dickinson:

Let our third person be just they
And he, she, it unite
And at first Hearing be it known
Embrace they when you write –

By Emily Dickinson:

Let my first knowing be of thee
With morning’s warming Light –
And my first Fearing, lest Unknowns
Engulf thee in the night –

Because of Emmett Lee Dickinson’s inventive use of language and his influence on words, the Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum (above the coin-op Laundromat on Dickinson Boulevard) also selects a “Word of the Year." For information on our selections, click HERE.

Also, just FYI: Emmett Lee Dickinson promoted other modifications to make English simpler.

* He hoped to end the nonsense with there, their, and they’re by advocating the use of theiyr to replace all three.

* He suggested the use of tu in place of to, too, and two.

* He created the word ur as a replacement for your and you’re – a practice that many millennials have adopted with modern-day text talk.

Who knows, maybe one of these words – theiyr, tu, or ur – will be a future Word of the Year? We are hopeful! ; )

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Choice of Words

Civil Engineering

Playing with Fire!

Oh No They Di-in't? Oh Yes They Did!

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